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Want to not only put your agency on the proverbial map, but also achieve unrivaled success in your housing market? Then, as Placester VP Seth Price noted in our exclusive webinar, you need a modern, thorough, well-crafted real estate branding strategy.
While your end goal for marketing is always leads, leads, and more leads, at the heart of your lead generation strategy is actually establishing your brand in your community, gaining more recognition over time, and leveraging that brand to convert prospects.
To learn how you can become a trusted resource to your audience through your personal real estate brand, you’ve got three top options:
- Checking out Price’s branding book, “The Road to Recognition”
- Listening to the Placester webinar featuring his expert insights
- Continuing on below to catch a brief recap of said webinar
You’d certainly be wise to set aside some time at your next open house or before your next listing presentation to read and listen to both content assets — for now, let’s review the webinar highlights.
Constantly improving your real estate branding is the best way to build trust and earn new business.
As far as Price is concerned, if you have a lot of know-how around a specific topic — say, the history of your market and the types of popular properties that exist there — you’re that much closer to providing value to your customers and creating the framework that your business and your real estate brand are based on.
“The reason that you’re in this business and how you can help people is that you know something more than they do,” said Price. You know how to guide them. You’ve studied and put in your 10,000 hours. You are a brand, whether you like it or not.”
When powerhouse brands like Apple or Starbucks come to mind, we certainly have a large amount of trust in the company — whether we think of it that way or not — thanks to proven value over time. We’re guaranteed a certain level of product satisfaction and we know what to expect.
As Price stated in the webinar, the same goes for building your brand as a real estate agent.
“As you start to gain brand reputation and build trust in your market, when someone needs to make a decision to work with you or not, you are influencing their decision-making process,” Price said.
Price’s personal brand model above represents how leveraging the positive aspects of your brand ultimately leads to the coveted influence over your followers and their purchasing decisions.
Before you can even think about building your brand though, you need to have an idea of how you’ll by found by your leads in the first place. Your prospective clients will be confirming your skills and value proposition by searching online, so your name needs to appear in Google.
Price cautions, however, that building trust with your clients isn’t only about ranking high in search engines.
“It’s not like, just because they find you on Google you’re going to get the sale,” Price said.
“It’s an accumulation of positive touch points — we call them micro moments — that a consumer has with any brand that determines when it comes time to buy or sell … that they feel like they’ve gotten enough information, whether that’s through reviews or the content they consume.”
Using content as the building block of your real estate brand enhances your message and attracts leads.
If you’re interested in generating leads with your real estate website, relevant content that engages your prospects is a must.
Price explains that content gets its value from being available in many different forms — and it ultimately showcases your skills and knowledge, which helps people remember your name.
“As businesses, we need to figure out how to stay somewhat top-of-mind with people,” said Price. “If we can’t do that, they can be distracted and choose another REALTOR®.”
It’s only logical, then, to strive to create pieces of content that go above and beyond the kinds of assets you typically produce.
According to Price, creating real estate content marketing collateral that fuels social media conversations and increases reach will generate more real estate leads for your firm over time and position you as the all-knowing agent in your market — something you shouldn’t take lightly.
Engaging content requires a certain set of key ingredients and a solid framework for success.
A content strategy wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the actual aspects that determine if content will succeed or flop.
“There are three very distinct goals that content can have: education, entertainment, and inspiration,” said Price. “Ideally, you want a combination of two of those.”
Price stressed that, of all of the existing content types at your disposal, it’s important to create things that make sense for your niche and your market, as well as having an end goal in mind.
“I use a very simple formula,” Price said. “I think about my content goal, the format, and the style.”
As for framing your content, Price stated you have to provide the best answer to the questions your leads are routinely asking, curate content from other valid sources — and create content that’s better than anything you can find.
“It’s okay to do a search for exactly what you want to create so you can understand where the bar is,” Price said. “How good do the images need to be? How well does [the content] need to be written?”
With all that in mind, Price said it’s important not to skimp on quality or consistency so you’re able to continue to focus on real estate brand-building.
Amplifying your content’s reach will ensure your leads’ eyes end up — and stay — on your website.
Once you’ve got a handle on creating your real estate content, you’ll want to determine how your target audience will actually view what you’ve been working on. Price advises agents keep these tips in mind:
Get out of your content marketing comfort zone.
When it comes to expanding your audience reach, approach your content in a more ambitious way than you ever have before.
“Create amazing content that you are so excited to share with people it’s just waiting to burst out of you,” Price said.
Check out our: NAR Annual 2017: Top Takeaways from Chicago
Repurpose your existing content everywhere online.
Price used his recent book as an ideal example of turning one piece of content into several.
“I have repurposed that as a lead magnet,” said Price. “I’ve created 25 blog posts loosely based upon different chapters. … I’ve created videos and Instagram images. This is a way to repurpose an idea and get lots of mileage from it for years to come.”
Amplify content using social media management tools.
Price also explained the benefit of tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Edgar to manage your website content on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
“It [Edgar] allows you to take evergreen content … that isn’t just written for a specific time, and it schedules this stuff, so we can focus our time doing human-to-human interaction,” said Price.
While it undoubtedly takes commitment and energy to think up and execute a content strategy around your real estate brand, it will only serve you in the long-run.
“The reason this is so valuable is that the market is always going to shift, but if you can build a brand where you are discovered, you can weather the storm of the market shifting,” said Price.
Listen to our entire webinar with Seth Price to learn how you can enhance your real estate branding:
What are some of the ways you focus on building up your personal brand? Share with us in the comments below!
