Real estate is nothing if not local—after all, you’re selling location. So it may come as no surprise that the key to a winning real estate brand is to focus on your local area, delivering informative real estate content and branding that shows prospective clients that you’re the expert in your area.
Katie Clancy, winner of our Battle of the Brands Competition, knows this well. A longtime Placester customer and team leader for The Cape House Team of William Raveis Real Estate on Cape Cod, MA, Katie Clancy has built a website (TheCapeHouseTeam.com) with the perfect mix of contemporary design and custom branding to make a strong first impression on buyers. But more than that, Katie has built a hyperlocal marketing machine that, as her competition victory shows, makes her website even more effective.
“I am so excited to win Battle of the Brands,” Katie told us. “Winning this contest just reinforces my belief that I have invested in the right part of my real estate business. I am very proud of how far The Cape House Team Brand has come, and am excited that Placester provides a website platform that I can showcase my brand.”
It’s About You, Not Your Listings
When most real estate agents think about hyperlocal marketing, they often assume that listings are the key to success—after all, that’s what consumers are looking for, right? Not exactly. Instead, Katie says, hyperlocal marketing starts with giving prospective real estate clients a strong sense of who you are.
“Everything is a story,” Katie says. “Your listing verbiage is a story, your bio is a story, and it’s the story of you. So I write things that really matter to me because that’s who I am.” Instead of hiding behind a cookie-cutter website that touts your professionalism in generic terms, Katie recommends that agents be open about their values, personality, and expertise. “They’re going to find out [who you really are] eventually,” Katie says, “so you may as well give them a good intro.”
People are not going to your website to search for property. There are other places they can go for that. They’re going there to find out about you.
— KATIE CLANCY
Katie’s focus on relationships over listings also extends to one of the most prominent features of any real estate website: listings search. “People are not going to your website to search for property,” Katie explains. “There are other places they can go for that. They’re going there to find out about you. And not just facts—they’re not just looking for your resume…They’re looking for a feeling. People come away from my site knowing that I know what they want.”
The Personal Power of Video
So how can you use your website and other channels to build relationships with real estate consumers? For Katie, the answer is video blogging, or vlogging.
Each week, Katie produces an episode of “The Cape House Show,” a video blog full of tips for buying and selling homes in the Cape Cod area. “The Cape House Show” not only enables Katie to demonstrate her local expertise: it also allows her to speak directly to her customers in a way that a traditional blog post can’t. “Vlogging is so important because it’s a way for me to show people who I am, not tell them,” Katie explains.
Of course, hours of video content won’t have much of an impact unless those videos are reinforcing your brand. That begins, Katie says, with consistency. “When you do a vlog, you start the same way and end the same way,” Katie explains. By using the same introduction and sign-off for every episode, you’ll teach viewers what you want them to remember about your brand, as well as where they should come looking for you when they’re ready to buy.
This brings us to the second key to success when it comes to vlogging: driving people back to your real estate website. Video blogging is powerful, but in order to have a positive impact on your business, your vlog must inspire viewers to visit your website and contact you. That starts with sharing your vlog on all the online channels where your audience might find and consume video content. “I want to get [my vlog] in front of the people who already know and like me because they’re more apt to watch it,” Katie says.
In addition to posting new episodes on her website, Katie also publishes her vlog on YouTube and Facebook, and shares it via all her other social media channels. In every case, Katie includes a link back to her website, so that engaged viewers know exactly how to find her.
Finally, Katie amplifies the reach of her vlog by including other local professionals in her posts and tagging them on social media. This helps her demonstrate her connections to others in her community and leverage their own networks to attract prospects that may not have seen her content otherwise.
Congratulations to Katie on winning the Battle of the Brands! To learn more about Katie and her website, check out the recording above of our Facebook Live presentation during NAR Annual 2018.
