Many realtors assume a brand identity design is just an option. They could not be further from the truth. Your brand identity establishes itself at all of your brand’s touch-points and many people will form an opinion about your business just from a single look at your identity. They decide there and then whether you’re worth getting involved with based on the perception they’ve gotten from the way you present yourself through your brand identity.
A good brand identity is the missing piece of your branding that helps you attract and retain your ideal clients. With your identity, you can influence your leads’ and customers’ perception of your business which influences their behavior thus your business performance.
In this guide, I’ll be discussing, in detail, how you can easily develop a distinctive real estate brand identity that resonates with your target audience, communicates your values, and differentiates you from the competition.
Before we dive in though, let’s understand what brand identity is and why it is important.
What is brand identity?
When you think of identity, you think about the attributes that make someone the person they are. The parts of themselves that make them unique. Their identity can include the sort of person they are — their sense of humor, their personality, the things they think and believe — as well as the way they present themselves to the world — the way they dress, their general style, and any other badges they may choose to display.
A brand identity is no different, but instead of pertaining to an individual, a brand identity describes a company or a product line, or both. A brand identity is the entirety of a brand’s expression of itself to the world.
Why do you need an effective identity design as a Realtor?
The best identity programs will embody and advance your company’s brand by supporting desired perceptions. Identity expresses itself in every touch-point of your brand and becomes essential to your company’s culture—a constant symbol of your core values and relevance.
When you can successfully communicate who you are through your identity, you can better reach your desired clients and form the strong relationships you need for long-term success.
The keys to a strong brand identity
A strong brand identity needs to work for every stakeholder of your brand; external customers, the media, and internal customers (for example, employees, the board, brand ambassadors, etc).
Your brand identity should be:
Distinct: It should differentiate you from the competition and be attention-grabbing.
Meaningful: It should go beyond aesthetics and resonate with your target audience. Sometimes, brand identity is even designed to represent brand values and commitment. An example of this is Southwest Airlines’s heart-inspired logo. Southwest Airlines writes, “We like to think of ourselves as a customer service company that happens to fly airplanes. Without a heart, our planes are just machines.”
Memorable: It should make a visual impact and be easily memorable.
Sustainable: It should be able to stand the test of time and lend itself to a brand architecture if required. It should also be able to grow and evolve with the brand.
Cohesive: Each piece of your brand identity should work together without much effort, complement each other, and represent the brand effectively in its entirety.
Easy to use: It’s intuitive and clear for whoever needs to use them.
How to build your brand identity
Whether you’re building your brand identity entirely from scratch or updating a stale identity, following these steps will help you move through the identity design process seamlessly and build a strong brand identity that sets your real estate business up for success.
Step 1: Complete your brand strategy
Your brand strategy is a detailed plan for the development of a successful brand to achieve specific business goals. It outlines exactly what you’re trying to achieve and how you’re going to achieve it. It helps you establish the following among other things:
Brand Goals: It is pertinent when developing your brand strategy to define distinct goals. Goals provide a road map to follow and help determine the tasks that must be improved to meet those business goals.
Brand positioning: Positioning defines where your service stands in relation to the competition in the marketplace, as well as the mind of the customer.
Values: Organizational values describe the core ethics or principles that the company will abide by, no matter what. They inspire your best efforts and also constrain certain actions.
Target audience personas: These personas help you identify and understand your target audience. Gain key insights into their aspirations, pain points, and challenges so you can cater to their needs effectively.
Competitive audit: This is a foundational tactic to better understand what your competitors are doing and the threat they may pose to your brand. It also offers insights into who they are, their strategy, and what your brand may be missing out on.
Your brand identity is a tool to help you communicate your brand visually, thus supporting your brand strategy. As such, before you dive into developing your brand identity, it’s important to have a full-fledged strategy.
It’ll help you understand what it is you’re trying to communicate, to whom, through which medium and in what way.
If you’ve not done your brand strategy, don’t fret. It is not as complicated as it may seem. Follow this easily laid out in our guide on developing an effective real estate brand strategy and you’ll be up to speed in no time.
Step 2: Know your target audience
Your brand identity is the “face” that interacts with the entire world. Whatever you create should accurately communicate who you are. However, one common misconception is that a brand identity is exclusively informed by what your brand wants to present. This isn’t entirely true. It’s also informed by what your brand’s customers want to engage with, or are accustomed to interacting with. If your identity doesn’t resonate with them, it won’t be effective.
Understanding your target audience will help you make effective design decisions; once you understand their perception and beliefs about certain things such as color, shape, form, etc you can design your identity not to contradict them.
For example, according to Symbolism, many in Scotland consider a strange black cat as a sign of good luck while other parts of Europe consider it to be bad luck. If your target audience lives in Scotland it might be a good idea to use a black cat in your Logo as a symbol. If not, you should reconsider.
Step 3: Explore the results of your competitive audit
Building a brand identity is all about differentiation: making your brand visible, relevant, and unique. However, without a firm understanding of your competitive landscape, it’s easy to blend in. Thus, it’s crucial to understand not just who your competition is but how your brand compares, in perception and presentation.
To effectively analyze your competition, follow our guide to doing a competitive audit presented in our complete brand strategy guide. As you move through the process, pay special attention to how your competitors present themselves in terms of common visual elements, trends, industry-specific visual themes, brand personalities, etc.
It is common for many companies in the same industry to gravitate towards the same visual elements. If you discover that this is the case for you, seize the opportunity to radically differentiate yourself and stand out among the crowd.
Step 4: Design your visual identity elements
Each brand has unique communication needs so the elements of identity you’ll need to design will highly depend on those needs. However, a basic brand identity should include the following:
1. Logo: A logo can be described as the face of your brand. It’s often the first thing that a potential customer will notice about your business. It is a point of recognition for clients and an important foundation for the brand identity design of your company.
Your logo should be distinctive enough to be easily recognized and simple enough to work across multiple media. It should be effective at any size – whether it’s on a billboard or a pen. A good logo makes an impact both in color and in black and white.
Furthermore, with logos details are extremely important. Particular attention must be paid to every element of the logo, including colors, shapes, and fonts. All of these elements help to convey a message about your brand.
The visuals and imagery should be appropriate for your brand to avoid any discrepancies or confusion.
2. Colors: From the yellow helmet of a construction worker to a bride’s pristine white gown, colors are quick to convey important information. Their strong and immediate impact makes color palettes a crucial component of any identity design effort.
The color scheme you’ll assemble for your brand will play a key role across your various marketing assets – from building your website to the design of your logo, and much more. Employing brand colors consistently and across all platforms can result in a unified look and feel for your company, making them memorable and recognizable.
While choosing your brand colors you should also consider your target audience and competitive audit. Red might be your favorite color and symbol of love, it won’t matter if it communicates danger to your target audience.
3. Typography: Typography is another core building block of an effective identity. Many brands are immediately recognizable due to their distinctive and consistent typographic style.
The typefaces you choose need to be flexible and easy to use, and it must provide a wide range of expression. Clarity and legibility are the main drivers of choosing typefaces.
To keep it simple, limit the number of typefaces to 2-3. This generally includes primary and secondary brand typefaces for specific purposes, such as body copy typeface, UI typeface, etc.
Some other elements that can be included in your brand’s identity design package are photography, illustration, iconography, etc.
Step 5: Build your brand style guide
The only thing worse than a poorly designed brand identity is a wonderfully crafted identity that is never used or used incorrectly.
This is where a style guide will come in handy. It doesn’t only ensure every element of your identity is used correctly, it also helps you achieve brand consistency across a wide variety of media platforms.
Include clear, easy-to-follow guidelines for every part of the brand identity, including examples and use cases.
Once made, make sure the guide is distributed to your team, stored in an easy-to-access place, and regularly updated. This could be on your website or in a company archive (in case your guide in is PDF format).
An example of a brand style guide hosted on a website is that of Zoom.
Have I left anything out? What do you think about brand identity design? Please let me know in the comment section below.
References:
TMDesign on Medium
Brand Identity Design, book by Alina Wheeler