As competition creates infinite choices in the real estate industry, it becomes increasingly important for realtors to build brands that connect emotionally with clients and create lifelong relationships. A strong brand stands out in the densely populated real estate market, helps communicate the intrinsic quality of your services, increases the lifetime value of existing customers, and attracts the right new ones.
Building a strong brand that is both profitable and irreplaceable takes time, effort, and commitment though. It becomes virtually impossible without a good brand strategy, without which everything from your content to your culture, to your core business can suffer. A good brand strategy will help you:
- Understand who you truly are and use your beliefs and values to guide your decisions in ways that are better for your people, your business, and the future.
- Communicate your brand consistently and effectively through a unique brand identity and every piece of content you make.
- Attract the right customers to build a strong, lasting brand.
- Position your brand in a way that helps you compete now—and tomorrow.
This guide is a simple step-by-step process that’ll help you create an effective, flexible real estate brand strategy.
As you work through this guide, follow the steps sequentially as each builds on the previous and you don’t want to miss any part.
Also, download our free brand strategy kit that includes all the worksheets, templates, questionnaires, etc you’ll need to easily complete each part of this guide.
WHAT IS A BRAND?
There are a million definitions of a “brand.” Often, when people talk about a “brand,” they’re referring to the visual identity of the brand. Something that helps them identify a business such as a logo.
A brand is more than a physical mark though. It’s an emotional mark—more specifically, an emotional experience, strengthened or weakened through every interaction with your business.
Branding Guru Marthy Neumeier says, “A brand is not what you say it is, it is what they say it is.” Therefore, a brand can simply be defined as what people think, feel, and say about your business.
WHAT IS BRAND STRATEGY?
Brand strategy is a plan for the development of a successful brand to achieve specific goals.
Alina Wheeler the brand identity design guru says, “Brand strategy is built on a vision, aligned with business strategy, emerges from a company’s values and culture, and reflects an in-depth understanding of the customer’s needs and perception.”
WHY DO YOU NEED BRAND STRATEGY AS A REALTOR?
An effective brand strategy gives companies a major edge in an increasingly competitive market. It helps you:
- Identify and understand your target audience.
- Gain key insights into their aspirations and challenges.
- Develop an effective and consistent way of communicating your values.
- Develop brand touchpoints and make adequate plans to optimize them for conversion.
- Position your brand to create new openings in an over-saturated, continually changing industry.
- Understand your key competitors that serve your target audience, compare points of difference, and develop a plan to lead them.
A lack of good brand strategy causes problems at every level of any business.
WHAT TEAM DO YOU NEED TO BUILD YOUR BRAND STRATEGY?
You can’t build a brand strategy alone. You need a team consisting of key decision-makers at every level of your organization to craft, revise, and bring it to life. Without this designated team, the work you do here will likely get steamrolled.
The team required to build your brand strategy highly depends on the size of your organization though.
For real estate brokerages and big agencies, you need key decision-makers in your company such as the CEO, COO, CMO, etc. The more decision-makers that can be involved in the process the better.
If you are an independent agent or broker, you can do it alone.
HOW TO BUILD YOUR BRAND STRATEGY
Following these steps sequentially (as each builds on the prior), will help you build a comprehensive and effective brand strategy.
Step 1: Define your brand goals
Defining actionable goals is important for the brand strategy-building process. Goals provide a road map to follow and help determine the tasks that must be done/improved to meet those goals.
All goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
You’ll find a SMART goals template in the resources folder free brand strategy kit.
Examples of some SMART real estate brand goals are:
- Increasing brand awareness by 30% in 3 months
- Garnering customer loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value by 10% in 6 months.
- Increasing business revenue by 20% in 3 months
Step 2: Position your brand
Positioning defines where your service stands in the competition in the marketplace, as well as the mind of the customer.
Positioning is used to determine which dimension your company can compete in and what it can own.
In an industry cluttered with lots of agencies and brokerages offering similar benefits, a good positioning makes your brand stand out from the rest and gives you the ability to have a unique value proposition.
“Positioning has the potential to create new openings in an over-saturated, continually changing marketplace.”
Lissa Reidel, Consultant.
There are different methods of positioning your brand and crafting a positioning statement. The one that is most easy of them however is Marthy Neumeier’s onliness statement.
As Marty says, “Onliness is by far the most powerful test of a strategic position. Brands need strong positioning because customers have choices—if you don’t stand out, you lose. To win the positioning game, you have to answer one simple question: What makes you the “only?”
Use the brand positioning template in the strategy kit to easily position your brand and formulate your onliness statement.
For example, our onliness statement at The Brug is:
The Brug is the only real estate creative service agency that provides strategy-led creative solutions for realtors who want effective solutions tailored to their specific needs. This is important in an era of excessive generalist agencies that use a one-size-fits-all method to proffer solutions to just any business in any industry.
A positioning statement is an internal-facing tool used to radically differentiate your brand from the competition and define your unique value proposition. It also informs the direction of your brand messaging and helps direct towards creating effective taglines, advertising headlines, etc.
Step 3: Define your organizational 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.
Strong, clearly-articulated values should be a true reflection of your business aspirations for appropriate workplace behavior, and play an important role in building a positive culture at your organization.
Step 4: Define your unique value proposition
This is the unique benefit that ties to the highest-level needs of your customers. From our positioning statement at The Brug, it can be deduced that our unique value proposition is strategy-led creative solutions that are tailored specifically to our realtor clients’ needs.
Step 5: Define your ideal customer
Understanding who you are for as a business is an absolute necessity. Knowing who your target audiences are will help you bring clarity to how you can communicate your intrinsic value to them and ultimately serve them.
Creating customer personas will help you fully understand your target audiences.
Customer or buyer personas are thorough and concise profiles of your prospects and customers synthesized through the surfacing of their demographics, psychographics, pain points, challenges, motivation, etc.
Some data that can be used to create your customer personas are:
- Demographics: You look at their age, gender, income, education, etc.
- Psychographics: Habits, values, beliefs, hobbies, etc. These affect customer behavior.
- Questions, challenges, and pain points: Concern yourself with the questions your prospects are asking and the jargon they’re using, the challenges they face, and their peculiar pain points.
Check out our full, detailed guide on how to create effective buyer personas for more information. You’ll also find free downloadable buyer persona templates in the guide to make creating your personas simple.
Step 6: Map and analyze your customers’ journey
The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your business. Instead of looking at just a part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of becoming a customer.
There are four (4) viable stages of the customer journey for the real estate industry.
- Awareness: This is the first stage in a customer’s journey and is a stage where your prospect acknowledges a problem and begins to research a solution. As an example, someone might be getting married and want a bigger house that’ll accommodate their prospective new family.
- Consideration: This is the stage where the prospect looks at the options of solutions available to them and weighs them accordingly.
- Decision: The prospect chooses a solution, looks at specific buying details, and considers if there’ll be any support or follow-up. For example, they’ll consider if you’ll be available to lead them to inspect the properties they’re interested in, and how difficult or easy it’ll be to purchase or lease the properties of their interest when they are ready to commit.
- Engage/Delight: In this stage, the once prospect who is now customers look forward to how you’ll support them after their transaction with you.
Mapping your customers’ journey will help you understand what their needs, desires, challenges, and pain points are so you can support them in every stage of the journey.
Check out our detailed customer journey mapping guide for more information on this subject. We’ve also included free, downloadable customer journey maps in the guide.
Step 7: Do a competitive analysis
As mentioned earlier in this guide, one of the major aims of a brand strategy is to understand the key competitors that serve the same target audience as you, compare your points of difference, and develop a plan to lead them.
A competitive analysis (also called competitive audit) is the exercise that will help you achieve all of the aforementioned objectives. When reviewing the competitors, you should look at their identity, positioning, unique value proposition, strengths and weaknesses, etc.
Our detailed competitive analysis guide with its free downloadable templates will help you perform your competitive audit easily.
Step 8: Create your Brand Brief
Your brand brief is a comprehensive document that summarizes the results of each part of your brand strategy. It should include your brand story and voice, value, unique value proposition, positioning, customers’ profiles, detailed competitors’ profiles, etc.
After you complete your brand brief, make sure it’s easily accessible to every member of your organization and anyone who is to work with your brand.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Now that you have a brand strategy, you can easily align your business goals with customer’s needs and build the long-lasting relationships you need for long-term success.
Of course, the work doesn’t end with brand strategy. You should develop a distinctive brand identity, and look into marketing strategies like messenger marketing, etc.
In case you find the process overwhelming, you’re short on time or resources, or you just want to bring in help to develop your brand strategy, you can always contact us. We’d love to help you tell your unique brand story.