Your brand is your business in real estate. It’s everything including the way you carry yourself daily, your website, your closing and communication with a client after a sale.
For new real estate agents and vets alike, developing and maintaining a brand can present challenges. The emerging social media platforms can become overwhelming keep up with, coupled with the fact you have to run the other aspects of your business.
Here are the five keys to creating a great brand in real estate.
1. Consistency
Consistency is important in two ways.
- You need to make sure you are consistent in the way you present yourself online; this allows your audience to grow familiar with you and what you’re doing.
- You need to be posting often. No one piece of content is going to endear people to you or your brand.
Think about it like this, if a person tells a funny joke, it’s a funny joke; but if he or she tells five funny jokes, he or she is seen as a funny person.
If you produce one piece of interesting or useful content, it’s just that. But if you can do that over the long haul, you’ll be seen as an interesting and useful real estate agent.
2. Use different themes in your content
Everything you put out should fall under one of these categories: entertainment, informational or educational. When you’re creating content, look at it, and make sure it fits into at least one of the three categories above.
Remember, listing information is great. It fits under the “informational” theme.
However, if that’s all you do, then your content is going to come off like reading an Encyclopedia: it’s informative — but extremely boring.
3. Switch up the medium
We ingest media in many ways as consumers. You’re reading this right now, others will watch the video.
Some people will get to this article from Inman’s Facebook, and others from my LinkedIn.
The point is, you need to make sure you’re producing different content types for people on different spaces. This means video, written content, great yard signs, etc.
4. Keep it real
Don’t be who you are not.
The hardest thing to sell is a brand you can’t embody. Your brand in real estate should be a heightened reflection of you as a person.
You got into this profession because you’re a people person, let that shine through your content.
5. Be where your customers are
You wouldn’t mail flyers in a county you don’t do business in, so why would you join a social media network your customers are not on?
If you’re selling to retirees, you don’t need to be on Snapchat or Instagram.
Likewise, if you’re selling to first-time homebuyers, going all-in on an email strategy might not be a sound plan.
Create great content consistently on different mediums, be authentic, and go where your customers are. Prospects will appreciate you for being you. Building a brand takes time, invest in it.
Jordan Scheltgen is the founder of Cave Social. You can follow him on Twitter @cavejordans or connect with him on Facebook.
