In a reposting from Reminder Media: A guide that answers all your burning questions about how to best brand your real estate business and become the successful entrepreneur you were meant to be.
Here is a reprint of the full article, written by Gabrielle King:
When agents go about building a strong real estate business, one of the first things the smart ones do is brand their business.
Why?
There are compelling reasons to brand your business no matter its size. One of the best list of reasons I’ve come across, because it makes branding a no-brainer, comes from branding specialist Taughnee Stone Golubović:
Branding is the way you:
- [Tell] people … who [your product or service is] for
- [Explain] what they can expect when they hire you
- Make your case for why you’re the best choice out of all the others they’re considering
- Establish credibility
- Build awareness
- Become recognized and remembered
- Become known, liked, and trusted
Another way to think about it is … Branding is the way you’ll create the positive feelings about your company that will lead people to purchase things from you.[1]
For at least these seven reasons, deciding upon and creating a brand for your real estate company can be one of the most important business decisions you’ll make. And will become one of your most valuable assets.
Branding: What it is and what it isn’t
The words of Shannon Riordan, partner and cofounder of Global Brand Works, would not be out of place engraved on a plaque and hung on your office door[2]:
For a real estate brand to be great, it must be 3 things: Authentic (don’t just say what you are, be what you are), Differentiating (know your “secret sauce” and leverage it), and Relevant (offer something that your audience wants and needs).
You can think of branding as your business’s LinkedIn professional profile. It’s what you want your business to be known for and recognized as, and it works to distinguish your business from other similar businesses.
A useful way to describe branding is as a product (the “brand”) created by perceptions of what your company values, what it does, and why and how it does it. And because it’s a perception, it can be shaped, molded, and changed.
Which brings me to an extremely important point about branding and independent agents …
Examine what happens when I make a subtle but significant change to the sentence above:
A useful way to describe branding is as a product (the “brand”) created by perceptions of who you are, what you do, and why and how you do it. And because it’s a perception, it can be shaped, molded, and changed.
With no effort, buyers and sellers easily and frequently substitute an independent agent’s “personal brand” (the agent’s own reputation) for their business brand. Good or bad, it’s what happens.
In the mind of the market you are your brand, and your brand is you. Knowing that, Warren Buffet’s words take on additional meaning for your business: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”[3]
A final point about what branding isn’t: Branding is not your logo.
While an appealing logo can become associated with and representative of everything your brand is perceived to be, it is only one (albeit very important) part of your overall branding strategy. Logos act like visual shortcuts infused with the perceptions of your brand.
And they make your company recognizable and different from others.
The benefits of branding your real estate business
If anyone knows about branding, it’s Brandingmag, and they’ve offered several reasons why branding is important.[4] Three of those, I believe, are especially relevant to real estate agents.
Branding is how your company gains recognition. It’s why a logo, that visual shortcut to your brand, can be the most important element of your branding strategy. A little later, I’ll talk about some ideas to keep in mind when creating a logo.
Your branding will inform your advertising. Every means you use to advertise your business should reflect your branding strategy. Your advertising needs to be cohesive, consistent, and appealing as it promotes your brand.
Branding can generate new customers. If you’ve got a strong brand, it means your clients and prospects have a good impression of your business. Your community considers you dependable, familiar, and, most importantly, trustworthy. And when a company is all that, word gets around.
People long to do business with others they can trust, and it’s this desire to find someone they can trust that makes word of mouth such a valuable form of advertising. The number varies, but it’s always high, and a study published by Invesp reports people are 90% more likely to buy from a brand recommended by a friend.[5]
At ReminderMedia our priority is to help you get those recommendations. We publish two high-quality, print magazines, American Lifestyle and Start Healthy, that our clients send to the people in their sphere of influence to help nurture relationships and keep themselves top of mind. A 2019 independent survey reports that in the prior 12 months, 58% of recipients gave a referral to the professional who sent them the magazine.
How to brand your real estate business
As of May 2020, there were more than 1.3 million members of NAR.[6] How you will differentiate yourself and your business from the multitude—all promising to find their clients that perfect home or sell any property in 48 hours?
You can begin by deciding what makes you different and/or by selecting a niche.
What’s your USP?
A unique selling position (USP) is a statement that sums up what makes your business different from others. Many successful brands owe at least part of their success to having a strong USP.
For Domino’s it was their pledge to deliver pizza in 30 minutes or less. No other pizza place was saying that, and it set them apart.
M&M’s is another whose branding, developed in 1954, has not only survived but was selected in 2014 as America’s favorite slogan[7]: “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”
At ReminderMedia, our USP comes from our familiarity with the fate of most printed marketing pieces – they’re perceived as junk mail and quickly land in the trash can. American Lifestyle and Start Healthy magazines, unlike junk mail, are something recipients look forward to getting. Consequently, one of our many USPs is, “Our quality gets you in the door and past the trash can.”
Here’s the thing about a unique selling proposition: It doesn’t have to be unique, but you still need one.
A writer for Call Porter, a company that assists real estate investors by taking and screening calls, puts it this way:
[The goal of a USP is] to differentiate your business in a crowded market so that you can generate more leads and close more deals of a certain type.
In other words, the Unique Selling Proposition you choose only matters to a select group of people — and that’s the way it should be.
Some people won’t care, for example, if you have 10 years’ experience more than your competitor if the other guy’s offer is $10K better.
But some people will.
And it’s the people who do care that matter — those are the ones that your Unique Selling Proposition gives you an advantage over for closing the deal. [8]
Finally, you’ve probably noticed that some businesses use their USP as their slogan or tagline. You don’t want to force it, but when it happens, it can be great news. It helps put what makes you different in front of every prospect and, if it’s popular and memorable, keeps you top of mind.
This short, 20-minute podcast from Stay Paid provides more details about developing a USP and how to use it to position your brand.
What about choosing a niche?
Real estate is such a humongous industry – spanning all types of professions and services – that choosing a niche, for all intents and purposes, is a requirement.
A niche is a subset of a larger market. In real estate, that could mean choosing to work with investors, buyers, and sellers interested in luxury properties … vacation homes … or long-term rentals.
It could also mean working with buyers … with sellers … or with investors. Drill down further and perhaps you’ll decide to work with first-time home buyers, couples who are divorcing, or individuals looking to buy factory spaces.
The number of possible niches, while not all viable options, is practically limitless.
Niching also includes many benefits:
Marketing becomes easy-peasy.
When you know exactly who you want to work with, targeting your marketing becomes simple. If you choose to work with single dads who have multiple children in different age ranges and who also work from home, your marketing becomes a matter of plug and play.
You can become the only game in town.
The more specialized your niche, the less competition you are likely to have. There are likely hundreds of agents in Seattle that sell homes, but not so many that sell homes specifically to disabled veterans.
You can appear at the top of Google’s search results.
Appearing high in organic search results is second only to paying substantial fees for highly targeted ads that typically occupy the #1 spot. But if you already have a focused niche that you can combine with popular keywords that have little competition, then you’re going to appear high in the ranking.
What do you think will appear higher in the rankings: “Florida real estate” or “Florida hurricane-proof homes for sale?”
Your value as a specialist goes up.
Although not a real estate agent, Tom Hegna is a highly successful financial planner whose niche is retirement planning. As a recent guest on our Stay Paid podcast, Tom offered this pithy piece of advice: “You want to get rich? Find a niche.” You can listen to the podcast here.
When something is desired but rare, its perceived value goes up and some people (obviously not all), will pay mounds of money to have it.
It’s why diamonds are so expensive.
The same is true for a highly specialized, niched real estate agent. If there are very few doing what you’re doing, and maybe no one doing it in your community or farm, you become more valuable.
It stands to reason that if you educate yourself, do the deep dive, and learn everything you can about your area of expertise, you’ll become a trusted advisor. And, as previously mentioned, people want to do business with those they trust.
When selecting a niche, your imagination and interests are good starting points, but don’t go into something blind. Consider the following:
- How big is the niche? As much as you want to focus, if only a few properties or people fit the mold you won’t make much money.
- What’s the turnover rate? It’s going to vary with the geography, but you’re probably going to want 10% per year or higher.
- What’s the average sales price? Price and commission go hand in hand. Higher prices mean higher commissions.
- Will you have competitors? Has the lion’s share of the market already been claimed? Is the competition a well-establish leader in the community? If the answer to either question is yes, you’ll likely want to start with something that has more opportunity.
Having a niche doesn’t mean you can’t do business with clients who fall outside the parameters. It does mean you’ll likely experience a higher success rate because you’ll attract clients who see you as the expert and with whom you want to work.
Critical branding elements
If a brand is created by perceptions of who you are, what you do, and why and how you do it, then branding has a long list of elements that contribute to its formation.
What’s important when developing your brand is that you be consistent across all its elements. Color, design, font, strategy, messaging, marketing collateral … Being consistent extends to and encompasses everything you do on behalf of your brand.
This is not to say at some point and if necessary, you cannot rebrand your business. Rebranding, like most decisions, has its advantages and disadvantages. The important point is to maintain consistency within a single brand.
Choose a name
Coming up with a name for your real estate business is a creative process, which means it will involve at least a modicum of inspiration. Far more important are the practical considerations:
- Don’t make people guess what it is that you do. Include some reference to real estate in your company name: real estate, realty, condos, estates, rental, properties, and homes are obvious choices. Consider combining these words with confidence-inspiring nouns: advisors, partners, or group.
- Include a popular keyword. Real estate, realty, and the others listed above are all popular keywords for SEO, but they also are highly competitive. Including your niche in your name can lessen the competition.
- Resist using your personal name. While you may want to associate your name with quality and service, think about how many times you’ve forgotten someone’s name. You don’t want people forgetting the name of your business.
- Avoid puns, clichés, and references to pop culture. I like a good pun as much as the next guy, but not everyone will think they’re clever. Clichés are trite and tired. And the problem with references to pop culture is they’re time-bound, and changes in their popularity and associated meanings are unpredictable.
- Watch out for the acronyms. Take a moment to figure out if your business name creates an undesirable acronym (an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word). Many a law firm might have dumped a partner or two if they paid attention to the word their string of names created.
- Make sure it can scale. Including your geographic farm, especially if it’s your niche, is a good idea, but you may need to appeal to a wider demographic. Try to attract as wide an audience as you can.
- Keep it short. If you go with your gut, you’ll intuitively find that shorter names tend to be better. Maybe it’s because shorter names are easier to remember. Shorter will also dissuade others from chopping it down. The crisp Starbucks used to be Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spices.
Claim a domain
There are about two billion websites[9], which means there are two billion domain names already taken. That can make finding the perfect domain name for your perfect business name a challenge. Try and find one that meets as many of these criteria as possible:
- Has a short URL.
- Doesn’t include dashes.
- Easy to spell.
- Has a dot-com extension.
- No repeating letters.
- Is descriptive.
Additionally, because real estate searches tend to be local, think about including your city name. It’ll also help with SEO.
Build your website and social media
There are services available that allow you to build your own website. GoDaddy, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Placester (this last one is specific to real estate) are only a few. You can read user reviews and select the one that works best for you, or you can decide you have a business to run and let an expert build a site for you. It will cost you some money, but with security, hosting, coding, visual placement, copywriting, and other technical aspects of website maintenance, you may find it worth your while to let someone else handle it.
As for setting up your social media, the technical part is far less complicated.
According to NAR, 97% of REALTORS® use Facebook[10], making it the #1 social media platform for agents. We provide some tips for building your Facebook business page in Set Up Your Facebook Business Page in 5 Simple Steps.
We provide other free resources about social media and branding that you will likely find useful:
- How to Create an Effective Branded Facebook Ad
- Tips for Creating a Personal Brand on Social Media
- 5 Branding Tips for Rookie Real Estate Agents
- Whose Name Is it Anyway? A Guide to Personal Branding
Choose a logo
While your brand is not your logo, it is the most recognizable aspect of your brand. For that reason, you need to exercise great care in selecting one.
Creating your logo is another instance when you might consider letting an expert do the work.
At ReminderMedia we have a talented creative team of designers and technical experts that can work with you to create a logo whose look and feel expresses what’s unique about you and your real estate business. You’ll find some helpful advice about creating a logo from our team in How to Create a Winning Logo.
About logos and their style, Deidre Woollard, cofounder of Lion & Orb, a real estate PR firm, says[11]:
We are seeing less big ornate logos and more clean design. You can compare it to the design that is popular in houses these days. Current design styles for homes are clean and simple, real estate brands should mimic that style … Too many agents focus on using their initials or using an image of a house, that ends up being repetitive and forgettable.
Color, another important element in logo design, creates an entire range of psychological and physical responses. Color evokes emotion, conveys meaning, and adds another layer of sensory experience to a visual design.
For example, because of its connotations, green is often used in the real estate industry. According to the design company Graf1x, green suggests safety, harmony, stability, reliance, and balance. It’s used to relax, balance, revitalize, and encourage. For these reasons, you’ll also find green used in environmental, banking, farming, and nonprofit industries.[12] Whatever you select, you’ll want a color that supports your branding and that can be used consistently across your brand.
Image from The Logo Company [13]
Some final words about branding
Paige Arnof-Fenn, founder and CEO of Mavens & Moguls, strives to remind businesses (from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies) that:
Everything communicates, not just your company name, brochure[,] or logo but [also] your business cards, stationery, e-mail signature, invoices, how you present yourself, how quickly you respond to messages, everything. [Branding] is a deliberate and holistic process. [14]
By now it’s obvious that branding your business is serious work. It’s not something to overlook or to treat casually. Take the time to think about your values, what you want to achieve, and how you will best serve your clients. Discover what makes you different and focus in on a niche you’ll enjoy.
Hire experts when it makes sense. You don’t need a full-blown marketing department, but help from qualified web designers and logo designers may save you time and trouble.
Remember to be consistent in your branding and if you play to your strengths, you’ll succeed.
Interested in taking a look at the best follow-up tools in the industry? Download a free copy of American Lifestyle magazine or Start Healthy magazine. Personalized with your brand and sent every two months to your exclusive list of contacts, these magazines nurture client relationships and keep you top of mind, helping to ensure you get more referrals.
[1] Taughnee Stone Golubović. Branding a Small Business: 8 Essential Components, Endeavor Creative, Updated August 15, 2019, https://endeavorcreative.com/branding-a-small-business/.
[2] Wendy Connick, 5 Examples of Unique Selling Positions, National Association of Sales Professionals, Accessed July 2, 2020, https://www.nasp.com/blog/5-examples-of-unique-selling-propositions/.
[3] J.T. O’Donnell, In 1 Simple Sentence, Warren Buffet Explains the Power of Personal Branding, Inc., August 28, 2018, https://www.inc.com/jt-odonnell/in-1-simple-sentence-warren-buffet-explains-power-of-personal-branding.html.
[4] Elizabeth Smithson, What is Branding and Why is it Important for Your Business? Brandingmag, October 14, 2015, https://www.brandingmag.com/2015/10/14/what-is-branding-and-why-is-it-important-for-your-business/.
[5] Khalid Saleh, The Importance of Word of Mouth Marketing – Statistics and Trends, Invesp, Accessed on July 2, 2020, https://www.invespcro.com/blog/word-of-mouth-marketing/.
[6] Monthly Membership Report, National Association of Realtors, Accessed on July 2, 2020, https://www.nar.realtor/membership/monthly-report.
[7]Justin Wm. Moyer, The Most-Liked Advertising Slogan: M&M’s ‘Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hand’, The Washington Post, June 24, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/24/the-most-liked-advertising-slogan-mms-melts-in-your-mouth-not-in-your-hand/.
[8]Justin Dossey, How to Create a Simple but Powerful ‘Unique Selling Proposition’ for Your Real Estate Investing Business, Call.Porter.com, September 3, 2019, https://www.callporter.com/how-to-create-a-simple-but-powerful-unique-selling-proposition-for-your-real-estate-investing-business/.
[9] How Many Websites Are There? How Many Are Active in 2020? Hostingtribunal.com, Accessed July 5, 2020, https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/how-many-websites/#gref.
[10] National Association of REALTORS® Research Group, Real Estate in a Digital Age, (PowerPoint presentation), Accessed July 5, 2020, https://www.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/2019-real-estate-in-a-digital-age-08-22-2019.pdf.
[11] Wendy Connick, 5 Examples of Unique Selling Positions, National Association of Sales Professionals, Accessed July 2, 2020, https://www.nasp.com/blog/5-examples-of-unique-selling-propositions/.
[12] Color Meaning and Psychology, Graph1x, Accessed July 5, 2020, https://graf1x.com/color-psychology-emotion-meaning-poster/.
[13] Psychology of Color in Logo Design, The Logo Company, Accessed July 5, 2020, https://thelogocompany.net/blog/infographics/psychology-color-logo-design/.
[14] Wendy Connick, 5 Examples of Unique Selling Positions, National Association of Sales Professionals, Accessed July 2, 2020, https://www.nasp.com/blog/5-examples-of-unique-selling-propositions/.
Written by Gabrielle King
Grand Wizard of Words