Real estate branding is not what it was ten years ago. The days of creating the most epic offers and then shouting from the rooftops are gone. The focus has shifted inwards now, emphasizing how our personal brands serve the community and operate in the world.
The truth is, your branding determines how your clients connect and emotionally relate to your business. This means that those who have become caught up with modern real estate branding initiatives are those who will succeed in the future of the real estate industry.
So we’ve consulted with the real estate branding experts to offer some innovative and up-to-date branding principles to support the success of all agents whether you’re just starting out or accomplished in the field. Check out these real estate branding ideas to learn how to make the most of your brand now and in the future.
What Makes A Good Real Estate Brand?
A good real estate brand is distinct from its competitors, establishes trust, and builds brand loyalty among its audience. To achieve this, an agent must authentically and consistently connect with their niche and work to solve their problems. Here are a few questions to ask as you uncover the vision and purpose of your brand:
What Are Your Goals?
Consider what you are trying to achieve with your real estate business. Your goals encompass financial objectives, team structure, and the overall impact of your business on its audience and community.
As with any business owner, your personal life is a critical consideration as well. Do you easily slip into a workaholic mode, or do you prefer to take the lead, automate, and divide your time between family life and running a successful business? The clearer you can be about what you want to achieve, the easier it will be to get there.
Who Are You Helping?
This question connects your goals with your mission statement and purpose creating a road map for your brand to carry you towards your goals. To do this, we need to understand your audience.
Reflect on who your ideal client avatar is, what their desires and challenges are, and how your expertise can help them overcome these challenges and move on to a more prosperous life.
How Do You Help Them?
What problems are you helping your audience to overcome? Some people hone a niche in the luxury market, selling exotic lifestyles in spellbinding places. Other real estate agents target budget housing for first-time buyers. There’s no limitation to the niche you can serve, so think about your personal values, how these connect to your business, and how your brand will set you up to help others.
Good brands always provide value to their clients. Think about the value you want to add to somebody else’s life and build your brand around that.
Now you have a better understanding of your personal branding, your vision, and your unique value proposition, let’s dive into some fantastic branding techniques to keep you thriving in the modern real estate industry.
Choose A Brokerage That Supports Your Brand Values
The brokerage you choose to affiliate with will set the tone for your brand and your career from that point forward, so it’s necessary to choose wisely. When you know your mission and objectives, you can discover which brokerage encourages your goals and brand’s success.
For example, eXp is an online brokerage that helps build reliable brands for agents, not just clients. This brokerage supports you to reach the top of your field by encouraging balance and powerful performance in your personal and professional life. Here are a few tips to look out for when you select your brokerage, along with a discussion around how these points make for strong and effective real estate branding.
You Can Be Authentically You
Authenticity produces stronger connections, helping forge genuine relationships and build trust. One of the most powerful techniques in your real estate branding toolkit is authenticity. When your clients can connect with your personal brand, they’ll do your marketing for you via word of mouth, emails, or social media.
How Does eXp Support Your Authenticity?
With no brick-and-mortar footprint, eXp is one of the world’s first and fastest-growing virtual brokerages. The virtual office model offers agents the freedom and flexibility to work when, where, and how they choose every single day.
Effectively this system provides a platform for you to have a voice in your brand as you set the boundaries, schedules, and objectives in your personal and professional life. It doesn’t matter if you are a devoted parent who prioritizes family and career or if you love to travel and lead a life of rich new experiences. With eXp, you get to decide the values of your authentic personal brand and integrate them into your business to connect with the kindred spirits you serve.
You Have A Reliable And Consistent Brand
Reliability and consistency across all channels – whether social media, your website, in-person connections, or otherwise – is how trust and loyalty get built in your client relationships. A consistent brand reaches targeted audiences and represents your brand’s vision and values every time.
How Does eXp Support Branding Consistency?
eXp helps agents to stay consistent and accountable by providing world-class, cutting-edge technology platforms and tools for your business. eXp Enterprise is a financial reporting tool that opens visibility into business metrics, including real-time performance reports to help you stay on track. Additionally, agents have access to paperless transaction management and CRM tools to keep agents on top of multiple client relationships.
All agents gain access to a robust marketing suite allowing you to create logos, business cards, flyers, and signage for marketing initiatives. You even get free branded websites! These marketing materials ensure agents function at a high level with a cohesive brand identity and smooth, streamlined business operations.
You Are Supported To Develop Your Skills
A robust brand knows exactly who its target audience is and can easily identify clients’ pain points and offer solutions. To accomplish this, an agent must continuously learn about their niche and how to address client concerns.
How Does eXp Develop Agents’ Skills?
With eXp, all agents are encouraged to discover their niche and hone their message through continued education opportunities. By tapping into a borderless virtual campus, eXp World, agents can access over 50 hours of on-demand training weekly. Regular monthly meetings and seminars help you connect with like-minded agents and better relate to your niche.
All real estate agents new to the industry and those who have made less than three transactions in the past 12 months are offered a mentorship program. This program allows you to develop your skills with a more experienced agent, attend client meetings, and gain the foundational knowledge and hands-on skills required to succeed in the real estate industry.
Your Credibility and Authority Are Celebrated
A real estate agent’s credibility and brand authority refer to the degree to which clients trust your brand and view you as a subject matter expert. Often, authority is established by the certificates, qualifications, and other forms of recognition real estate agents earn throughout their careers.
How Does eXp Highlight Your Credibility?
eXp recognizes and rewards agents’ success based on their exceptional performance in the field. Earning eXp ICON status is a major accomplishment that many agents strive to achieve every year. The prestigious award acknowledges that an agent has met certain production benchmarks and represented eXp’s core values over 12 months or that they have contributed to the growth and knowledge sharing of other agents.
Agents are incentivized to gain this status with the opportunity to earn $4,000 in eXp World Holdings company stock annually. In this light, the virtual brokerage is not only offering employees the chance to benchmark and celebrate their real estate brand’s competency but get financially rewarded for it too!
You Have A Platform For Growth
At some point, every successful real estate business will experience a growth phase. Importantly, your brokerage should provide a platform to expand your operations and reach more people with your message. Without growth opportunities, a real estate company may become stagnant and decline.
How Does eXp Grow Your Business?
eXp supports business growth in two ways. The first is by providing a seven-tier revenue share system for agents, helping you construct additional passive income streams. For every new agent you recruit to the eXp brokerage, you receive a certain percentage of that agent’s commissions. This model works for any subsequent agent they recruit, down to seven levels. By creating multiple streams of passive revenue, agents have the freedom to focus their energy on their vision.
The other way eXp supports the growth of your real estate brand is through team structures. There are four types of teams you can lead as an eXp agent. These teams follow various forms and provide incentives and benefits in the form of stock awards and ICON status awards based on the performance of each. Not only are you supported to grow your business, but to uplift other agents and lead an excellent brand.
If you’re interested in becoming part of one of the fastest-growing brokerages in the world and constructing a successful and supported brand, call Elizabeth Riley for a discovery call to learn how to get started today.
Craft A Unique Message
We all want to feel as though we’re part of something much bigger than ourselves. When you align your brand to a set of core values, you link yourself, your brand, and your business to a powerful vision past, present, and future leads can emotionally connect and identify with.
Crafting your unique brand message generates more leads and sells homes more effectively than advertising alone could ever achieve. Why? Because you distinguish your brand apart from others in your market and make people feel like they’re investing in values rather than a piece of real estate alone.
Tell Stories
The key to a strong real estate brand is to build connections and show empathy through the power of storytelling. Fortunately in the industry, there’s no shortage of stories to be told.
Storytelling can enhance your personal brand by sharing the trials and tribulations that led you to the success you experience today. Sharing these events helps your audience to connect with you, and creates a sense of authenticity and trust which is excellent for your brand.
The other approach is to look outward and share the incredible success stories of your clients. Purchasing a new home is an emotional journey, and house hunters often feel as though they are facing their challenges alone. By sharing stories, you demonstrate your competency in helping your audience manage challenges to drive strong and desirable results. But it goes deeper. Through these stories, your audience connects with one another and experiences a sense of belonging and community, which moves beyond branding: it’s plain good leadership.
Invest in High-Quality Graphics
The visuals we use in branding have a way of subtly influencing our audiences to form thoughts about the products and services we offer. This ranges from the brand colors we use to psychologically communicate emotion and feeling to the quality of the images and videos shared on social media posts. It all represents your brand and impacts business success. Here are a few tips to keep your visual identity sharp.
The Logo Design
Your brand’s logo is a small emblem that target audiences can recognize easily. A good logo will incite feelings in your clientele and convey messages that align with your brand’s core values before a word is spoken.
Hiring a graphic designer is one of the best ways to capture the spirit of your brand and enhance the efficacy of this tool. Graphic designers are highly trained visual communicators, skilled at conveying your messaging and brand identity with a singular icon. It may be an upfront investment but it is worth it over the long term.
Images and Videos
In today’s day and age, there’s no excuse for poor-quality images. As a real estate agent, your cellphone is possibly one of your greatest branding assets. Fortunately, many come with graphics to rile basic pro-level cameras these days.
Thanks to social media, the quality of your images has a major impact on how engaging your social media and website content (and by affiliation, your brand) is. You could hire a professional to take some portraits for your visual toolkit. Though, a couple of Youtube videos can also set you up to take gorgeous promotional shots of properties and attract even more quality leads to your business without the expense.
Get Your Brand Out There
You could have the best brand in the whole world, but it won’t be successful if nobody knows about it. The best real estate agents like to place their brand directly in front of a targeted audience requiring their services. So how can this be achieved? By positioning your business where your target audience is looking for it.
Real Estate Company Website
Nowadays when people need a product or service, it’s common to conduct an online search to find local solutions. So if you don’t have a website yet, you could be missing out on a number of qualified leads.
Plenty of free platforms are available to host your website if you have the time and patience to create one. Alternatively, it could be a good idea to seek help from the pros and get a stunning, professional website faster.
Once you have a good website, fill it with SEO-optimized content so you can rank for the keywords most relevant to your target audience. This can take some initial time and effort to implement, but the results will see your brand in front of every qualified lead that requires your services. You can always get professional real estate SEO experts to optimize your content and drive a predictable flow of leads to your website faster.
Social Media
If you haven’t got a social media account for your business yet, you’ve probably been hiding under a rock. And that’s okay, but now is the time to create one. Social media posts are one of the single most effective and free ways to sharpen your brand identity, experiment with new and creative ideas, and generate leads for your business.
Keep your brand alive on social media by mixing up your posts. For instance, try interesting ad formats for new listings, offer virtual 3D property tours, and go live to present market updates for your audience.
Use exceptional quality images and videos to assert your brand as the high-level player it is. Ensure you inspire your audience to engage with your brand by posting consistently, asking questions, and creating new connections.
In The Community
Bring your real estate branding efforts together by getting involved with the community. Here you have some space to get creative. Perhaps you love hosting casual real estate meet-ups where your audience can ask questions, learn, and bond with like-minded people. Or maybe you can enter a team in a local fun community event (marathon anyone?) to get your brand name out there.
If the business is going well, sponsoring community events is a fantastic way to get locals familiar with your brand, as typically event organizers offer free sponsor advertising and acknowledge sponsors for their hard work. Not only does this bring awareness to your real estate brand, but it makes you look great too!
Make Genuine Connections
People want to buy from people. So technically, you already have all the ingredients you need for a successful real estate business. Although, with many of your lead generation techniques – particularly the digital ones – leads will engage with your brand before they engage with you.
Once you have some quality leads in the pipeline – and to get quality leads into the pipeline – it’s important to convey yourself as the authentic, perfectly imperfect human you are, and genuinely associate with the people and communities you serve. So how can this be achieved?
Get To Know Your Clients
Getting to know your clients means understanding their goals, frustrations, and challenges through active listening. That way, your services are better targeted and more effective for each of your clients. That way, you form life-long partnerships with individuals rather than a one-off transaction.
Understanding the client’s needs involves actively empathizing and investing time into the relationship. It makes sense in the real estate industry: when you assist a family in buying a new home, you’re helping them navigate one of the biggest and most emotionally-charged decisions of their lives. Showing that you understand the gravity and magnitude of their experience and (helping them get through it) is an approach that will pay dividends to your brand’s referrals and reputation in the future.
Find Shared Interests or Experiences
As a real estate agent, you’re constantly meeting new people in your professional and personal spheres. Relating with people and building rapport quickly is a skill that establishes common ground and builds trust the fastest and most authentic way.
When people trust you – and when they like you – they are considerably more likely to be influenced by what you have to say. So building rapport with new clients is a sure way to establish a relationship based on trust and authenticity.
Final Thoughts
Real estate branding in the modern world is constantly evolving. To stay ahead of the industry, agents must refocus branding initiatives to underscore client connections, value propositions, and building trusting and authentic relationships.
To be an authentic agent, it’s necessary to opt for a brokerage that supports who you truly are and helps you to achieve your lifestyle goals, rather than an agency that dictates who the industry thinks you should be. To make the most out of these real estate branding ideas, an agent must ensure that they connect with a brokerage that will help them to live, learn, and grow as a successful agent.
If your vision and values are aligned with achieving lifestyle freedom and unlimited financial possibilities as you serve your community, contact Elizabeth Riley today for a discovery call and learn how eXp can support your successful realtor brand.