5 Bulletproof Strategies (and Action Steps to Take) to Build Your Personal Real Estate Brand with Social Media
Before we dive into all the strategies, let’s define a brand and what building a brand could mean for your business.
As Marty Neumeier said, “Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.” A brand is not just a logo or set of colors, as many may think. It’s a perception, a feeling, a lasting impression that people get when they think of you, your product, or your business. For that, you can never own your brand; you can only manage it. Your goal with branding is to make sure that perception is exactly what you want it to be by being consistent across every interaction people have with your brand across all the channels – starting from your business cards, social media, listing marketing materials, website, and more.
Define Your Brand Goal
Defining your brand goal will help you assess how successful you are in your efforts to build your brand.
A few examples of brand goals would be:
Driving awareness of your real estate services
Generating business through new buyer and seller leads
Increasing customer loyalty
Action steps:
Take a few minutes to think about and write down your brand goals and what differentiates you from other real estate agents, what sets you apart.
2. Build a Strong Brand Identity
Brand identity is a collection of all the elements that you will create to portray the right image to your audience: from your logo, marketing materials, web design, social media graphics, business cards to fonts and colors you use.
Action steps:
Define the building blocks for your brand identity:
Typography – the font you choose for your branding materials. There are 4 main types of typography: Serif, Sans Serif, Script, and Display. Choose your fonts wisely.
Color palette – choose 3 to 4 colors for your color palette to use in your logo and marketing materials. Remember there are phycological ties to different colors – you might like to research what each color means to make that aligns with how you’d like your brand to be perceived.
Form/Shape – defining the subtle elements of your design (round shapes, straight-edged shapes, or straight lines) could reinforce the reaction you’d like people to get when looking at your marketing materials.
2. Hire A Professional Graphic Designer
If you are not a graphic designer, I highly recommend hiring a professional to create your brand identity. It will save you hours and hours of time that you can spend on other aspects of building your real estate business, such as developing your contact list, creating an overall marketing plan, or engaging with your audience on social media. Your graphic artist will most likely give you a branding questionnaire to fill out in order for them to create your brand identity and brand style guide for your future marketing materials, including social media graphics.
3. Cover Your Basics on All Social Media Platforms You Are On
You don’t need to be on every social media channel; you can choose one or two where your ideal client is hanging out the most and do it right! Another thing to keep in mind – you also don’t need thousands of followers to reach your brand goals. Ten engaged followers who become your clients are better than 10,000 followers that are not engaged.
Action steps:
If you are to choose Instagram and Facebook as your main social media channels, make sure you are using the same profile image (or at least very similar) on both platforms, you include your bio/description telling people exactly who you are and what you specialize in and what is the best way to reach you!
4. Be Consistent and Post Frequently
Being consistent doesn’t just come in the form of posting every day at 10 am – it’s about having a consistent look and feel of your social media graphics and a strategy behind posting. It’s not about “post and done”, but also about engaging with people who comment on your post, showing up in Instagram and Facebook Stories, providing value, and sparking 2-way conversations.
Action steps:
Create a social media content plan where you highlight a topic of your post for each day of the week.
Create social media graphic templates for each of the topics that you identified in the step above (e.g. seller/buyer tips, listing promotions, inspirations, etc.) using the brand colors, fonts. Canva could be a great resource for you!
Create a unique hashtag for your real estate brand
5. Give as much as you can
In order to create a memorable brand, you need to give people a reason to follow you and remember you when it comes to buy, sell or rent. In order to do so, you need to provide value to them by educating them about the market, neighborhoods and providing tips on selling/renting/buying.
Action steps:
Educate yourself on the current conditions of the market
Create a list of tips (one sentence each) that you can give to the people who are looking to sell, buy or rent
Building a brand doesn’t happen overnight; it takes time and dedication. Sometimes it will feel like a full-time job, just remember, you have my support and expertise.
To kickstart your social media presence today, download a sample of weekly social media content plan that includes graphics, captions, and Instagram package to go with each graphic. Feel free to use those on your social media pages!
P.S. Share some love by tagging @yourmarketingmuse on Instagram when you post! :)