A 3-Step Framework for Successful Real Estate Branding

The first step to building your successful and scalable real estate brand is to gain clarity into where your brand currently is, and adjust its trajectory if it is not headed in the right direction. Our Brand Clarity Workshop is designed to help you define and clarify what your company is all about. 

Clarify your brand values

Using your brand core values to compute, communicate, and connect with your target audience is the best way to reach the people who want to work with you. Most people want to engage with businesses and brands that they can relate to, and we all know no one relates to products, services, or features; they tell to what matters most to you. That’s your core value; start here.

Clarify your core messaging

Dedicate your brand to clarifying critical core messaging to ensure you are saying the right thing to your target audiences. Our approach starts by defining why you do what you do (pro tip – it isn’t just to make money), what fulfills you about your work, what you do is different and better, and who you do it for.

Your core message will not be your tagline or marketing slogan; those should be customized to your unique audiences based on what they care about and how you can help. But your core message is the bones of what you are communicating through your people, platforms, and products.

Clarify your personality and tone of voice

Not only is it precious to say the right thing to the right people in the right place, but saying it in the right way to convey the personality of your unique brand is imperative. With a defined character and tone of voice, you feel empowered to know the right design aesthetic and words for your marketing efforts. This step ensures folks get the right feeling and emotional connection with your brand, and you’ll attract the right people while repelling the wrong fit. And this works for all targets, not just customers.

Clarify your target audiences

Simply put, your brand is people-focused, no matter what you sell or serve. That’s because people connect with others to help them in one way or another. Using empathy to map out what matters to your targets, where they are influenced, what channels they are on, and their pain points, as well as how they measure success, is another way to infuse your decision-making with confidence to get more out of your marketing efforts. Remember, marketing is an infinite game with finite resources, so do your diligence to get the best returns possible.

Assess your current situation

Now that you know your brand and target audiences, you can confidently assess your existing assets and determine your priorities to maximize your investment in a competitive landscape. Likely, your website and content aren’t telling the right story in the right way to the right people, so with limited resources, focus on the essential asset in your marketing arsenal: the website.

What makes a successful marketing website?

1. A clear purpose
2. A defined audience
3. Intuitive navigation
4. Ease in managing and updating
5. Harmony between word and image
6. Clear points of conversion and engagement
7. User-friendly and accessible across all displays and devices
8. Exceptional speed and performance
9. Scalability
10. Measurable results
    

Put together your priority list. Your trusted brand advisor or agency should collaborate with you on priorities to ensure you have the proper guidance. Once you have your list, formulate the list into a top-down list of priorities, then put together a timeline based on the agreed preferences and your budget. This will serve as your roadmap.

Propr Brand-building Resources

Article: Brand Growth: 12 things to consider before growing your brand

Book: Build Your Brand Like You Give a Shit

Workshop: The Propr Brand Strategy Workshop

Optimize brand assets

With newfound clarity, begin building the assets your brand needs to connect and communicate with your target audiences and compete with your brand’s competition. You’ll want to focus on consistent messaging and design across all touchpoints. Any lack of polish or consistency will send the wrong message, leading to losses in opportunity, revenue, and loyalty.

Asset Assembly includes refreshing and expanding current brand identity systems, including typography, color palettes, word and image style guides, and a critical comprehensive list of required vehicles for the primary channels for engaging customers.

Brand asset checklist

• Brand identity style guide
  • Inventory of logos and identity system
  • Rules of usage
• Editorial style guide
  • Rules for communication
  • Rules for image treatment
  • Rules for video
• Brand standards
  • Color palette
  • Typography rules
  • Key messaging

Consider the following when developing your optimized band assets. 

Channels

What are the best and most effective lines of communication to connect with your audience? Identify the best channels to get your message in front of your audience. Next, create an inventory of assets with your list of channels, sometimes called vehicles; you will need to carry your message to the right folks. The vehicles can be broken down into tools and templates. We list our recommended tools and templates below.

Propr’s list of key real estate marketing channels:

• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Direct mail
• Email
• Signage
• Paid ads
• PPC
• Blog

Optimization of your custom website

Easily the most important and necessary asset in your brand’s inventory, your website should be the hub of all your marketing and brand development activity. You understand your marketing opportunities now that you have clarity about your brand and target audiences. You are excited and confident and begin updating or refreshing your website.

Refer to our Do’s and Don’ts of updating your website for our tips on getting the most impact on this critically important investment. 

Tactical Tools & Templates

Empowering your marketing and making real connections with your targets is only a step away. The final step before action is creating an inventory of tools and templates to hit the ground running. These tools and templates will serve as the vehicles to communicate and connect with people. Vehicles should include a consistent, flexible, and easy-to-manage tool chest of creative templates and assets.

Out list for real estate tools and templates: 

• Logo files optimized for application
• Email templates
• Google ad templates
• Postcard templates
• Direct mail templates
• Brochure/listing templates
• Easy-to-print signage
• Case study templates
• Keyword-researched blog subjects for content marketing

Here are a few Real Estate brands and websites we have designed.

With steps 1 and 2 complete, it is time to hit the ground running and not stop. When growing your real estate brand, your marketing approach should consist of a multi-facet approach, with clearly defined metrics to measure and a reporting system to evaluate, learn, and improve each step of the way.

Important Goals

• Build up an email list by collecting emails on your website through traffic and lead-generation efforts
• Create great content that will help your audiences be better informed and perform their jobs better
• Increase engagement on social media channels with compelling and frequent content
• Increase website authority and SEO value with dynamic content and broad traffic sources
• Increase leads and conversions by engaging your visors with valuable content
• Build real estate brand awareness by building authority and leadership in your space
• Make more meaningful connections with target audiences by being authentic
• Attract the right people for the business and repel the wrong ones by being yourself
• Stay top of mind with frequent touchpoints, valuable insights, and helpful advice

Content Marketing

Blogging 1: SEO

1. Based on keyword research and core audience trends, compile a list of blog topics to drive the right website traffic. Outsource these blogs to a qualified and experienced content writer. This traffic will give your site more authority while helping build your subscriber list. Start with two blogs at 1,000 to 2,000 words per month, and work up to 5-10 monthly posts. 
2. Send out a newsletter once a month with these blogs to your list.
3. Please share this content on your corporate social media pages as it goes live on your blog.
4. Ask your team and colleagues to like and share (emphasize ask; you cannot direct your employees to use their social media).

Blogging 2: Conversions

1. The leadership within your organization needs to contribute content. The good news is that the SEO posts are meeting your SEO needs, so these don’t need to be long-form. Start with 100 words once a month from each of your public-facing leaders. Share an opinion, give a forecast, be critical of something, share a how-to or why we did it this way thought piece. The idea is to get your leaders’ thoughts and wisdom published on your medium. Have fun, get excited, and keep it real, honest, and on-brand. 
2. Share via their own social media, tag the company and any client if relevant. Use the corporate channels to promote as well.
3. Include it in the newsletter or send it out via email as a one-off. 

Resources

Create high-value resources (like worksheets, calculators, checklists, etc.) to drive traffic to your website. Don’t feel you are giving away the secret sauce when you share your intellectual property. Likely, the people downloading them won’t replicate your people, experience, systems, and processes.

1. Start by creating one to two resources per year. 
2. Require the visitor to give something of similar value up to get your stuff, like their email or more info if the value is higher. 
3. Promote the resources using Google ads and the like.
4. Share the resources via email.
5. Share an electronic or print version of your resources with prospects.

Social Media

Stay active on social media to remain top of mind with your audience and provide interesting, relevant, and engaging content content content content. Share images, before and after, results, testimonials, and a mix of images and text. Never share personal information on professional channels. 

• Post 3-4 times a week on corporate channels
• Mix the content up to keep it fresh
• Consider a weekly post featuring a consistent post on the same day, like “awful listing photo of the week” or similar, to gain a following and have some fun. 
• Have goals for growing your followers organically. Never buy followers or likes; that’s a hack; it makes you look bad, and you should check your ego before you do it.
• Keep the content on brand and in the right tone of voice. 
• Avoid using industry speak and jargon; speak to your customers in their language.

Dynamic Content

Video, podcasts, live streams, and other forms of dynamic content can bring awesome results when coordinated with these other marketing tactics. Whatever you decide to do, make sure you know it’ll reach your audience, is measurable, you have a long-term plan, and the effort is sustainable. 

Our Growth Process Outline

1. Identify goals
2. Develop strategic plan
3. Create necessary assets
4. Develop advertising budget
5. Implementation
6. Measure, assess, report, and improve
7. Rinse & repeat
   

Final Words

The best marketing and brand advice is to act with sincerity and authenticity. Every part of your real estate brand, from how you talk to customers to the performance of your website, sends a message; that’s why we say everything is marketing. That message you send is branding, hence why we equate brand to reputation. When things aren’t sending the right message or giving you the reputation you want, take steps to align your brand with this framework. But we are all very busy, so contact us at Propr. We understand the real estate industry and the power of professional real estate branding work, but not as well as you. But we know our craft very well, and together, we can help make a difference for your company.