How can you as an agent differentiate yourself from the competition? Most marketing experts will recommend โnichingโ; they will talk about demographics, psychographics and knowing which end of town you want to be playing in. This is great advice, but itโs only the beginning. You need to visualise who your ideal client really is. Susanne King explains.
If you want to stand out from the crowd, you have to be your niche.
Let me explain. People are buying you. Yes, the agency you work with matters; the brand and who you are serving are all very important โ but if people donโt know who you are they are not going to work with you.
People are smarter. Not only do they have more access to information regarding real estate, they have access to information about who you are. Itโs not uncommon for a person to search your name, stalk your social media profile and spend time watching what you do. A recent statistic I heard was it takes 18 months for someone to decide on the agent they are going to use.
SO HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE WHAT THEY WANT?
I see a lot of people investing in their business and doing a great job. They have action lists for the number of calls they will make and the areas they will doorknock, but when it comes to having a strategy around the brand of who they are itโs often a hope-and-pray kind of deal. If you want to stand out, you have to treat your personal brand as being as important as your day-to-day business operations.
START WITH YOU
The first place you need to start is with you. Who are you and what do you stand for? Recently my business partner and I ran a live stream on the power of mantra and values. You need to know who you are so you can communicate that to the marketplace. Take a moment and think about the following four questions:
1. What makes you irresistible? Why would a person want to work with you personally?
2. What are you passionate about in life? Are you a beach surfer, an avid traveller or into design? Think about the things outside of what you do for a living that make you stand out, things that would be interesting for your clients and potential clients to engage with.
3. What do you stand for? What are your values?
4. What is your mission? What positive impact do you want to make in this world through the work that you do? Why does that inspire you?
START WITH THEM
The second action is to think about who your ideal client is and what they want to know about. Far too often I see people communicate only about themselves without ever thinking about who they are talking to.
Your brand is what people say about you when youโre not in the room. You have to get good at communicating who you are and what youโre doing in a way that matters to the person seeing or listening to your brand.
Think of your favourite client and then be the best version of yourself that you know they would want. Look at how you can be so attractive to them (while being true to yourself) that it would make them want to not only do business with you, but rave about you too.
FINISH WITH THE HOW
Now that you are clear on who you are, what you stand for and what your ideal client would want, itโs time to decide how you are going to showcase it.
- Is your social media showing a full perspective on who you are and what you stand for?
- Do you have a website that is about you and provides value-adding content?
- Are you involved in the community in meaningful ways that stand out to your clients?
- Are you connected with people who can promote you in a way that you are automatically trusted?
- When you Google yourself, does it speak to your values and brand or does it say something else?
- Take the time to show who you are, because at the end of the day people buy not just what you do โ they buy you.