How would you define your brand? When your clients thinks about you what thoughts and emotions do they associate with you and the service you provide? These are very important questions to answer.

Branding 101

Your brand helps you differentiate yourself from your competition.  Your differentiation must be based on more than just a list of the functions that you provide. You want to focus on differentiating yourself based on the benefits you provide to the client not just the features or functions. The strongest benefit that will help you truly distinguish your brand is if you can evoke emotional benefits.

Developing an Elevator Pitch

A great way to start to define your brand is by developing an ‘elevator pitch’. Elevator pitches are succinct marketing messages that can be easily understood and delivered in the time it would take to ride up an elevator. Typically 160 words or less. Larry has developed a very useful workbook to help Toronto real estate agents through this process. We have it posted on this blog here feel free to download it and use it: Toronto Real Estate Agent Personal Branding Workbook.

The elevator pitch process will take you through describing your existing brand and how you are currently positioned. Once you understand where you currently are, you then need to ask yourself if that is how you want to be perceived by the market. For many of you the answer will be yes but for some it may be no. If it is no then take this opportunity to describe how you want to be positioned to your target market. Social media is a great way to reinvent your brand.

On social media networks you have a great ability to control how it is that you are perceived. This control comes from the way you position yourself in your profiles, the way you interact with others, and the content you put out there.

Content is King

Content is the single most important element to a social networking campaign. You are in the service industry; people pay you for your knowledge and expertise. You all already have the content needed to develop an effective social media campaign. You just need to focus on developing that knowledge and expertise into good quality content that your network and target market will find engaging. It is this content that will position you as subject matter expert. It is this content that will give those people consuming it insights into your personality and brand. It is this content that will allow you to start to develop trust and only after this trust is in place will you have the ability to convert this traffic into a lead. It is also this content that will not only engage your network but also generate the positive word of mouth. As your existing network consumes the content and finds it useful they will start to share it with others in their network whom they know will find it useful. Those other people will then typically go back and look at the source of that information.

Content is also a great non-intrusive tool to drive traffic back to your website or blog. The majority of the content that you develop should live either on your website or blog (some exceptions apply). You should take bits and pieces of that content and start using them strategically on your different networks. In future posts we will discuss how to do this on the different social networks.

What Content Should I Develop?
If you are struggling to come up with ideas for content just think about questions that your clients have asked you or that you think they have. Answers those questions in succinct posts of 200-300 words. Also look through your sent email box as I’m sure you have great content that you have already sent to clients. If you find you get the same question from many different clients use that as the topic for you next post. Get it on your blog and the next time you are asked that questions direct them to the blog post. This is also a great way to drive traffic to your blog.

In the next post I will be tackling the question: What should I have a website or a blog?