Invest in personal branding and social selling

In any sales role, the oldest rule has always been that people buy from people. This is absolutely true, and even more so in the real estate business. Whether in the commercial or rural sectors, where you’ll need relationships with senior buyers and decision makers, or, in the residential space where you’ll need a great reputation and lots of relationships within your designated sales area.

Many agents will be operating under a franchise or larger brand, which has a central marketing machine. This central operation is mainly responsible for creating brand awareness, and is ultimately aimed at enhancing brand reputation in the market. Very rarely will it enhance the reputation of individual agents or brokers.

So, with a need for face-to-face interaction to grow your sales, or for new reps to get that all important first listing, it will be more important than ever for those responsible for closing deals to have strong online personal brands, and to start employing social selling/social networking tactics.

How to develop an online personal brand

The basic foundations

If you have a bio on your company/local agency’s website, now is a great time to revisit it. It is quite likely that it is out of date and could do with improving. The next step is to ensure that these bios have links to your key social media channel, at the very least this should be your LinkedIn profiles. It always looks good from a branding point of view if your personal LinkedIn profile has a company banner visible. If you have the ability to edit this banner, I’d recommend listing the areas you cover e.g. commercial office space Auckland CBD, or residential sales Te Anau. The profile itself should make it obvious from the get-go what you do, and what potential value you’ll bring your clients. Your summary should be written in the first person, it is a social networking platform after all, and you certainly don’t talk about yourself in the third person at a networking event. It pays to keep your profile, and the key ones in your business, up to date and relevant.

Start a news/article sharing programme

Being passive on LinkedIn doesn’t work. So, to start building your own, or your key people’s personal brands, you’ll need to start sharing some relevant content. It pays to mix up this content. That means you shouldn’t just push out your own company’s articles and material. Instead, share some relevant industry news, market trends and articles showing trends overseas that may come here, as well as your own company information (such as the latest REINZ blog updates or current news stories). Once you get this balance right, you’ll start to get more views and comments on what you share.

Focus on creating and publishing content

Articles, videos, or short posts when developing a personal brand are certainly effective. This is a key channel to help your target audience understand what you stand for, and who you help. If you’re a new agent, getting this right will help you to get a listing without having an established track record. Demonstrating your knowledge and hunger will help you to start gaining traction in your market.

Moving into social selling

Like personal branding, this is a big topic, so I’m only going to touch on a few basics in this article to get you up and running.

Make new connections the right way

One of the main aims of LinkedIn is to make connections that are relevant to what you do, and to those people you want to meet. When doing this yourself, or advising others, make sure that you always include a message with your invites to connect, particularly if you’ve never previously met that person. Make it relevant to them. As a good guide, saying that you read one of their posts, and found it interesting because of x, y or z (you’ll need to fill in the details here), noticed you were in the same industry and thought it would be a good idea to connect, is usually a good approach.

Then, whatever you do, do not, repeat do not then send them a message with a cut and pasted sales pitch. That will make them wish they never connected with you. Instead, continue the conversation, and through asking questions, building to a natural point where it makes sense to arrange a call or meeting, to discuss how you can help them.

Join some conversations

It takes some time to explore the hashtags and groups on LinkedIn that are both active and relevant to you, or your key people, to participate in. Then, start joining in some conversations. Agree with what the author of a post has posted in a constructive way, and also offer some different points of view, in a similarly professional and non-confrontational way.

Once you have successfully done this, you will then be able to start some conversations, and you can even share the occasional article from you or your organisation, on the proviso that it is informative and will be valuable to those in the group who read it.

Start now for the long term pay-offs

It may be the case that you are catching up on this. Last year’s lockdowns and the threat that we may have another one, may have made you realise that you need to have a better online presence. The advantage is that if you do put a firm plan and strategy in place, you will start to see some benefits in the short to medium term.

In the longer term, people will start to gravitate to you as a key source of information in the real estate industry. That really is a huge value, as these activities help drive lead generation, and ultimately help you get more listings.

Ben Paul is the founder of The BD Ladder, a BD & Marketing consultancy focused on growing B2B companies. Ben has more than 20 years’ worth of experience delivering tangible results to B2B organisations, with a particular focus on professional services. You can get in contact with Ben via The BD Ladder’s website or by connecting with him directly on LinkedIn.

Ben Paul, Founder, The BD Ladder