Tricks to Using Email & Social for Real Estate Agent Branding

As a real estate agent, you might not think social media and email useful in building an image for your brand. However, real estate agents can use email and social media to establish their brand image and use it to attract future clients. In addition, using email and social media properly can help prospects see realtors as the experts they are. Whether someone is already in your sphere of influence or new prospect reaches out to you, there is no better way to create the brand image you want as a realtor than to use social media and email newsletters.

Here are three quick tips to help you get the most out of your email and social media efforts when crafting your brand as a real estate agent.

Use High Quality Images Across All Media

One of the primary advantages of marketing your business online is that you can use photos and other images to help make an emotional connection with your clients. This helps your branding because the more prospects associate positive emotions with your brand, the more likely they are to work with you when they want to buy or sell a home.

Many real estate agents snap photos of the homes they are selling with digital cameras or mobile devices and upload them to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This is a great start; seeing beautiful homes can help clients associate you with the home of their dreams. While photos of a listing you have might help you sell a house, they don’t tell the online world much about you as an agent. You should strive to give people a sense of who you are offline through online images on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Google+, LinkedIn and your website:

• Personal photos of you and your staff celebrating with a client after they purchase their dream home.
• Humorous photos that relate to real estate.
• High quality graphics to augment your email newsletters.

These types of images can help inspire trust, confidence and a desire to work with you when your readers see them regularly.

Grab Clients’ Attention With Short, Concise Content

Social media makes it easier than ever to get new clients’ attention. If you’re the first to post relevant content such as breaking news about the housing market, tips on getting your home ready for sale and info about what to look for in a realtor, followers will flock to your social media pages in order to see what you’ve got going on. They also will trust you over the competition, making it more likely that you will gain new clients.

For best results, keep posts short. If you use Twitter, there’s a 140-character limit that forces you to make your posts brief. You can be a little longer on Facebook, but don’t write an essay. Try to keep your posts to one or two sentences so that busy readers can scan them and get the essence of what you’re saying. You never know when someone will stop by your page, so the idea here is to always have fresh content available on your social feeds.

Build Rapport While Generating Traffic

Both social media use and blogging can help build traffic to your website. Blogging is a particularly powerful tool for content marketing because it allows you to have a public archive of material that showcases your industry knowledge while helping you generate traffic.

A blog is an online journal where you post articles related to your business and readers respond. If you follow up on the responses, you’ve automatically built rapport and interest with customers. If you don’t want to write a blog, you can communicate via email. Write your articles in the form of letters to your customers and also set them to automatically post to your website.

Successful blogging or emailing requires you to pay attention to real estate issues that are of concern to your clients. For example, if you’ve had several clients tell you they didn’t know where to begin their home search or they weren’t sure whether the timing was right because of credit issues, you know that these issues are of importance to clients. If you write a how-to blog or email about one of these topics, you’ll get customers’ attention. By opening a dialogue about these issues, you can build rapport and keep people coming back to your website.

Another way to approach this would be to use your email newsletter as the content posted to your website. This archive content would be saved for future visitors to your website and would help save you time in the process. This approach to online content helps centralize everything in one place, ensuring that your emails, tweets, and Facebook posts all lead back to your website. This is the approach we use here at OutboundEngine for our real estate clients.

The image that you cultivate for yourself as a real estate agent should be one that showcases your enthusiasm for the industry without being over bearing on the self-promotion of new listings. People continue to work with you when you’re perceived as more of a friend than a business associate because of the comfort level they have with you. This is comfort level is part of your brand image. Social media, content marketing, and email are the best approach to this and we can help.