Lit: The best of Spotlight, 2011
No: 659
There’s been a lot of dialogue recently around raisingthebar – a stirring of ingredients that, if boiled to perfection, could transform the industry. Continuing education, sales coaching, licensing standards and more are in the mix.
These are things that real estate typically outsources to outside experts, and everyone seems OK with that.
Yet along the way up the bar, most choose to manage the marketing and packaging of their brand themselves – an odd contradiction, if you ask me.
A real estate Brazilian
Brand campaigns aren’t cookies you bake at home. Or a pot of goulash into which you throw pinches of this and that. It’s the singularity you weave into everything you do to stand out.
Technology has gifted us with many implements with which to work at this. They empower the user, but can also falsely lure them into believing they are “building a brand” when in reality they are simply making a mess.
You risk sliding down the bar you wish to climb. You’ll gravitate to that which is convenient, or free. You’ll write words that you would never speak to people.
Perhaps you will fail to realize that the stock image of a handsome couple you chose to portray buyers on your collateral may also be the erectile dysfunction models found on a pamphlet at RiteAid’s prescription counter.
Technology has been generous. But it can’t provide strategy – and the discipline required to wax your real estate brand to a perfect Brazilian.
Great brands don’t skim edges. They meticulously groom their campaigns to evoke desire within people who want their product or service. And when that personal connection occurs, when what you do matches how you appear, you create something timeless: A brand.
When you fail you become just another nameless, faceless agent. Or brokerage. Someone or something that just sells real estate.
Climbing
Maybe you have gone the distance. Honed your brand to perfection. Raised your personal bar. You’re ready to rock in 2012.
Why risk the final, grand reveal of who you are through a do-it-yourself, arts and crafts marketing campaign? Leaving your brand obscured beneath a tangle of shoddy marketing and expecting, hoping, praying, that people will search for it is too grand an expectation.
You don’t cut your own hair. You don’t build your own cars. You don’t cobble your own boots or manufacture your clothing – the things with which you adorn yourself to create the picture of who you are to the world. You seek professionals to help you look great.
So find seasoned marketers.
Let them do their job.
So you can spend more of your time climbing.