When it comes to driving in sales for your real estate business your success of course will hinge upon how effective you are with your marketing efforts more so than any other activity your perform as a real estate agent. But what sort of marketing should you be focusing your time working on?
If you pick through the internet long enough you’ll undoubtedly run into coaches who will tell you that your time would be far better spent developing your brand. While others teach that the first thing you should do is to join a good keyword research company in order to figure out what keywords you should be focusing on to get lots of the right kind of traffic over to your blog or website.
With so much seemingly conflicting information on the web it can be quite a task to know whose advice to follow and whose to ignore.
Since a fair share of my apprentices have asked me to explain the difference between these two types of marketing and what I suggest they do first I thought I better get my answer down on the blog for all to see.
First of all the definitions:
Brand – A brand is a customer experience represented by a collection of images and ideas; often, it refers to a symbol such as a name, logo or slogan.
Brand Marketing– The act of formulating your brand so that it fits a particular need of a particular segment in the current marketplace.
Search Engine Marketing– The process of researching the keywords your prospects enter when they surf the web looking for information regarding the particular product or service you offer.
Those of course are all very generic definitions but they will work well for the the purposes of this short discussion as I only want to show the differences between brand marketing verses search engine marketing and why I feel your time would be far better spent on the latter rather than the former.
In years past when individuals first launched a new business the very first things they did was to work on establishing some sort of branding for themselves. This included the creation of logos, slogans, newsletters, invoices, signs, receipts, letterhead, etc. Which was fine back before the internet came into play for business owners.
Succeeding in business back then was more a matter of luck than anything else. For they were forced to develop a brand without having any real knowledge of the prospects they hoped to service or provide products to. Sure they probably had a little insight into what their prospects were looking for. But they had no where near what we have today as far as research tools we can study the habits, needs and desires of our prospects with.
But now that we are in the internet age our marketing time will be far better spent on researching which keywords our prospects are searching. Not just so we can go out and start getting instant traffic to our blogs or websites either (but that’s nice too!) but also for the fact that in order to brand ourselves to our customers we first need to learn : 1) who our prospects are? 2) what do our prospects want? and only when we spend time searching the keywords they enter when they surf the web will we gain the knowledge needed in order to start branding ourselves to them.
It’s sheer arrogance and folly to think we can build a bridge over to our prospects (branding) before we even know what they want or have need of in the first place.
What it all comes down to in your business is that you have to decide whether or not you’re going to be a professional who does their homework or an amateur who wings it.
For your sake as well as the sake of your family I sure hope you do everything you can in order to become the professional I know you can be.
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