A lot has been said about branding and your message. If any of you follow Alexandria Seigel, she has written several excellent posts on branding, colors, demographic and psychographic messages. This is a whole new world for many of us and your message relates to the end consumer. If any of you are like me, oftentimes you feel like customers are ignoring you and your brand’s message. It’s a frustrating feeling to have; especially when you know, in your heart of hearts, your business is truly offering something of value to your customers. More often than not, you feel you are playing to an empty room.
So how can you build brand loyalty if nobody is paying attention to you? I have been doing a lot of extensive research on branding, blogs and how do the “big boys” market. There are some camps that buy into the social media myth. Bang out a lot of content and post it on FB, LI your website and other social media sites. Great idea. Touch the masses with content so it will be indexed by the search engines. What is your ROI for these activities? In business, it is all about the bottom line.
Earlier today, Lise Howe, touched on one of the ways to connect with customers that want limited engagement. Shared values and interests. It is a proven way to increase brand loyalty, and it’s closely tied to how you want to position yourself among your competition.
Far too often, we peddle our products, real estate, mortgages, home inspections . . . and the list goes on. The concept is to design our ad campaigns around people and what they value - real or perceived. The more I study business, and we are all business owners, shared values are by far the largest driver of brand loyalty. Perhaps our blogs should be more about people and values, not our wares.
We all have heard that folks do business with those they know, like and trust. I do believe that it does one one step further. Folks will do business with those whose values resonate with their own. In one article I read, one point was clearly made: “Consumers everywhere state that they were loyal “not to companies, but to beliefs.”
As a community of real estate professionals whose life blood and livelihood is the end consumer, what branding message are you conveying to your client? What are your beliefs and core values? Do you display them on your website and in your marketing materials? Think about it! I will reiterate: Most customers aren’t particularly loyal to any one business or person. They are loyal to what your business stands for. What do you stand for?
;-)
It is a GREAT day at Complete Home Inspections!
Comments(11)