In Part 1 of this series, Benefits and Tactics, we reviewed the various methods available for personal brand promotion. In this Part 2, Defining A Strategy, we explore the process you must follow to define your unique brand promotion strategy or plan.

The Status Quo

Agents usually go about personal brand promotion in one of two ways. They either set out to implement all the methods they know without reflecting on which tactics are practical and authentic for them, or they sporadically implement one and then another method without cohesion or coherence.

In both cases, they fail to be effective because a) attempting to implement all the tactics warps the message and confuses the audience, or b) they are too inconsistent to create a lasting memory in the public’s collective databank. Remember: personal brand promotion is many things, but at its core, it’s about consistency and repetition. For your brand promotion to be effective, you must design a feasible strategy you can implement now and augment and sustain over the long run. You must have a plan.

What is a Personal Brand Promotion Strategy?

Your brand includes your value proposition, your personal and business values, your business rules, and your brand identity. To promote it, you must define a strategy or plan of weekly, monthly, and annual activities that will place it front and center in your audience’s mind.
One concept and three anchoring principles should drive your brand promotion plan. The concept is Top of Mind Awareness, and the principles that anchor it are:

1. that your audience should see or hear from you at least three to five times per month,
2. that you should have a minimum of 50 conversations per week about real estate and
3. that you should add a certain number of people per month to your database. This number depends on several factors and will be different for each of you.

Top of Mind Awareness

Top of Mind Awareness, or TOMA, is a marketing concept that refers to the degree to which a brand is the first to come to a customer’s mind when she has a particular need. Achieving and maintaining TOMA means anyone in your audience who needs real estate services will think of you first. Marketing gurus of the last several decades agree that to achieve TOMA, your brand must be in front of your audience at least 3-5 times monthly.

You and Your Brand, Front and Center

How you can be front and center with your audience is simple when you remember there are only so many ways to be seen or heard. They are direct mail, email, social media, phone calls, or in person.

• Direct mail includes letters, notecards, postcards, printed newsletters, and magazines.
• Email content spans a wide range, from a simple message to an elaborately formatted market report or video message.
• Social media includes all the channels your audience uses and the formats you choose to create.
• Phone calls are just that. You must speak regularly to the people in your database
• To reinforce your brand and to maintain TOMA, in-person contacts are both the most fun and the most effective. Invite people to coffee, lunch, or a glass of wine; or stop by to drop off a season-appropriate little gift –wildflower seeds in the spring or chai tea in the winter, for example.

50+ Conversations

Real estate is a contact sport. You must connect and speak with your audience, the known and unknown. Known are all the wonderful people that make up your base: friends, family, past clients, current prospects, and the myriad of referral sources you cultivate. Unknowns are all those you have yet to meet, get to know and add to your database.

Your conversations do not need to be with buyers or sellers only but with adults interested in real estate. Buyers and sellers are not excluded from the count. They are just not the sole focus of our conversations. It is equally important to have conversations with people who can refer clients to you as it is to have conversations with potential customers.

You will reach at least 50 conversations per week in several ways.

1. Speaking with your active clients, sellers, and buyers.
2. Placing calls to your base or farm based on your TOMA plan.
3. Scheduling in-person meetings with your referral sources. In any given week, you should have a minimum of 5 face to face conversations with someone you know.
4. Sitting on floor and holding open houses. These conversations can be very productive, but you cannot count them toward your total count ahead of time since you have no control over who might walk in. Consider them “extras” and still plan to generate 50 conversations actively.
5. Networking. I wrote about the various ways you can network in Part 1 of this article. Like the number of contacts in your database, this is a highly customized aspect of your brand promotion plan. I recommend you list the networking options that attract you, pick three that resonate, test them by participating in the activity, and select one you feel is aligned with your values and interests and to which you can commit authentically.

Which Brand Promotion Activities Should You Use?

An effective brand promotion campaign is made up of tactics that are feasible, repeatable, and authentic for you right now. This exercise will help you identify 3 to 5 activities that fit your stage of business development.
Exercise
Review the brand promotion tactics we’ve discussed and, for each item, answer the following questions:

1. Can I implement it?
2. If I cannot, why?
3. What would I need to do or have to implement it?
4. Can I implement it regularly?
5. Does my broker provide support to implement it?
6. If so, what kind of support?
7. What support will I have to source myself?
8. How will I go about sourcing it?
9. Will I enjoy doing this?
10. Can I afford it for at least 12-18 months?

Select a minimum of 3 methods and a maximum of 5 to be implemented.

Scheduling

Now that you know what you want to do, you must tackle the challenge of scheduling these activities. Your goal should be to create a yearly schedule you can implement without rethinking it every month. Most of my clients are Florida agents, and we plan our promotional activities in August and September for the season starting in October of the same year. Use this form to write down the activities you will perform every week. This is your plan’s cornerstone.

Implementation
You will need a few things in place to implement a personal brand promotion.

1. A brand
2. A visual brand
3. A database
4. A graphic designer
5. A printing and mailing house
6. Sources of real estate and other relevant data
7. A budget

These items are not the subject of this article, but I will cover them soon in Part 3 of Personal Brand Promotion. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to call if I can help you plan and deliver an efficient and effective personal promotion strategy.

Happy Selling ∞