Why Your Real Estate Marketing Strategy Should Lead with Authenticity
When it comes to planning and managing your real estate marketing strategy, and all of the pieces within it, it’s sometimes easy to forget that you’re marketing to actual people; and that those people have real needs, real wants, and real values.
It’s easy to get caught up in metrics of who clicked this, who downloaded that, and who viewed the other, but good, authentic marketing goes beyond that (and can get you better, higher quality leads).
Generally speaking, marketing is all about connecting with your audience and building trust with them. To be successful in marketing, your audience must trust you, your brand, and your business; and a lot of big brands go a long way to work toward making their audience trust them.
★ Want to learn more about building trust and authenticity with your audience? Have a look at these posts:
- The Steps to Building a Trustworthy Personal Real Estate Brand
- Why Every Agent Should Have Their Own, Personal Brand
- Planning an End-to-End Brand Experience for Your Real Estate Business
Nowadays, building trust is more important than ever, as people seem to be more skeptical than ever about brands and businesses intentions and promises.
That’s where authenticity comes in. Without a doubt, the absolute best way to build trust with your audience is to be authentic with them. When done correctly, authenticity helps your audience connect with you, believe in your, and ultimately, trust you – which will lead to more of the high-quality leads that you want to work with.
Authenticity in marketing is rooted in honesty. Meaning, for you to truly be authentic with your audience, and win them over, honesty goes a long way.
Being authentic means making sure your marketing provides:
- Transparency: This means being open about your processes, your experience, and even your mistakes. It’s about pulling back the curtain a bit and allowing your audience to see what you and your brand are really all about.
- Consistency: Your brand’s voice, message, and values should be consistent across all of your marketing touchpoints, from your print marketing to your digital advertising to your website to your social media content – all of it needs to look and sound consistent. Inconsistency makes things confusing, makes you more easily forgettable, and ultimately, makes it more difficult to build trust in your brand.
- Empathy: Understanding your target audience’s needs, pain points, and long term is crucial. Authenticity in your marketing helps you align your marketing messaging and values with where the people you want to attract need help.
- Vulnerability: Showing more of your human side, admitting when you’ve fallen short, and sharing your the truth about you and your brand’s journey – even the challenging parts – can be incredibly powerful in making your audience connect with you.
- Purpose-Driven: People increasingly want to support brands and businesses that stand for something beyond just making a buck. Showing you and your brand’s desire to make a positive impact, especially in your local community, goes a long way to building an authentic, relatable brand that people like and want to support.
At the end of the day, authenticity in marketing isn’t about being perfect though; it’s about being real and upfront and genuinely connecting with your audience on a human level – ultimately, it’s about being honest.
For example, most real estate agents will always have marketing messaging that says that “right now is a great time to buy or sell a home”; but what if it wasn’t a good time to do either? And, what if you told the person who inquired exactly that?
It may seem a bit crazy to give up business (and not everyone can, or would, do this of course), but if someone is truly looking for the best time to buy or a sell a home, and and agent told them, right now isn’t a good time, but you’ll follow up with them when it is; and then once you did follow up, they waited just a little longer to sell their home, and the market agreed with them, and they sold their home for 5% more money than they would’ve, imagine how happy they’d be, and:
- how many people they’d recommend you to,
- how much they’d advocate for you and your brand,
- how much they’d trust you,
- and as a result, how many more people you’d work in the future because of it.
And of course, there’s many more ways to be authentic and build trust with your audience through your marketing strategy, the key is to make sure that you actually believe in the marketing messaging you’re putting out there, or it won’t feel or be authentic.
★ Want to learn more about our own strategy for empowering agents to make better real estate marketing decisions? Have a look at this post called: How We Work to Empower Clients and Not-Yet-Clients Alike.
Being authentic in your real estate marketing works because it makes people like you; and people will always make a decision to work with someone they like and connect with over someone they don’t.
Want to get better, more qualified leads and build your authority? Our Inbound Marketing Guide is a walkthrough of the overall philosophy of inbound marketing, why it’s effective, and how you can build it into your own real estate marketing strategy to get better marketing results.
