From Personal Brand to Personal Marketing

The first rule of successful marketing is to find a niche and exploit it. Traditional marketing has always focused on appealing to the masses. Thus, conversions are low and often disappointing with traditional campaigns. However, with niche marketing, the savvy marketer is putting his or her brand before a highly targeted and, hopefully, highly motivated audience. The end result—more conversions!

In today’s niche-oriented market, a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing just doesn’t work. Find your niche and capitalize on specialization. Example real estate niches include first time home buyers, seniors and retirees, relocations, etc. A personal marketing campaign focused on first time buyers, let’s say, might target recent college graduates. It might also benefit by hosting a seminar in residential areas with a high renter-to-owner ratio on home ownership or by building a website that acts a clearinghouse for first-time buyer information. Be creative and most importantly, meet a need that isn’t being met.

A second important component of a personal marketing campaign is that of publicity by means of public relations. Everyone is an expert on something and has something to contribute to the community. This is true of the realtor as well, especially even. One can go about marketing via public relations in many ways. For our purposes, we are primarily concerned with the press release and trend analyses.

A media savvy realtor is a successful realtor. However you go about targeting your niche, make it a newsworthy ordeal. Referring back to one of the examples above, hosting a seminar on purchasing a home for first time buyers, prepare and submit a press release to a number of media outlets. Now, your press release may or may not be released depending upon any number of variables. One’s greatest chance of success with regard to having a press release published is with the smaller community newspapers (and don’t underestimate the marketing potential of such papers). Such will establish you as an expert in your field with the various media, present you and your services as a valuable community commodity and keep your personal brand before your target niche audience.

Another media-related marketing strategy is for the realtor to publish trend analyses, i.e., to keep abreast of and prepare reports on, current trends from within his or her particular niche. These can be submitted to newspapers and other local and regional print media, published online and so on. Such pieces tend to be very informative and can only help to bolster community confidence in the author’s personal brand.

One of the more important components of personal marketing is that of Internet marketing. No realtor can truly reach his or her potential until they have implemented an online personal marketing campaign. This should consist of a website and/or blog (though preferably both). Such an online presence provides for easy access to the personal marketer and can serve as an additional clearinghouse of niche-relevant content and information further solidifying the realtor as an expert and community resource.

There are other personal marketing strategies to be sure, e.g., provision of branded freebies (coffee mugs, pens, etc.), sponsoring events of human interest and charity, providing scholarships and internships, hosting seminars, community outreach and so on.

The key to remember, however, is that the focus of one’s personal marketing should be upon differentiating oneself from the proverbial pack. Your personal marketing strategy should be an extension of your own personal brand. Your personal brand is saying to your market niche that you are different from your competitors. Your personal marketing strategy should be demonstrating it.