How to Start Building Your Real Estate Personal Brand with Free Tools

In the Age of AI, those who build strong personal brands will be the leaders and deal magnets of their industry.

If you want to thrive as a real estate pro today, you need a strong personal brand that conveys your unique value and abilities. Even if you're working for a company, having a solid personal brand will make you more valuable to your employer, and you can only win as a solopreneur or as a founder with a strong personal brand. But where do you start when establishing your professional brand?

What is a brand?

A brand is more than just a logo or a tagline; it's the overall image and perception of an individual or a company in the minds of others. A memorable brand is one that effectively communicates its values and message to its audience, creates a strong emotional connection and loyal community, and stands out in the market. Corporate brands and personal brands are different in a lot of ways (think of Apple vs Steve Jobs). Personal brands are more personable, and elements such as someone's look, voice, and personality are part of the overall brand. Corporate brands have more crafted, formal messaging, while personal brands thrive on authenticity and relatability. If you take a look at the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook's X account (14.3M) has way more followers than Apple (9.5M). Same with Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin (12.4M) vs Virgin, the company (250K). According to Forbes, when CEOs use social media, 77% of buyers are more likely to purchase from that brand?

Personal branding is the process of creating and promoting a consistent and authentic image of yourself in the marketplace. Investing in your branding can raise your perceived value, make you a lead magnet, and ultimately drive accelerated growth and more abundant business opportunities for you.

What are your favorite personal brands? What do you like about that brand? Is it the person's values, personality, mission, or the products they sell?

Follow this Quick Guide to begin shaping and sharing your real estate brand effectively:

#1 WHO-WHAT-WHY: Define Your Niche

Before crafting your personal brand, get clarity on who you help, what you do for them, and why it matters. Define your niche audience and their pain points. By developing better self-understanding first, you can create an authentic personal brand and positioning that truly resonates with your ideal clients.

Start by articulating your values, the solutions you provide, and the message you want to communicate to your audience. This will help guide your branding efforts and ensure that you stay true to yourself. Take notes and learn from other leaders in your niche. Look for ways to set your brand apart. Are you serving a specific neighborhood, or a niche target audience like first-time, or luxury home home-buyers?

Work on crafting an up-to-date Bio that you can use on your website and other platforms. Articulate your motivations and why you're passionate about this work. Know thyself, and expressing your purpose will come naturally.

#2 Create Your Website

Your website is the foundation of your personal brand. In today's digital age, people need to be able to find and connect with you online. Depending on your goals, you can start with a simple landing page that showcases all your social links, a Bio or About section, a section explaining what you do, and a contact or subscribe form that lets interested clients reach you. This could be achieved with a simple multimedia link-in-bio page builder such as hoo.be or Beacons.ai.

If you are ready to invest in a full website, you can also hire a designer or agency, and showcase your expertise, listings, or real estate services with a professional site that can instantly elevate your brand and reputation. Work with a local photographer to create an updated headshot, or even some lifestyle shots of you doing business, to better help you communicate your brand on your website.

PRO TIP*

With Beacons.ai's free drag-and-drop style page builder, you can easily create a custom LinkIn Bio-style webpage showcasing your branding, bio and social links, your property listings, or embedded YouTube videos all in one place. You can sell digital downloads of your courses, ebooks and generate leads, and send newsletters to your email subscribers straight from your Beacons.ai app. Pro plans are available for teams and to access enhanced features.

#3 Grow On Social Media

Studies show that 44% of real estate buyers & investors use social platforms in their search. An active social presence builds trust and credibility and helps your ideal client find you. Social media is the #1 way to get in front of your audience. But it's about quality over quantity. Posting on every platform won't necessarily succeed. You need the right strategy for platforms where your audience is active.

You may choose to start with two or three platforms to focus on first and leverage your content on other platforms later. If you're comfortable on camera, you may focus your social media strategy on YouTube, TikTok, or IG Reels where you can leverage videos (most popular & best converting) to share your insights. If you prefer to stay off-camera, you can focus on growing your brand via LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Facebook Groups, or Instagram, and real-time audio-based social networking platforms such as Clubhouse, and X Spaces.

To learn more, visit Real Estate Social Media Strategy: The Quick-Start Guide for Agents

#4 Design Visual Assets

Convey your brand visually with graphics that showcase your unique style. If you're not ready to invest in professional design services, you can create your business card, great-looking flyers, open house invites, and social media graphics with tools such as Adobe Express or Canva.

PRO TIP*

Our vote goes to Canva: their design template library in the real estate space is unmatched, and even with their free plan you can create stunning pro-quality visuals. With Canva's drag and drop platform, you can easily design anything like your business card, or your promotional materials and print it directly from your dashboard. Design your own logo, business cards, social posts, ads, presentations, emails, flyers, yard signs and more.

#5 Invest In Yourself & Showcase Your Expertise

Develop your skills and expertise. Invest in your personal development, continuously educate yourself, and grow in your field. Listen to podcasts and audiobooks, or read books that will keep you inspired and focused on your goals. This will help you stay current and relevant, and establish yourself as an expert in your field.

YouTube is a great way to learn from experts, and if it is part of your brand strategy, YouTube can also provide a passive income source through paid views for your content. You can create neighborhood guides, property walkthroughs, interviews, informational videos, webinars, or whatever fits your niche, and become the go-to expert that people will seek out. YouTube is one of the best ways to grow your personal brands, and you can leverage your video content on other platforms as well.

Content marketing such as blogging can position you as an authority in your field and also can bring significant organic (free) search traffic to your site, and boost your SEO. Blogging can also help you build your email list and grow your network via subscribes. Share market insights, local guides, home tips, (or whatever is your niche) through your unique perspective on your site, social media, and emails. Quality content builds authority and attracts your ideal clients.

#6 Optimize Your Copywriting

Engaging copy that sounds like you builds trust and credibility. If you like to write, blogging can be an excellent way to grow your brand and establish yourself as an expert in your field. You can blog on your own website, as well as on socially connected platforms such as Medium, LinkedIn, Quora, and our recent favorite, beehiive. Build a subscriber list and create a regular newsletter.

Depending on your needs, using AI writing assistants such as ChatGPT, Bard (Google), Perplexity, Epique, Jaspers or others, can help you create SEO-optimized research, drafts, and outlines for your content.

PRO TIP*

Perplexity.ai's free AI writing assistant can quickly generate researched, on-brand real estate content ideas from listing descriptions to blog posts, boosting your productivity in a big way. We like Perplexity because it provides its top references in the form of website links, so you can double-check your research.

#7 Be Authentic and Consistent

It's important to be authentic and consistent in your personal branding efforts. This means staying true to your values and message and presenting yourself in a consistent manner across all of your branding channels. Cultivate genuine connections with your network via in-person meetups or online webinars.

Branding helps real estate professionals and companies create a strong and consistent identity, build trust and credibility with customers, differentiate themselves from competitors, increase the perceived value of their products or services, and make marketing and advertising efforts more effective.

With free tools like Beacons, Canva and Perplexity, you can quickly grow a real estate personal brand that sets you apart. If you'd like to learn more in depth about these tools, check out our Personal Branding Quick Start Guide For Real Estate Professionals [with Free Tools].

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