How Branding & Marketing Works Together

Announcer: Welcome back to the flipnerd.com, REI Classroom, where experts from across the real estate investing industry teach you quick lessons to take your business to the next level. And now, let’s meet today’s expert host.

Sharon: . . . with the Louisville Gals Real Estate Blog and I’m your host of today’s REI Classroom. Today, I’m going to talk about branding and marketing, and how they work together and the important part that your website plays in all of this.

Announcer: This REI Classroom real estate lesson is sponsored by theinvestormachine.com, FlipNerd’s private investor coaching program and your blueprint to investing success.

Sharon: Hi, this is Sharon Vornholt with the Louisville Gals Real Estate Blog and today I’m going to talk about how branding and marketing work together and the part that your website plays in all of this. Now, when we talk about branding, I’m sure you all know it’s important. Branding plays a big part when it comes to lead generation and marketing. These two things are really intricately tied together.
Now, your brand helps make you memorable. It creates trust more quickly, and it establishes your credibility and your professionalism. Your brand also gives you authority in your local and national marketplace.
So what exactly is your brand? Well, your brand should help people think about you. Your brand isn’t just about colors, and fonts, and logos, and tag lines and things like that, although those are the physical components of your brand. But the thing you really want to focus on is how people feel about you, so that they’ll want to do business with you.
Now, as a real estate investor, you might say, “What’s the bigger reason I need to be worried about branding right now?” But the reason is because most of your competition isn’t worried about it at all. Just by doing some basic things, you can be a standout in your marketplace. It doesn’t really have to be a big deal, a big job, but you do have to work on consciously creating your brand.
So let’s talk about your website for a minute. What does the look of your website have to do with lead generation? Well, a lot more than what you might think. Your lead generation website will become, over time, one of the biggest most important pieces of the whole marketing puzzle if it isn’t already. This is where the majority of the people will come first and that’s where they’ll vet you, where they will see if they want to do business with you.
Now, let’s talk about what has changed. It used to be that people would call you from your direct mail piece, maybe you give them a business card, you left a door hanger or whatever physical marketing piece that you had. They would take that marketing piece and they would take action from that marketing piece.
Well, now there’s another step in the middle of that. What they’re going to do is get your direct mail piece, look at it, look for your website address, then they’re going to go and call you, or they’re going to go and check you out online before they call you. So there’s that extra step in there. So your website becomes really an important piece of the puzzle. So that’s one way that they date you, one way that they decide if they’re ever going to call you from your direct mail piece.
Now, another way is people search online now. A large percentage of people that want to sell their house, especially younger people that are maybe a little bit more internet savvy, they start their search online. And when you have a motivated seller that’s up late at night, they’re worried about something, they’re going to lose their house or they’re getting transferred, they have a house they need to get rid of. They’re going to start that search online.
So, when they land on your website, that first impression, you only get one chance to make a first impression. That first impression that they get from your website is likely going to determine if they do business with you. Whether they go back to your mail piece and call you, whether they get your phone number off the website or whether they even fill out an online form. So you need to be really concerned about that because of the way all of that happens.
And over time you need to make a point to try to get your website ranked. Your ideal goals should be to get it on the first page of Google, which by the way isn’t as hard as you might think if you’ve got the right type of website. You need to be found easily so that if they’re looking for you, let’s say they’re searching for sell my house in their city at night, and they somehow click off of the page they’ve found, they need to be able to find you again. It’s nice if you have a memorable URL, that really helps or a name that they can find out. But the point is that, if you cannot grab their attention, if you cannot connect with them while they’re on the website, connect with them immediately, chances are they’re just going to leave and go somewhere else.
Now, a couple more tips for you when it comes to your website. Be sure you have your picture on there. Have your name on there, be a real person on your website. I was on one the other day where there was a company name, there was no real contact information except for a phone number and nowhere in this website did it say call Sharon Vornholt, or call John Smith. So you need to make it personal, you need to make them feel like you’re a regular guy just like them and it needs to be easy to contact you and easy to take action. Fill out a nice “About Me” page, put your story up there, make them see that this thing is happening to them, but you’re just like them so they can talk to you about it.
So, if you have any questions, you can leave them here, you can leave them over on the blog. This is Sharon Vornholt and thanks again.

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