Welcome to the third of ten, step-by-step guides on building your estate agency or lettings agency brand – although this applies equally to many other businesses as well.
Last week was about building solid rational reasons for people to choose you, and the previous week was about developing an offering that significantly differentiates you from your competitors.
The next step is to build ‘emotional’ reasons why people should choose you over other agents. This might sound like woolly marketing guff, but it’s a really important step in building a brand: as much as people might like to think they’re buying for ‘good’ rational reasons, decisions are also largely based on how something makes them feel, even if it’s not immediately apparent to them. Obviously the ratio of rational: emotional will vary from product to product, but emotion plays a part in many, many purchasing decisions.
The key thing here is that it’s about solving people’s pains, irritations and problems (let’s call them ‘PIPs’) in a way that nobody else does.
So here’s what I recommend. As a team (and possibly led by an external marketing expert!) take each of the segments you’ve identified in step 1 and write down what PIPs are felt by each one.
Take the young family, for example. Yes, important to them is maximising the value on their property in the shortest time, and every agent will promise to solve that pain. What might swing the instruction your way is showing you understand the irritation of having the baby’s sleep or feeding routine interrupted by viewings – and that you uniquely take note of these times and work viewings around them. This could even be packaged as ‘young families’ service.
On the other hand, buyers who are singles or pre-family couples might appreciate your in-depth knowledge of the bars and restaurants in the area, and being able to demonstrate this on your website will show sellers of such homes the efforts you are making to appeal to likely buyers.
Again, do this for each of your segments and creatively storm with your team how you can do things that will make people think ‘aw, they’re a nice agency!’ and so putting clear blue water between you and your customers.
So that’s the third step: generating emotional appeal by tailoring your offering to each segment. A lot more value can be generated by making sure your communications have an element of emotional appeal about them – and we’ll look at this in stage 10 of this process. Don’t miss it!
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