Creating Your Brand - Steps to Sell Yourself

Jul 10
06:57

2011

Dana Lange

Dana Lange

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In our information ready world you are either creating your brand or one is being created for you. If you are proactive and savvy, you can have access to great tools to help you define and promote an image of yourself or business that you create and control.

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I am no marketing expert,Creating Your Brand - Steps to Sell Yourself Articles but I do know that people will form opinions of you. Those opinions may be from a brief encounter, something you said on a social network or something you did. The more we begin to think of ourselves as a brand, the more we can shape what others think of us. Additionally, with the growth of the internet we can provide additional resources to help others form a better opinion of us. 
Before we talk about creating your brand, let’s discuss branding in general. Marketing 101 dictates that a product has four branding attributes: 
  1. Product – YOU
  2. Price – will you be a low cost provider ( Walmart) or a high cost provider (BMW)? 
  3. Place (distribution) – how will people access your services?
  4. Promotion – how will you promote yourself? 
These all work towards creating your brand. Spend some time thinking and writing how you want others to think of you? What attributes do you want them to hold in their minds when they think of you? How will people connect with you? How will you promote yourself? 
These important questions lead to how you will brand YOU. For example, if you want to be known as an internet savvy real estate investor, then you better have a website and a significant presence on the internet. If you want to be known as the commercial real estate go to person, then you had better have a presence in that world. 
The promotional piece of the puzzle is often the first focus for real estate investors. I urge you to determine who you want to be prior to promoting. The following are a few questions to get you started: 
  1. What types of real estate do I want to be known for? What is my niche?
  2. What do I have or provide that makes me better than my competition?
  3. I want people to say [fill in the blank] when they mention my name.
  4. What does my target audience or ideal customer look like? What are their needs and wants? How do they receive information? 
This list is not meant to be exhaustive; however it is a great starting place. 
As an example: 
  1. Commercial real estate investor that specializes in apartment buildings 150 units or larger. 
  2. Purchases in emerging markets (where growth is expected) in C to B+ neighborhoods that are on the rise.
  3. Buildings of C to B+ quality are considered.
  4. Primarily looking for buildings that will increase in value with stronger management and other value propositions.
  5. Investor provides value to sellers through dealing with the highest integrity and value to investor-buyers by providing strong investment opportunities. 
This is just an example to give an understanding of the basics. This same process should be done for every aspect of your business – private investors, sellers, buyers, etc. Then you want to boil all these aspects down to a tag line. One word is great, but no more than a sentence. An example of a tagline is BMW’s, “the ultimate driving machine.” Another example is "millionaire in training." A tagline brings all the different marketing aspects together. 
So what is the take away for creating your brand? Be clear about who you are. Be clear about the ideal audience. Help your audience relate to you by being consistent in the marketing of YOU.

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