Personal Branding: Maintain Your Visibility-Part 2
The 3 Keys to Parlay Your Reputation into Celebrity Status
If you are interested in achieving market leadership in your local marketplace think of yourself more like a celebrity and think of your luxury real estate marketing business more like a media. It may seem like a big stretch, but those who make this shift in thinking will be the big winners for years to come.
Create a plan to parlay your reputation and personal brand into celebrity status. Here are the three keys to the plan:
- Develop a celebrity/media mindset
- Build your audience, consistently
- Gain and maintain visibility
Your Mindset: You need to think of your business not only as luxury real estate marketing practice, but also as a media with your brand as the star. This is not about pretentiousness; it is about becoming a savvy marketing expert. How can you expect to win trophy listings if you cannot demonstrate to the sellers, through your personal marketing, that you are the superior choice over your competition?
Instead of being what we call a “transaction engineer”, you must become a marketing company who also processes transactions professionally. This is the metamorphosis that most agents are unwilling to do, which is why it represents such an outstanding opportunity for you, if you do it right. High net worth clients expect you to have integrity, local market knowledge and excellent negotiating skills, just like your closest competitors. But, how will you stand out from the pack? How will you gain top of mind/celebrity status? Those are the questions!
Your Audience: The best way we have found to quickly increase your sphere of influence and leverage your personal brand is through a buzz-worthy blog. Blogging is a vehicle for self-publishing. As your own media, you do not need to answer to an editor. It puts you in control and enables you to capitalize on the primary promise of social media: rapidly amassing a sizable audience of raving fans.
Your Visibility: Managing your reputation, maintaining your star power, and staying visible in your marketplace are essentials. When you achieve high visibility you put yourself in position to parlay your celebrity status into additional revenue streams.
In Part 3 of this series, Maintain Your Visibility, we will showcase a professional who has achieved celebrity status and has extended his personal brand to build to become an international conglomerate. Hint: Food for Thought!
WATCH VIDEOS
"Buzz-Worthy" Luxury Website Design
Personal Branding Case Studies and Company Branding Case Studies
Comments (2)
Paul, This is one of best questions posed. We thank you for the willingness to ask it, and our opportunity to answer it The ideal circumstance is to attract an abundance of ideal clients. This entails sharply defining who your ideal clients are and knowing who you are, and facilitating the match-up of the two.signals. Those who are not on your wave length will not gravitate to you or present a problem because your signal is so pure, clear and precise. If you send out mixed signals you will get mixed results. That is why branding is so important because at any given moment you know if you are on signal or off signal. The business benefit is that you work with people you like who like you and satisfaction becomes a wonderful by product. Wishing you continued success.
Ron Seigel, over 15 years ago
I have a serious question for you- I am NOT trying to attack you- but rather I would like to provide you with a contrarian viewpoint and then ask you a serious, specific question. Here's my experience and my resulting viewpoint. I am NOT "arguing against" anything you have to say, but I would like to CHALLENGE you to be more specific about the actual real-world benefits of becoming a 'celebrity' in your market... Once upon a time I was a semi-celebrity in my local market. I actually ran the largest business networking group in Chicago (and the most publicly well-known in the area). As often happens in the case of a successful venture, I split with my former business partner. After six months of mostly unnecessary legal wrangling I sold my interest in the company to my partner and walked away. Since then, I could not be happier. At the height of my "fame" I found myself surrounded by tire kickers and star gazers. It was MORE difficult to get deals done because serious investors had to wade through the morass to reach me, and many simply looked at me as fool- because in reality, I was. I have discovered that networking and forming associations is the result of careful, and methodical SELECTION of the right people, and the more non-serious people you tend to attract, the more difficult the process of finding the right people becomes. It's setting yourself up for the needle-in-the-haystack approach. I have decided that for me, the key is not to be widely known, but well known in the right circles. I actually recently took my LinkedIn page NON-PUBLIC, and will likely do the same soon with my Facebook page. The key is not to be widely known, and an "open networker" but to CONTROL access. Let's face it: Do you want to deal with the throngs of people who'll listen to any old fool at the bottom of the mountain? Or, do you want to meet with the few the will make the climb to find the wise man at the TOP of the mountain? It's a matter of positioning. You're not unique or different if you're easy to find on Facebook, or you Twitter every time you take a dump, or you answer your phone just because it's ringing. (Actually, I chose not to work with a "major nationally known guru" when I Googled his office, was able to get his [i]cell phone number[/i] and he personally answered it when I called) I view social networking as "Marketing from the parking lot of the country club". You're one in a big crowd of largely ego-centric, attention-seeking, insecure little people who frankly have nothing better to do. I've since joined several "real" clubs and I'm practically "invisible" now in the wider "real estate networking" groups. Nothing could have been better for my career. The last three years have the most productive years I've had since 1999. Now, given my viewpoint: can you convince me that it's REALLY a good idea to be a celebrity? Did I miss something important that you can expound upon and perhaps change my mind? I'm still tempted from time to time to return to the old methods of being well-known, etc. But I want it to be for the right reasons. Can you give me a business benefit that outweighs the hassles and nonsense of being a "celebrity"?
Paul Strauss, over 15 years ago