If your small business in real estate has been underperforming lately, you might want to consider a rebrand. More than just a logo or a website design, a brand is your real estate company’s culture. It encompasses the values you hold dear and how you behave, both with your customers and within the company.
However, rebranding is no easy feat. Sometimes it takes a consultant for real estate companies help you find out how to rebrand a real estate small business. Bur before you go out looking for help from an external party, you can start the work yourself. Even if it’s hard, many small real estate companies have been able to rebrand successfully. Read on to learn how to do a rebrand along with small business rebranding tips.
How to rebrand a real estate small business
Unless you’re an expert at branding, it can be difficult to figure where to start with the rebrand. Don’t jump straight to your visual brand by changing your logo or the design of your website. The best way to start a rebrand is to review your current brand. If your current branding isn’t working, it’s imperative that you find out why.
Start with your customers and learn how they respond to your brand. You can use customer surveys or informal discussions to find out the following:
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- How customers think of your business
- How you compare to other competitors
- How customers feel about your business, whether they have emotional attachment to your brand, products, or services
Alongside talking to your customers, take the time to review your brand and business from the inside. Talk to your employees and see how they feel about your brand as well. Do they feel like the real estate brand you outwardly express truly resonates how the company conducts its business?
You should evaluate your existing brand by examining it again and see if it still true. Try asking these questions:
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- What is your USP? What makes your real estate business different?
- What values guide the company?
- How do you behave? (Both internally and externally)
- Are there other important real estate groups/sectors/industries where your reputation matters? What do they think?
Also check for warning signs that can reveal problems with your brand such as:
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- Declining customer loyalty or average spend
- Fewer new real estate customers
- Loss of market share
- Problems recruiting or retaining employees
All of these should provide you with the building blocks for how to rebrand your real estate small business. From there, you can focus on how to communicate your brand. These steps typically include establish key messages you want to broadcast, develop a tone of voice that reflects the brand, and updating your business image – with a consistent approach covering everything from your logo and design language to your physical office and employee dress code.
Small business rebranding tips
The rebranding process will look different for every company as it is dependent on the problems you may uncover in the first steps. Generally, however, you’ll want to avoid common pitfalls with these tips.
Don’t just rebrand your logo, website, and/or visual design
As mentioned earlier, your branding covers far more than just how your business looks. Updating your visual look might pique the interest of a few new customers, but it won’t be able to solve all your underlying problems. Change has to be comprehensive and sometimes your look might not have any issues.
Have a well-organized timeline
A rebrand will take time to complete and will impact your day-to-day operations. Having an organized timeline makes sure that everyone in your company is able to handle all the changes while still being able to complete everyday obligations. A proper and realistic timeline will also help ensure things go smoothly. Without proper planning, delays can happen, and costs can spiral out of control.
Have a brand book
As you conduct your rebrand, it’s important that the new branding is documented. You can compile all of these in a brand book or style guide so that anyone in the company can easily learn what the brand is and how to execute it.
Create the perfect brand with a marketing consultant for real estate companies
Sometimes creating the perfect brands means getting extra perspective from an external party and who’s better to provide this than an experienced marketing consultant for real estate companies like Shawn Tiberio.
Shawn has decades of experience consulting small businesses and helping build brands that achieve continued success. Learn from Shawn’s knowledge and insight and give him a call today!