7 Ways Brand Awareness Can Help You Do More Business Within Commercial Real Estate

In the first section of our guide, we explain how branding is used throughout an organization, from the way your staff answers the phone to your print collateral, vehicle signage and your website and social media channels. All of these factors relate to the importance of brand recognition and establishing a real estate brand identity. These can be thought of as the personality and messaging of your brand. As with all marketing, this should relate directly to your audience and the customers that you're trying to attract. 

• Define your brand’s tone, personality and voice: What is your brand’s personality or voice? Is it informative, serious, and traditional? Or is it more playful, and smart but cheeky? Share that information company-wide, even if you’re a small business with only a handful of employees. 

• Images and graphic design: Many web-based tools make it easy to design your own print collateral, infographics, images and logos. Take care in who handles your design, and ensure the colors, images and graphics line up with your brand. 

• Logo: This is the first thing many customers will see when you meet, so make it relatable to what you do and easy to reproduce. 

• Taglines and slogans: In the guide, we’ll show you how we used AI to generate ideas for taglines for a fictitious commercial painting and pressure-washing company. If you use AI for content, use it wisely; adapt the AI-written taglines so they make sense for you and are original to your brand and what you do.

In the second section of the guide, we explain 4 tips for promoting your brand through email marketing:

• Make sure messages are mobile-friendly.

• Use compelling subject lines (again, this is where AI-written content might be helpful).

• Always include multiple calls to action (CTA) that meet readers where they are in their journey (read more, see how it works, schedule a demo).

• Personalize your messages. While email workflows can be easily automated, when you have hot prospects, show them that you know them by incorporating personal messages.

Newsletter ads are part of email marketing and essential in real estate branding strategy. A monthly, or weekly, newsletter is a common method to keep your customers engaged in your brand. A brand will often include a benefit for signing up for a newsletter. Once established, you can use your newsletter to boost the efforts you put into your other marketing. Newsletters are low-cost to set up and have excellent long-term benefits. 

As a sister company to Bisnow, we have seen the benefits of CRE business partners that leverage Bisnow’s newsletter distribution lists by including advertorials and advertisements to the Bisnow readership. 

Speaking of paid promotions, in addition to Bisnow’s newsletter ads, your branding can be used for social media posts, LinkedIn articles, and more. Although these channels have a higher upfront cost and should be carefully planned, they can significantly be targeted at segments of your audience that are likely to convert. Your brand awareness ads can be located in channels for sponsored content.

Social media has an organic component as well, which helps firms build relationships, share helpful content, and generate leads that can be nurtured through your own website and email marketing workflows. Unlike sponsored content or paid advertising, social media has a “viral” quality that can spread through careful research, planning, and marketing. Although you shouldn't entirely rely on social media advertising, it's an excellent tool to have in your marketing tool belt.

Smart marketers use paid digital marketing efforts, including advertising retargeting, to engage the customers interested in your brand who haven't quite converted yet. We touch on how LinkedIn is used for creating predictive audiences, so you can target the right audience with the right messages.

Here, we start to explore why brand recognition is important. All of your advertising, messaging, and other marketing material contribute to an instantly recognizable brand that an audience in your industry will associate with a product or service. Beyond spreading the word about your brand and boosting its awareness, customers will be more likely to trust and be loyal to a well-established brand. 

We also highlight customer service and customer relationship management as two components of building value beyond your brand. In other words, once you close the deal, how can you build a longer-term relationship? We present three real estate branding examples— Uber, Slack and Zillow — all of whom have built value beyond their brand. We also answer the question: “Why is brand awareness important in consumer decision-making?”