Fuel Your Real Estate Business Growth with a Well-Planned Public Relations Strategy. Learn How!
“If I was down to the last dollar of my marketing budget, I’d definitely spend it on PR.”
– Bill Gates
A research piece indicates that businesses across the globe, especially multi-national organizations, invest $250,000 to $25 million each year on Public Relations (PR) campaigns.
When implemented right, a well-planned PR campaign can help brands establish their identity, raise awareness, build trust and confidence, drive sales, grow consumer interest, drive greater valuations, and generate investor interest.
While millions of large companies like Apple, Nike, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Tata pour in millions, if not billions, of dollars towards running result-oriented PR campaigns, it’s important to note that even the small businesses or brands can harness the power of public relations to build a strong industry presence and brand identity.
Despite having a brilliantly designed website, a top-notch content marketing strategy, and a growth-driven social media marketing or advertising team by your side, you may find yourself struggling with attracting your prospects towards your business and converting them.
And if you want to establish a strong online brand presence and break through the noise, you need to build a well-thought-out PR strategy for your business.
While it’s true for businesses across different industries, real estate professionals and brands should keep it at the top of their priority list.
This blog post explains the top benefits of developing and smartly executing a result-oriented PR strategy for your real estate business. On top of this, we’ll also look at the steps you should follow to bless yourself with one such strategy.
Let’s dive in.
5 Benefits of Well-Established PR Strategy
for Your Real Estate Business
Following are the five reasons why real estate professionals should develop an awareness-driven PR Strategy for your real estate brand today:
- Develop Brand Identity
- Develop a Credible Relationship with Your Prospects or Clients
- Drive Greater Valuations
- Develop Relationships with Sources Having Large Followings
- Skyrocket Your Online Presence
Let’s go through each of these benefits one by one.
Develop Brand Identity
Reports indicate that 92% of people around the world trust earned media (when someone talks about you) over paid advertisements.
Today, real estate buyers and sellers hop onto the world wide web and carry out their own research prior to reaching out to a real estate professional.
According to the CEO of Media Minefield, Kristi Piehl, “People want to work with a real estate professional or brand that’s not only personable but also holds the much-needed expertise and knowledge to get the job done. And from a PR perspective, that’s where earned media works its magic.”
So, the first step is to build strong brand identity by planning and executing a well-planned PR campaign for your real estate brand.
This way, you’ll be able to build a reputation that’ll earn you interviews as well as publicity.
Through these interviews, you can showcase to your potential clients who you are and what makes you stand out from your competitors.
Also, you can highlight your knowledge as well as local real estate market expertise, allowing you to position yourself as an industry expert, which will contribute towards building a strong brand identity.
Develop a Credible Relationship with Your Prospects or Clients
One of the major benefits of running PR campaigns is its ability to help you build a credible relationship with your prospects as well as clients.
A well-thought-out PR strategy will allow you to interact with your target audience directly right from the start.
This will help you not only increase your real estate brand awareness but also grow consumer interest.
A strong PR strategy plus a serious focus on delivering top-notch service and experience will help you build a loyal client base. This set of people will give you honest feedback, allowing you to pinpoint the changes you need to make to deliver a great customer experience.
Drive Greater Valuations
If you are looking to scale your real estate business and are approaching a few potential investors, you need to do it right.
Up until now, if you have been struggling with attracting potential investors, maybe it’s because you didn’t focus on public relations.
Not having a PR strategy may lead to a bad impression.
Remember – investors will always invest their money in brands that are credible and seem promising. On top of this, they’ll always put brands with a positive image above the rest.
And you can build a strong positive brand image by running PR campaigns, helping you earn positive press mentions as well as exposure.
PR campaigns allow you to demonstrate a strong track record, popular service placement, as well as industry and consumer interest, helping you create a strong impression in front of your potential investors, which will ultimately lead to greater valuations.
Develop Relationships with Sources Having Large Followings
PR is all about relationship building, and when you do it right, you will be building long-lasting relationships with sources having large followings, as you will be reaching out to them for regularly publishing as well as promoting your real estate brand.
You’ll be reaching out to editors, writers, publicists, reports, and various other media professionals, helping you build strong relationships.
While they’d love nothing more than sharing your story with their audience, you’ll have to offer something valuable in return – something that makes them actually want to get your story out there.
So, what exactly are these publications or agencies looking for the most?
Maybe money?
While money is an obvious benefit, what publications and agencies are looking for the most is name recognition, which helps them generate traffic and, in turn, more advertising revenue.
So, the more are the followers and fans you have, the higher will be the chances of publications, radio stations, agencies, podcasts sharing your story as well as with their audience on their channels.
Skyrocket Your Online Presence
In today’s digital era, building a strong online presence is crucial. Brands invest a lot of money to appear at the top of the search engine rankings, attract more and more prospects, and build a highly converting sales funnel.
But, none of these strategies will work as outstanding as a PR campaign can.
Running result-oriented PR campaigns will help you get your story out there and position yourself as a real estate industry expert – someone who is reliable and knows how to get things done.
This will help you build a strong brand image, which will allow you to scale your business and raise awareness in a much more efficient manner.
Soon, you will see people recognizing you as well as your brand name. And if you execute it brilliantly, maybe it’ll become a hot topic of discussion among people within and outside your industry.
Imagine walking down the lane and witnessing people from far-off pointing their fingers towards you and saying:
“Wait! That’s the guy from the newspaper, isn’t he?”
Some people may know you from an event you sponsored, whereas others may have read about your brand in the newspaper. A successful PR campaign will build a strong foundation for your marketing campaigns.
Trust me, the benefits of running a PR campaign are endless.
And if we had tried to fit all of them in here, you would have ended up reading this blog post for hours.
Now, let’s learn how to build a PR strategy for your real estate brand.
7 Steps You Should Follow to Build a
Growth-Driven PR Strategy for Your Real Estate Brand
You are seven simple steps away from planning a strong PR campaign:
- Review Your Past Year’s PR Activity, If Any
- Create PR Goals
- Identify the Public in “Public Relations”
- Conduct Competitors’ Analysis
- Identify Key Messages
- Choose PR Tools & Plan Tactics
- Implement & Measure Results
Review Your Past Year’s PR Activity, If Any
While this blog post has been written for real estate brands with no PR strategy in place, if you did run PR campaigns the past year or like ever, firstly, we need to review it.
However, if you didn’t ever run a PR campaign, you may skip to Step II.
So, here is the list of questions you should ask yourself:
- Where do you currently stand?
- Did any of those past campaigns get you any media attention?
- Was it negative or positive coverage?
- Which publications published your article? What’s the name(s) of the journalist(s) or blogger(s) that published favorable articles about your real estate business?
- How influential is the blogger(s) or journalist(s)?
- Let’s say your company name is “Dan & Realtors.” When you look up for it on Google or other search engines, what are the results?
Once you review your past year’s strategy, you’ll be able to learn how well you are doing when compared with your competitors.
Also, it’ll give you a clear picture of the areas you’re lacking and how you can capitalize on those.
Create PR Goals
Irrespective of whether you did run PR campaigns in the past or not, you should start building your next growth-driven PR campaigns by setting your PR goals.
Think about the changes you’d like to make or the heights you’d like to reach in the next 12 months.
Note down the writers and publications that you can reach out to, the type of content that has helped your competitors build a strong company presence, and the kinds of story pitches that go well with the audience.
Carry out thorough market research. From there, you can proceed towards setting your PR goals for the next year.
To level up your PR campaigns, consider setting SMART goals.
The SMART in SMART goals stands for:
- Smart
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-Bound.
While setting your SMART goals, it’s important to make sure that they tie naturally into your real estate brand’s overall goals.
Identify the Public in “Public Relations”
In today’s digital world, identifying and reaching out to the right set of audience can not only save your top dollars but can also help you achieve your goals efficiently.
One of the biggest mistakes real estate brands make is not identifying their target audience.
The end result – they end up reaching out to the wrong audience or almost everyone out there, which is just a waste of their top marketing or advertising dollars.
Hence, to smartly execute your PR campaigns, you need to identify the “Public” in public relations.
This can mean real estate buyers, sellers, investors, stakeholders, or other potential clients.
Either your target audience can be individuals or large groups of people, or even businesses, depending on your real estate business model.
So, it’s crucial to know who your target audience is.
Ask yourself:
- Who are most likely to purchase my services?
- Who can have a gigantic-sized impact on my business?
- Which channels do they hang out the most on? Maybe it’s television or social media?
- What would make them purchase my real estate services or schedule an appointment with me straight away?
Put together single or multiple audience personas, which will help you picture the location, priorities, demographics as well as your target audience’s behaviors.
Conduct Competitors’ Analysis
Prior to running PR campaigns, note down the kinds of messages as well as content pieces your competitors use the most.
Prepare a list of the strategies that worked for them and the ones they didn’t.
Look for any media coverage related to the subject and dive deep into your competitors’ social media channels.
This will help you understand what your target audience is responding to.
Also, count in various external factors that could affect your business.
This will help you prepare a proactive strategy, allowing you to avoid and prepare yourself for any potential threats.
Identify Key Messages
Well-crafted and positive key messages are critical to a PR strategy’s success. So, the next step is to identify the key messages that you’d like to express via your PR campaigns.
Ask yourself:
- What’s my company’s mission or vision?
- What makes me stand out?
- How do I want my audience to see my business?
- What’s my elevator pitch?
- What’s the kind of impression I’d like to create when my prospects come across my real estate brand’s name for the very first time?
- Why should my audience care about my services?
These questions will help you develop engaging and compelling key messages for your real estate brand.
Choose PR Tools & Plan Tactics
Whether you are new to public relations or have run PR campaigns in the past, you can level up your campaigns with these PR tools:
- Source Bottle
- Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
- Muck Rack
- A News Tip
Also, you can plan the tactics to build an outstanding PR campaign for your real estate brand.
Start connecting with bloggers and publications around the world. Build top-notch content pieces that will help you create a great impression on your prospects and attract more potential clients.
Reach out to influencers in the real estate niche. If possible, feel free to reach out to the ones who are a part of your local real estate market. Connect with publications or bloggers on social media platforms.
Hire a blog writer or copywriter who can help you develop a strong content piece that also complies with the third-party publication’s standard and tone.
Upon building a strong PR strategy and executing it the smart way, you will see a rise in your website traffic and the number of people interacting with your business.
However, parallelly, it’s important to run result-driven marketing campaigns, helping you convert your traffic into paying clients.
Implement & Measure Results
The final step is to implement your PR strategy and track the metrics that’ll help you understand how well your campaigns are actually performing.
Track engagement as well as website traffic, social media reach. Also, document media coverage. Keep track of everything and compile all of it into a report.
At the end of every month, go through the report and understand what’s working for you and what’s not. Based on that, you can optimize your PR campaigns even further.
Conclusion
“Publicity is critical. A good PR story is infinite times more effective than a front-page ad.”
– Richard Branson
Not having a PR strategy in place may be the only reason why your marketing campaigns aren’t fruitful.
When incorporated with your marketing plan, a PR strategy can help you position yourself as an expert in your industry and create a positive brand image.
So, what are you waiting for?
Build your Real Estate PR Strategy today.
DESA NINJA Real Estate PR Services
Do these strategies from above sound time-consuming and you rather focus on your Real Estate business? No worries, we got you there. We can develop a PR strategy and execute it for you.
