5 Ways to Make Your Brand More Human

Brian Sooy and Jake Zufelt share insights on making your brand trustworthy, credible, and authentic.

According to Seth Godin, “Everybody is a marketer.”

Your business and Realtors share a lot in common.  Our businesses are relational, our brands are personal, the currency in which we trade is trust. You’re all marketers.

2. Be trustworthy before people want to refer you

You can't say your brand is trusted or ask people to trust you.  Your brand has to be trustworthy. If you know how to build trust with business clients and consumers, you know have to put in the work to nurture —and win— trust in and for your business.

From an outside perspective, it looks like all marketers do the same thing. The same can be said of realtors. People look for someone they know, can trust, or are familiar — when everybody does the same thing in the consumer’s mind — what’s the difference?

Every potential customer or client brings their previous agency (or realtor) experience into new relationships. A person’s expectations and bias was formed by the previous marketer with which they worked. 

3. Be an advisor, not a salesperson

Honesty, transparency, authenticity; all those things are really valuable. Marketing is much like fishing.  You go out to a specific location, you have to use the right bait, the right length of pole, and go at the right time of day. You have to know what a fish you're fishing for, you then have to make sure you’re in the right location, right. Your customers rely on you as a guide, but there’s guarantees with marketing.

4. Remember, you’re a guide. Help your customer win the day

One of the biggest mistakes realtors and agencies make is that they advertise themselves constantly. They post their numbers and they post their successes instrad of focusing on their client’s success. Here’s some advice for realtors and agency owners: “You are a very, very important person in someone's life for a very short time.”

However, at the end of the day, when people are talking to their grandkids, they talk about the house that they used to own on First Street. They don't talk about the realtor that helped them buy it.

People are looking for a guide to help them navigate a process, overcome a challenge, solve a problem, or achieve a goal. They’re not looking for someone that has all the answers.

5. Help people make meaningful connections

As a marketer, you can't guarantee success, because there may be unforeseen circumstances in the market that you can’t account for. You can’t guarantee success, but you can make the experience worth remembering.

Brand builders and marketers help people make a connection with something that's really meaningful to them. Be an advocate to make sure that the transaction or process goes smoothly.  Today is your best (and perhaps last) opportunity to make it easy for people to do business with you.