Your Estate Agency Brand Positioning Strategy for 2023

Brand Positioning is the process of positioning your brand in the mind of your customers. It occurs when you want to establish yourself in your market or revise your market positioning around changing consumer desires, market conditions, competition and technology. Nonetheless, both scenarios aim to set you apart from the competition and with declining market conditions, the number of Estate Agents in the UK multiplying, and average fees decreasing yearly, now is an excellent time to look into your brand positioning strategy.

The most common approaches are as follows:

• Become an innovator.
• Choose a winning pricing strategy.
• Solve clients' unique problems.
• Appeal to emotions.
• Deliver exceptional customer support.

So, where do you begin?

Typically the process starts with understanding who your audience is. However, we are sure that most of you know who your audience is, particularly those who attended our How To Find Your Perfect Customers Workshop in 2018 and 2022. There is also no doubt that you know who your competitors are; therefore, we are confident you have a clear map of your market landscape.

So today, with the new year well underway and the weight of it all hanging over us like a heavy cloud, we wanted to bring this to your attention. And secondly, provide you with the tools you need to identify the gaps and opportunities to take advantage of this year.

Before we begin, If you have yet to attend one of our workshops, it is the ideal time to subscribe to our mailing list to be notified of all our events and workshops this year. Now, I'm not saying it's carved in stone. Still, we have been toggling with the idea of building a workshop around a Strategy for leaving Rightmove, which I'm sure many of you will find beneficial.

Building Your Brand Positioning or Repositioning Strategy

Rummaging through the minds of the Iceberg Digital team often leads to another Age of Enlightenment, where we find ourselves distracted by the many innovations, and Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") in our continuous pursuit to 'Modernise the Property Industry', but luckily for you, today, we were able to push it all aside, and compile 8 simple and carefully curated questions to help you build a winning strategy to identify the possibilities to position your brand as an alternative or the better version of the competition - giving your market a justifiable reason to pick you over the competition.

The 8 questions to ask yourself.

1. What does your market want that they're not getting from your competitors?
2. What do they want more of?
3. What do they want less of?
4. Where do they want an alternative or a better way of doing things?
5. How can you do things better?
6. Can you save them time?
7. Can you save them stress?
8. Can you be more accessible/available?

An easy way to start is to summarise each in three words. For example, "transparency, availability and stress-free". But remember not to choose generic words or phrases such as "marketing, unique, successful" because this is the aim of every estate agent.

For Lifesycle users, the most innovative and accessible agents on the block :), think about the many unique *features within Lifesycle like, Heads up Property Alerts™, Automatic Qualification, Instant or Social Distancing Valuation, Automatic Viewing Feedback and Digital 20/20.

For non-Lifesycle users or those who find innovation more challenging, focus on customer support and accessibility, solving unique problems and appealing to their emotional side over pricing strategy. Here are some excellent articles on Digital Conversations and Customer Experience to help with support and accessibility. If you are considering pricing strategies, read this: Never have to drop your fees again.

As a final thought

Take your time, evaluate all opportunities, and include team members or other directors when you answer them. Multi-branch agencies or even siloed departments should look at this individually to address their bespoke needs. It's okay if some of the solutions are the same; what's important is that you don't look at this as a blanket solution for your entire market.

As defined by Kotler, Brand positioning is "the act of designing the company's offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market". Therefore you must make sure it resonates with your market, you can deliver on it (capabilities), and it is different from your competitors.

Lastly, regularly revisit your brand positioning strategy to keep your audiences attention and remain competitive.

If you are not a Lifesycle user, and the *features above sound advantageous, our team are always available to take you through them. Follow this link to book a demo.