How do you measure brand awareness for real estate?

Brands are a big deal here at Adwerx. It’s a hot topic around the water cooler, the coffee maker and the ping pong table. Brands, brands, brands… we believe your brand is one of your most important marketing assets. Just having a brand is a great thing. But creating brand awareness is another.

(For more on building your brand, join us for the Inman webinar tomorrow, “Basics of Building Your Brand”)

Brand awareness is a marketing tactic, but it’s a bit of a different animal from other tactics you might employ. But first, let’s define this idea of a brand.  A “brand name” refers to the name signifying the source of a product or service. This is often trademarked. But your “brand” refers to the perception customers have about that product, service or in this case, real estate agent. As an agent, you don’t really need the former. But you do need the latter.

Since 92% of home buyers start their quest online, and 70% of them hire the very first real estate agent they call, it’s absolutely critical you build your brand online. Big brands like Coca-Cola and Ford have multi-million dollar budgets for digital advertising to drive awareness and affinity. But most of us aren’t in their tax bracket.

So how do you solve a problem like measuring brand awareness?

Orkin took a unique approach by creating a series of YouTube videos. None of the videos pushed the Orkin product line. The story is profiled by Google on their blog.

This new content strategy was aimed at driving brand awareness by generating deeper engagement through a series of educational and funny YouTube videos that put a lighter spin on the “ew”-inducing business of ridding homes of pest intruders….

To measure success, we looked at multiple metrics: views and earned views, view rate, shares, clicks, brand study results, and media impressions…Our primary goal was brand awareness for the TrueView campaign; with our content, we were able to receive not only the TrueView exposure but also added value through unpaid engagements such as earned views.”

Putting your face on a shopping cart is one kind of brand awareness tactic. And it’s somewhat targeted in that the store in which those carts are used is within your area of service. But it’s impossible to differentiate the active house hunter or seller from someone who isn’t thinking about real estate at all but is just shopping for milk.

In a digital environment, targeting can go one step further to identify people in a specific area that are thinking about buying or selling a home. If they are aware of your brand as a real estate agent in their area, odds are even higher for you to be top of mind for the moment they decide to contact an agent.

Which brings us back to our original question: how do you measure brand awareness in real estate? Well, you’ll need to look at several factors:

Did you see a lift in Facebook likes and interactions?

Did your landing page see traffic?

Did people mention seeing your ad?

All these indicators combined will give you a better understanding of your brand equity and the overall benefit to brand awareness in real estate marketing.