Position Yourself For Maximum Success In The World Of Real Estate With This Strategy

These days real estate business owners around the world have access to numerous marketing strategies to promote their companies. However, many of those strategies will yield little to no return on their investment.

What is even more important, very few marketing strategies can offer long-lasting benefits that can be successfully leveraged for years to come.

Unfortunately, many of the real estate entrepreneurs today opt for easier, faster, and less demanding ways to promote their businesses instead of concentrating their time, money, and efforts on long-term, highly effective strategies like Expert Positioning.

Well, there are a few factors that make expert positioning so powerful. Here are the two major factors:

Importance of Trust

As consumers, we want to do business with those we trust. We will never purchase from someone we don’t fully trust, especially when it comes to large purchases like home buying or selling. Like in dating, in any business transaction we first must establish trust with our prospect before proceeding to the next step.

Many business owners neglect this essential part. As a result, we often observe extremely intrusive, annoying, and sometimes even illegal marketing tactics such as cold calling, unsolicited mailing, door-knocking, and more.

Sometimes these techniques generate short-term results. But at what cost? All these tactics are quite expensive, time-consuming, and highly ineffective.

Importance of Authority

Power of authority is being successfully exercised every single day throughout the world. It can be effectively applied in various situations and under different scenarios.

We are wired to comply with requests that come from a person with a perceived high authority status. Think about law enforcement personnel, professors, teachers, doctors, and others.

These are the people that we are almost instantly willing to obey without questioning. We blindly trust their judgment due to their authoritative status.

According to the study, conducted by the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 92% of the participants obeyed the requests of a person dressed in a uniform while only 42% obeyed when the requester wore civilian clothes.

This alone clearly demonstrates the profound influence of perceived authority status on humans because they are simply willing to blindly obey the orders of a person dressed in a uniform. As illogical as it sounds, it works and works quite effectively everywhere on earth.

There are a myriad of ways you can position yourself as an authority figure. The more strategies you adopt, the faster you will be able to obtain expert status.

In this article, I’ll be discussing only three of the strategies. If you want to learn about other strategies as well, read my ultimate expert positioning guide in which I fully cover 12 the most impactful ways to position yourself as a go-to industry expert.

Writing and publishing a book relating to your field is a strategic move to position yourself as an expert in your industry. Creating your own book can enhance your visibility in your profession, prove your expertise, and gain credibility.

Having a written book on a certain subject, proves you have an expertise that isn’t easily dismissed. A book is a physical evidence you can show to prospective clients proving that you are qualified and knowledgeable in your field.

According to Dan S. Kennedy, a marketing legend and the author of more than 25 books, “as an authority, you must publish or perish”.

Becoming an industry resource simply means being the primary source of information for your target audience. In other words, do anything possible to get in front of your soon-be-ready-to-buy prospects in the early phases of their research process.

Let’s look at the home purchasing process. What does the home buying cycle look like? Does a person wake up one day and say, “I’m going to buy a house”?

Of course not.

With a longer purchasing cycle, one of the first phases is becoming aware of the need to get a home. It can happen due to various situations such as marriage, divorce, having a kid, and many other reasons.

This is the phase where consumers start researching the subject. However, they are not yet ready to buy. Exactly in this phase, we want to get in front of them and provide the information they are looking for.

For instance, while house-hunting, consumers want to know what school district a location belongs to, various demographic stats, property taxes, and much more. So, what do you do to get in front of them and gain their trust?

What I call “Local Guides” type of content works incredibly effectively in this phase. Let’s take for example this Cleveland OH city guide created by a local realtor Kristina Morales. You can see how much useful information this guide contains about this particular location. Anybody planning to relocate to this area will appreciate this in-depth informational resource.

This is the type of content that will certainly help real estate agents and brokers who target home buyers to get in front of them during the early phases of the purchasing cycle and position themselves as local experts.

Even though many of the Top 10 lists, if not most of them, are highly subjective and oftentimes even misleading to readers, they seem to be quite effective in consumer decision making. There is plenty of evidence that the Top 10 list concept works well for marketing purposes.

The top 10 list concept is a powerful means for instantaneous trust. Regardless of what top 10 things are showcased on a Top 10 list, they all instantly gain a boost of authority and trust. Here is a great example of Top 10 Realtors in Cleveland that automatically makes those featured agents on the list stand out from their competitors.

Let’s sum it all up with some empirical data. A study, The Top-Ten Effect: Consumers’ Subjective Categorization of Ranked Lists, published in the Journal of Consumer Research by marketing scholars Mathew S. Isaac and Robert M. Schindler looked at how people perceived ranked lists.

They argued that people exhibit a so-called “top 10 effect”, explained by categorizing things into round-number groups and perceiving everything outside those groups as inferior.

This was written by Oleg Donets and originated on SCORE.