The Complete Guide to Positioning Strategies For Real Estate Brands
Concept: Villa del Soffio, image courtesy of Nicholas Preaud
In the competitive world of real estate development, differentiation and targeting are vitally important to effective marketing. The need to differentiate is especially important to real estate developers or marketers building and selling properties.
At Proven Partners, we excel at discerning what makes each property special so we can create the ideal positioning and marketing materials for success. WIth specialized experience in a range of real estate projects from custom developments, to luxury hotels, to exclusive city locations, we know how to make brands stand out from the crowd.
In this article, we will provide all the need-to-knows for brand positioning in real estate, a step-by-step guide to get started, and even some colorful case studies to illustrate the power of positioning in action.
Letโs begin!
Introduction to Positioning Strategies for Real Estate Brands
A positioning strategy for your real estate brand is a foundational part of your marketing strategies.
A strong positioning strategy creates positive consumer perceptions and attracts interest from your core target market, leading to higher prices and profit margins.
On the other hand, failing to create a strategic positioning strategy will leave your sales team fumbling with low-quality leads, lower close rates and shrinking operating margins.
What Is Brand Positioning in Real Estate?
Brand positioning is so much more than having a catchy name, a clever tagline or an eye-catching logo. With top real estate companies, itโs all about capitalizing on opportunities to maximize brand leverage by emphasizing key market differentiators.
Understanding Brand Positioning in Real Estate
If you're wondering, โwhat is positioning strategy in marketing?โ then youโre in the right place.
In the following section, we will cover the fundamentals of brand positioning, with a focus on identifying a real estate brandโs unique selling position (USP), target audience, and competitor analysis. Based on these few factors, we will be able to create marketing materials that position one real estate brand apart from the rest.
Ultimately, you want to clarify achievable objectives regarding where you want your brand to exist in the market relative to competitors, how it should be perceived by potential clients, and what key offerings and messages should be included to accomplish those goals.
Defining Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
If the goal of creating brand positioning is to set your brand apart, then a great place to start is by defining what makes your real estate company unique. Your real estate assetsโ distinguishing features can be considered โunique selling propositionsโ or USPs.
For example a penthouse suite might have a few USPs, like exclusive top-floor access, an obstructed view of the skyline, and an in-house cleaning service. These features truly set the penthouse suite apart from other rooms in the building, and from other buildings in the city.
Another example of a USP could be the way you operate your real estate business. If you choose to offer standout marketing features like cutting-edge virtual tours, personalized brochures, or sponsorships for community events, you might come across as more modern or engaging than competing companies.
By highlighting and defining your USPs, from striking property features to next-level realtor services, you will be able to better connect with the audience looking for exactly what you have to offer. In this way, you not only stand out, but signal that you have a specialized solution for a tailored audience.
Identifying Your Target Audience
Another pillar for effectively positioning your brand is understanding your target audience. Be sure to conduct appropriate research of your local market, centered around what requirements your potential buyers or โideal customersโ have in mind. This should drive all positioning decisions made throughout the process.
For identifying any real estate target audience, try the following process:
Establishing a detailed understanding of the target market. Ask identifying questions such as:
Does the market prefer to buy or rent?
What are the marketโs preferences in terms of location?
What are the spatial needs of the target audience?
Does the target audience need certain facilities or optional extras?
Categorizing target groups. Once the relevant information has been collected, analyze trends to establish priorities or preferences. Consider breaking different preferences into different groups with unique messaging for each.
Study regional and national macro-economic trends. These patterns, often discussed in economic and sector-specific publications, look at how larger market trends might affect your target market.
With a detailed understanding of your target audience, you will be able to create marketing messages and property curations that strike a chord with potential clients and return more qualified leads.
Conducting a Competitor Analysis
In addition to understanding your target audience, it's critical to analyze how you stack up against other real estate companies in your geographic area or industry.
To create a set of competitive data to measure your business against, research other companies such as:
Local or immediate competitors in the same geographical area
Regional competitors that cover various sub-markets with, perhaps, a more varied client base
Competitors that are national or aspire to be, perhaps as aspirational competitors
International competitors, whilst not directly competitive, may provide a useful case study(ies) on how to grow beyond the boundaries of local and national markets.
To create a high quality competitive set, the comparative companies must be offering similar properties to yours in terms of price, quality, and type. This way you can see how a common demographic might prefer one brand over another, and how to position your brand to attract the most audience members.
Ncaved House, Greece & image courtesy of MOLD Architects
Types of Positioning Strategies for Real Estate Brands
This section will explore different positioning strategies tailored to real estate brands, providing real-world examples for each type.
Customer-Centric Positioning
A customer-centric strategy may involve handling all enquiries as if the client is the most valued client, and being responsive and attentive, both pre-purchase and during after sales, ensuring that the overall customer service experience can help justify premium prices.
Differentiation Positioning
This type of strategy relies on a companyโs uniqueness or innovative qualities when compared to its traditional competitionโmaybe the real estate developer has bespoke property management systems, or is the only one in the area building swimming pools into its developments.
Value-Based Positioning
Adopting a value-focused strategy can target either end of the spectrum. A real estate brand can position itself as offering the most affordable option in order to generate a larger customer base (i.e. cheaper housing suitable for the mass market), or adopt premium pricing for the โexclusive few.โ
Niche Positioning
A niche positioning strategy focuses on a highly-specific part of your target market, which the broader market would be less interested in.
For example, this could be looking at specific lifestyle needs, such as disabled clients requiring certain amenities like handicap-ready bathrooms, staircases, and smart-home systems for convenience.
Alternatively, some clients who prioritize technology or sustainability might only be interested in properties that are positioned as state-of-the-art or eco-friendly.
Steps to Develop an Effective Positioning Strategy
Creating an effective brand positioning strategy involves a few key steps weโve already touched on. These are to identify what makes a brand stand out compared to competitors, what gives it a unique identity, and how to relate it to your audience.
With a great understanding of your target customers, and the strengths and weaknesses of competitors analyzed, you will be able to develop a differentiation strategy that positions your brand as unique, providing a product or service better than anyone else.
Step 1: Research the Market and Competitors
A competitive and comparative set of other real estate developers can be established and their strengths and weaknesses studied.
As we mentioned before, a competitive analysis should look at other real estate companies that have similar offerings to yours. The more similar in terms of price, type, and quality, the more helpful the analysis will be.
A comprehensive comparative analysis may include:
Assessing the facilities, features and amenities on offer and recording any differentiators, especially in the more aspirational competitive sets
Preparing a detailed list of amenities and facilities and identifying those which have proven to be particularly successful in terms of supporting sales
Whatโs included in such offerings and identifying those additional extras which can easily be delivered at enhanced prices.
Step 2: Define Your Brandโs Unique Identity
Based on the information youโve collected from your robust competitive analysis, you should begin to see differentiating data emerge. By comparison, see if you can identify the unique features of your real estate business or specific assets.
Select the most useful defining features of your business or property, considering which would garner the most beneficial media exposure if defined and refined as a unique brand characteristic.
This should be an ongoing process with further review and reassessment as circumstances change. Over a few iterations with new dataset from different comparable competitors, your real estate brandโs distinguishing identity will start to take form.
Step 3: Align with Customer Needs
After completing these detailed assessments, review the data to consider whether the information assembled on competitive sets requires any adjustment to your target market profile. You may uncover previously hidden market gaps to target. Or, you may find gluts to avoid.
Itโs critical to ensure that your position not only sets you apart, but also aligns with your target audienceโs needsโโfrom price points, to specific amenities, to their ideal buying or selling experience.
Step 4: Craft a Positioning Statement
The next step is to build a brand positioning statement to form the foundation for your brand positioning strategy.
A strong brand position statement should say exactly what makes your brand unique while attracting your target audience. By highlighting your distinct qualities in key messaging, brand slogans, and marketing approach, you will be able successfully grow a standout brand that really connects with your target audience.
Step 5: Consistent Messaging Across Channels
To make your brand positioning stick, itโs important to keep your messaging the same across every channel.
This means your website, social media, emails, and ads should all have a similar look, tone, and message.
Staying consistent helps people remember your brand and builds trust, so they know what to expect from you no matter where they see you.
Image courtesy of BonVivant Concept
Examples of Effective Positioning in Real Estate
Next, letโs look at a few effective examples of real estate positioning that illustrate quality branding in action.
Real estate positioning is often easier to perceive when looking at hotel brands rather than positioning strategies in service marketing or residential or commercial marketing, so we will use hotels in these examples.
Whilst the same rules apply to hotels as to other real estate sectors, hotel brands need to sell their product on a daily basis in a highly-competitive market, so they invest more time and thought into ensuring their unique brands are successfully positioned.
Without further ado, check out these hotel real estate brand positioning strategy examples:
Case Study 1: Luxury Brand Positioning Example
Images courtesy of Six Senses
Six Senses
Six Senses positions itself as a luxury brand by focusing on wellness, as it's a priority for their high-end travelers.The brandโs focus on wellness is completely integrated โ as seen across their name, the amenities, consistent tone of voice, and even the rich photography. Six Senses offers all the same elements as their boutique luxury rivals, but it increases its chance to capture the high-growth wellness market with a unique, premium focus.
Case Study 2: Eco-Friendly Real Estate Positioning
Images courtesy of 1 Hotels
1 Hotels
1 Hotels, a more recently launched brand, uses eco-friendly positioning to stand out, making sustainability the main focus. All of their hotels are LEED-certified, completely carbon-neutral, and feature sustainable biophilic designs. This clear dedication to green practices make them the perfect choice for eco-friendly hotel guests, and effectively captures their target market.
Case Study 3: Value-Based Real Estate Brand
Images courtesy of Aman
Aman Resorts
This brand uses a value-based market positioning strategy at the high end of the market, as illustrated by the world-class design, exclusive offerings, and focus on both privacy and personal attention. With this type of positioning, Aman commands premium prices and attracts those seeking the elite, even in larger urban markets where other high-end brands are competing for top-tier status.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Real Estate Positioning
There are plenty of common missteps that even the most seasoned real estate professionals can make when crafting their brand positioning.
In this section, weโre going to look at the common pitfalls to look out for and how to avoid them.
Failing to Differentiate
Since the purpose of brand positioning is to stand out, the ultimate failure would be to accidentally brand yourself with the same market position as one of your competitors.
Be sure to double-check all your competitive analysis so your unique selling points are front and center, without looking too similar to other brands in your immediate area or demographic.
Even if you and your competition have nearly identical properties, do your best to say why yours is better!
Ignoring Customer Needs
Itโs easy to make the mistake of focusing too much on differentiating yourself and ending up ignoring what the customer really wants.
For example, if you want to make your brand stand out by offering state-of-the-art sustainability technology, you might run into trouble if your target market prefers rustic, low-tech architecture.
This doesnโt mean you canโt install energy-efficient features, it just means you shouldnโt make sustainability part of your key market positioning strategy if your audience doesnโt resonate with it. Instead, play up the elements that your audience canโt get enough of.
Inconsistent Branding
Having inconsistent branding is a classic blunder that can come up in any marketing campaign.
When your key marketing messages or unique positioning statements end up looking different across channels, your target audience can become confused about who you are and what youโre offering.
To avoid this mistake, keep a central marketing playbook that contains everything about your brand identity, brand messaging, and brand positioning. This includes the exact colors, fonts, and logos you use too. With a central guide in place, you will always have a playbook to refer to when crafting your next marketing material to ensure perfect brand consistency.
Measuring the Success of Your Positioning Strategy
Just implementing a clever positioning strategy marketing isnโt always enough. The real strategy comes with measuring and improving your positioning so you can keep your brand on track for success.
In this section, weโll detail how to track the effectiveness of your brand positioning strategies using key performance indicators (KPIs) and feedback mechanisms.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Real Estate Brands
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are the most important numbers for you to use to determine the success of your marketing efforts. For real estate branding, some of the most commonly tracked KPIs include:
Volume of web traffic to property listings
Number of leads generated (and from which sources)
Rate of conversions from leads to customers
Average customer retention rate
So, if you just launched a new digital brochure and want to see if itโs impacting the target market, you could see if it correlates with an increase in website visitors or return customers. If you do see a rise, it can indicate your positioning is hitting home with potential clients.
Using Feedback Loops to Improve Positioning
Listening to feedback is one of the most valuable opportunities for honest data about the effectiveness of your brand positioning strategies.
From anonymous surveys, to hosting online reviews, to directly asking clients their thoughts, there are a multitude of ways for you to collect valuable feedback about your ability to communicate your brand positioning to your target audience.
By regularly adjusting your positioning position in response to feedback, you can see with each iteration if you are getting closer or further from communicating your unique selling points to meet customer needs.
Karl Lagerfeld HQ, image courtesy of Frame Work
Final Thoughts on Real Estate Positioning Strategies
A unique brand positioning strategy is essential in making a statement about a business, and attracting the attention of target clients and, in turn, successfully growing the brand.
Remember, the goal of positioning is to ensure your brand stands out by highlighting what makes your properties truly unique, while paying attention to your target audienceโs needs.
Every step from defining your unique selling points to running comparative analyses on competitors is crucial. And donโt forget to maintain brand consistency and use feedback to refine your approach.
Your real estate positioning strategy is going to be a long term and ongoing process, with continuous updating as the market shifts.
If youโre seeking assistance in crafting the perfect brand positioning framework, including regular updates, look no further than our offerings from experienced experts here at Proven Partners.
Visit our Real Estate Positioning Strategy page to see a range of our services.
