Building Your Personal Brand in CRE: Tips from the Pros

Building a unique and powerful personal online brand in commercial real estate is essential for inspiring trust and connecting with your clients. It’s a part of creating an effective marketing strategy for your business and serves to demonstrate your competence, thought leadership, knowledge of the market and differentiates you from the competition.

You can use different outlets to share your ideas and knowledge on social media – from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to blogging on your own website or other relevant industry blogs.

We asked some of the largest CRE personalities for their insights and tips on the following question:

What advice would you give to build a personal brand in commercial real estate?

 

Understand, building a personal brand is not an option. We are all competing for attention. Try prospecting for new business while you are an unknown resource. Good luck! Building a personal brand requires an integration of personal involvement, physical mailings and digital presence. You need all three to compete.

Rod Santomassimo
CRE Coach, Founder and President, Massimo Group

 

When building a personal brand or the new popular term “personal”voice”, the most important thing is consistency powered by authenticity. Your brand or voice should be true to you so that you can be a consistent contributor to the CRE space and dialogue. Consistency is important because people know what to expect and then they focus on what you know and what assets you bring to the table. If you are one person on LinkedIn, another on Twitter and yet another in person, people get confused and tend to focus on the confusion, not your value proposition. The easiest way to be consistent is to be authentic.

Diane K. Danielson
Chief Operating Officer, SVN International Corp.

 

The most important advice I would give someone who wants to build a personal brand is to be authentic, consistent and responsive to your audience. If your brand doesn’t really reflect who you are and what you are passionate about, no one will remember you or notice your efforts. Be real!

   

Michael Beckerman
Founder, The News Funnel

 

I would suggest three things if you are interested in building a personal brand – especially marketing content.
Be consistent – whether once a day or once a month. You must commit to a schedule and never vary
Be authentic – folks want to connect with a real person – not a robot from Sri Lanka.
Produce great content – this doesn’t have to be original – but must be targeted to your audience.

Allen C. Buchanan
Principal, Lee & Associates

 

Building a personal brand is about being genuine and being consistent. If you focus on being yourself, rather than creating a public image, it should be easy.

  
Jeremy Neuer
Senior Vice President CBRE

 

The best way to build a personal brand is to be completely authentic. Your relationships in business and in life will flourish if stay true to being the best version of you.

  
Jonathan Schultz
Managing Principal Onyx Equities LLC

 

Know who your audience is and what they like. It sounds simple, but if you don’t care about who you’re talking to or what kind of content they like, they won’t care about you or what you’re saying. Also, don’t talk just to talk. People in CRE (and in general) can tell when you say anything inauthentic, so create and share quality content when you actually have something of substance to say. There’s enough filler in the world – find a way to rise above it.

  
Linda McDonough
Cushman & Wakefield