Expanding into new markets can be an incredibly exciting time for a brokerage. Not only are you growing your business and your internal referral network for agents, but you’re also granted the unique opportunity to showcase your brand to a new audience.
Developing a strategic and impactful marketing strategy is paramount as you lay down roots in new regions and highlight your key brand differentiators to your target markets. Here are a few ways to achieve a successful marketing splash when expanding your brokerage into new areas.
1. Prepare
When entering a new market, it’s important to do your research. Create a robust research campaign to understand your target demographic. What resonates with your audience? What marketing strategies and techniques have worked in the past and what hasn’t?
Developing a campaign that reaches both agents and consumers is important as you introduce your brand to the market and highlight why agents would want to join your firm.
2. Develop a marketing mix
Developing a powerful marketing mix to effectively promote your brand in a new region is key. Having a strong public relations strategy, social media presence, as well as digital and print advertising campaigns will ensure your brand’s presence is known throughout all the appropriate channels.
Additional factors to consider include beautiful, eye-catching building wraps and signage on the new office space and planning exciting events, speaking opportunities and engagements that draw in the local community and potential recruits.
3. Produce creative content
In today’s world, content is king. Developing creative content strategies across multiple channels that tease your brokerage’s expansion is a powerful way to begin the introduction of your brand to new areas.
Securing highly visible advertising space on billboards, full-page ads in prominent local publications, targeted digital advertising on key news sites, having a dedicated social media campaign, and forming strategic partnerships with influential local organizations are all effective ways to get the word out.
4. Add value to local the community
When entering a new market, it’s so important to immerse yourself in the local community. Make sure that you’re aligning with organizations that are making a positive impact and that your brand’s differentiators are creating beneficial change for the area.
Adding value to the regions and communities you serve is one of the cornerstones to successfully growing your business and reach.
5. Keep it hyper local
When considering a grand opening event for your launch, keep activations and favors hyper local, when possible. Building relationships with fellow local businesses and providing a collaborative environment that showcases how your brand will seamlessly blend with and bring the local community together is essential.
At the recent grand opening of our second Pacific Palisades office location, we worked with local vendors on our activations, which included an ice cream truck, floral bouquet favor and large-scale games like checkers, Jenga and cornhole for families and children to enjoy while checking out our new space.
All in all, when entering a new area or region, it’s important to have a holistic marketing campaign in place to make an impactful mark. From doing your research on your target audience to utilizing a robust mix of marketing tools and creative content to make a splash, developing a thoughtful and curated marketing campaign will ensure your brand stands out from the rest.
Rainy Hake Austin is the president of The Agency in Los Angeles, California. Connect with her on Instagram.
