Are you a realtor, mortgage broker, financial planner, sales person or anybody whose name is really important to their daily business activities? How do you market yourself? If you are a realtor working for Re/Max, how you market you, John Smith? Forget about Re/Max and the marketing they do, how does John Smith market himself?
All too often I hear from individuals who work for larger companies that have a great brand in the marketplace. This could be Re/Max, Century 21, Investors Group, etc. and when I ask them how they market themselves online, I usually get the canned approach, my company has a website.
But what about you? Think about how many of these people you meet that have their pictures on their business cards, are extremely active in networking functions, and always use the line, “if you know of somebody who might be planning to sell their home, ask them to call John Smith”. Why don’t they say “if you know of somebody who might be planning to sell their home, ask them to call Re/Max”? So all this importance is placed on the individuals name, yet, many of these people do nothing to market themselves.
So, here are 2 real life examples, of individuals, who work for large companies, and what we have done to help market themselves.
1) YellowPages.ca / Canada411.ca / Google Local Canada
I have used his name before, but a friend of mine is a mortgage broker for Mortgage Alliance of Canada. His name is Ron Weldon. With how competitive the mortgage broker business is, it is important to make sure that when people do searches for you, in this case on the Internet, you can be found.
We set-up a campaign to list Ron Weldon under the Mortgage Broker heading on YellowPages.ca. We have his listing as,
Ron Weldon, The Mortgage Alliance Co. Of Canada
Consider the importance of this listing and the search keywords. If people use YellowPages.ca or Canada411.ca and do a search on mortgage alliance, Ron comes up first. If they search for Ron Weldon, Ron comes up first. The point here is that although he is within a larger organization, proper online marketing techniques can allow you leverage both your name and your company’s name to gain a competitive advantage and drive more sales.
2) Register Your Name
Recently I have worked with financial planner with Investors Group. His name is Andrew Fox. Not only am I a client, but we have set-up one of my most used techniques. What we did was register andrewfox.ca and pointed it to his Investors Group dedicated web site.
This gives him the opportunity to market himself, reinforce his own brand, as well as drive traffic to his parent companies web site, a truly win-win situation for all parties involved. The second step is to do the same thing we did for Ron Weldon above, which by way, if you visit ronweldon.com you notice we did the same thing here.
Don’t let all the business cards, networking, or asking for referrals to go to waste. Make sure that you own your domain name and that you can be found on the Internet when people do a search for your name. If you are a truly memorable person, I can guarantee you that potential prospects will be searching for you personally and not your company. When they get frustrated because they cannot find you, this is when you lose the sale to somebody else representing the same company. What usually happens here is you run into that person and they tell you they bought a house last year and you ask why didn’t you call me? Their response, I lost your business card and I could not find you?
Don’t let this happen to you, take the necessary steps to ensure that your name is front and center.