Every one of your team members in your real estate firm has an exciting story to tell.
Whether or not that story is shared on your website and marketing materials as content is the real page-turner.
Businesses in the built environment thrive on relationships, referrals, and human connections. Your staff bios or "Meet the Team" page on your website is vital to show your company culture, industry standards, and brand identity. It cannot and should not be a "throw-away" page that is haphazardly pulled together. Like your other website copywriting standards, your staff bios should have compelling and practical content.
Your customers and clients want to know what your brand is all about, particularly early on in the awareness stage of the buyer's journey; they will be highly interested in the experience level and the personalities of those people they might be working closely with in the future.
Be thoughtful about how you build your staff page and individual biographies. Then, take the time to do it right and ensure the team you present to the world mirrors the brand story you want to tell.
So, in that spirit, we offer six best practices for crafting website content for your staff page and real estate team member biographies.
Get Your Team On Board and Organized in Advance
Could you communicate with your team early and often as you develop your plan? For example, if a photo shoot is needed, set clear standards for appropriate attire, whatever you decide that to be. Give team members much notice so there are no excuses for missing the photoshoot date. In addition, set expectations for their participation in the bio creation process by requesting updated resumes and completed LinkedIn profiles. Even professionals struggle to write about themselves, so could you give your team a few bio copy examples to inspire their content creations?
Professional-looking pictures matter
Hire a professional photographer to take headshots and group photos. You will not get the look you need by having internal staff take headshots with their phones or by manipulating old headshots from past jobs. The results will look unprofessional and inconsistent; this is the last thing you want.
Know your culture and brand
You must understand your culture and brand identity to create effective team pages and bios.
- If you need clarification on culture and brand, take a step back and do that work first, then revisit your team pages.
- As an interim solution, you can list team members' names and titles or perhaps only create bios for senior leaders. Then, once you are comfortable with the culture and brand you want to project to the market, take another shot at a more expansive and inclusive team page and bios.
Decide how deep you with go
There is no best practice for how many staff members to feature on your team page. It's best decided on a case-by-case basis.
- For large businesses with many employees, senior leadership is likely most appropriate.
- For a small to mid-size company, every staff member may have a bio or whichever level on your org chart is deemed appropriate.
- Could you find the right balance of whom to include? For example, you could show too much depth and therefore create the perception that you are too big and expensive.
- Or conversely, your bench could look too thin, and your organization could appear top-heavy with little or no experience at the lower levels.
The takeaway is to think this through because it matters and impacts how the market perceives your real estate business.
Keep your bios consistent
Could you decide in advance what categories of information you want to feature? Of course, every bio can be a different length- in fact, more experienced staff and senior leadership members should likely have more extended bios- but the categories of information need to be uniform.
- For example, staff bios should always include the current job title, role and responsibilities, and previous experience.
- Whether you decide to include items like education level, professional certifications, awards, and personal information depends on your industry and the composition of your team.
- As an alternative solution, should your team have varying levels of experience from veteran to newbie, standardize the team bios according to your established hierarchy, i.e., senior leader bios include these categories, management consists of these, and individual contributor and admin or support staff are completed in a specific, consistent way.
Again, the takeaway is to make every attempt to be consistent with content categories across all bios.
Get Team Buy-In
It's essential to include your team in the process and to create a sense of participation. How much staff involvement is really up to you. At a minimum, allowing each team member to review their bios before it is used online or in print is essential. That's not to say every edit they suggest needs to be made, but it will help catch inaccuracies and limit the chance that your valuable employees will be surprised by bio content after the fact.
To create an impactful team page and compelling staff bios, follow these best practices, and you'll be happy with the results:
- Give advanced notice and set standards
- Invest in professional headshots and team photos
- Know your culture and brand
- Be thoughtful and strategic about which staff to include
- Be consistent with content categories
- Involve staff in the bio review process
We have years of experience helping businesses like yours shape their brand story. Reach out. We're here to help.