Are all of your agents branding themselves consistently and in line with the brokerage when it comes to social media?
Very few industries can say they operate as ours, where the independent contractor has significant control and can move from company to company with few repercussions. This creates a challenging dynamic for real estate firms when trying to control their branding and marketing.
Too many times our tech team enters a market only to find the marketing for a brokerage firm is inconsistent.
To give you an example, we recently analyzed a firm that is the No. 1 firm in its market based on market
share and various other metrics. However, this was not the perception amongst the three areas that mattered most—consumers, their own agents and outside agents. How’s that for negative?
Inconsistent Branding
One of the main factors contributing to this was that their branding was all over the place. Many of the top-producing agents and teams had their own marketing and branding. Unfortunately, this branding was different from the brokerage’s branding. When we looked at some of the offline marketing, it was apparent this brokerage’s competition was not doing the same. The competitor had unified its marketing as we viewed 30 to 40 pages that were distinctly branded with the brokerage colors with only slight variations for each agent’s personality. In reality, the client we were working with had just as many pages, but you could not tell. What kind of message is that sending to consumers in your market?
Training, education and marketing 101 are necessary. Sometimes having an outside agency (like REAL Trends) put the problem into perspective can also assist in aligning your goals with your agent’s goals. You can run on parallel paths to a common goal with your agents when it comes to your marketing and branding.
The Takeaway
Our takeaway from this topic: In order to achieve a unified vision, be sure to wow your agents with the quality of your own marketing. The surest way to a disjointed effort is to fail to give your agents consistency in their marketing. You should have numerous branded templates for e-mail, offline marketing, fliers and postcards. This makes it easy for your agents to access those marketing materials and distribute them to their spheres.
Sometimes it pays to have a dedicated marketing professional at your firm who can offer these services to your agents and handle all the heavy lifting. To increase your ROI, you must unify your marketing and market perception. This will certainly help your recruiting efforts, as well.
This article appeared in REAL Trends Newsletter and is being reprinted with permission of REAL Trends, Copyright 2014.