Real Estate Marketing: Broker Branding Help Desk

Brokers of all sizes struggle with brand consistency—especially if agent support of the broker’s brand is a desire and not required and/or supported by the broker’s marketing department. It is also the nature of our industry that many agents believe that because a few “rock stars” have built great agent brands, everyone can do it. That would be great, but I’m afraid this simply isn’t true.

Big brokers have marketing teams that support managing the broker brand. The branded materials they create are consistent and communicate effectively. But it can still be a challenge to make sure agents consistently support the broker’s brand. In fact, small brokers typically do not have marketing teams; so worst case, they send the company logo to their agents and hope for the best.

Today, brokers of all sizes need a branding help desk.

Ensuring brand consistency and quality is not easy. This is best accomplished through a well-rounded approach that utilizes the proper guidelines, visual references, and access to those who can offer guidance on how to and how not to use the brand. In other words, write it down and put your images in one place. Your broker intranet site is the perfect place to centralize and store brand resources.

Begin by creating a document that explains the proper usage of visual and verbal brand elements in plain English so the agents can easily apply it. Your brand guideline (an invaluable resource) should include rules, specifications, history, applications…all the standards for your brand. Guidelines are a compass for your agents that gives them what they need to know, like the Pantone Green in your logo, so they can order custom golf balls or whatever they need to promote themselves.

Writing it down is not enough. You need to go further and teach agents about branding. Many brokers include one-on-one branding training as part of their new agent orientation. Whenever you do group training at office meetings, grab a flip cam and record it.

With both guidelines and training, you are on the right track. The next step is to gain adoption of the branding, and the best way to do this is to create templates for agents. A marketing center on your broker intranet website where they can gain access to a wealth of branded materials they can use to communicate with buyers and sellers. With today’s technology and digital distribution, this is easy to accomplish. Over time, your brokerage will have an extensive library rich with well-branded marketing materials.

We know this works, which is why we've offered a marketing center as a component to AgentAchieve software for many years. We believe this is a necessary part of any customer relationship management solution because this is the easiest way to encourage, facilitate, and ultimately guarantee consumers will consistently see uniformly high-quality, branded deliverables (websites, CMAs, flyers, etc.) from your brokerage. Our findings show if you create easy access to materials that present your brokerage and the agent in the best light, agents will use these materials rather than spend their valuable time trying to create something better.

Make it easy to click-and-send, and the marketing center in your broker software will become the branding help desk that keeps your company looking good every time. Let me know if you want to see how it works.