Your brand is what sets you apart from your competition. It encompasses much more than you might realize.
Your brand doesn’t just include your logo and your color scheme. It includes every aspect of working with your brokerage, from the tagline on your business cards to the images on your flyers and from the look and feel of your website to your social media posts. Ultimately, your brand is a reflection of your entire customer experience.
The most successful companies, from Apple to Starbucks, know that consistency is key to creating a brand that precedes them in the minds of their customers. A consistent brand lends credibility to your prospecting, marketing, and sales efforts, and helps people remember you. Consistent branding helps build trust and could even help you win more listings.
In real estate, brand management is a tough job. Not only are you working to differentiate yourself from every other brokerage in your area, you’re also relying on each of your agents to establish a consistent message across so many different media and platforms—from lawn signs and flyers to social media and websites. With all that noise, it can be difficult to stand out. If your brand isn’t consistent everywhere, you run the risk of confusing potential clients about who you are and what they can expect from working with you. Below are four key areas to focus on to brand your brokerage effectively and consistently.
Consistent service
The first key to a consistent brand is delivering a consistent product or service. Without your product, your brand wouldn’t exist, and your customers come to rely on and expect a certain level of service. Imagine if, overnight, McDonald’s stopped serving buns or Ford trucks were sold without doors. Customers would immediately lose trust in those brands. Some major brands have suffered significant credibility issues after product recalls, legal troubles, and other scandals that call the consistency of their offering into question. The absolute baseline for branding is to deliver on your promise to your customers, no matter what you do or sell.
Consistent messaging
The second key to consistent branding is consistent messaging. This means knowing what you want to say, how to say it, and then saying it in a similar way across all your marketing channels. Let’s look at an example. One of the most successful brands in history is the Nike swoosh and the slogan Just do it. This personal, inspiring message permeates all of Nike’s marketing. They don’t say, “just do it” in some places and, “wait, don’t do it yet” in others: they inspire professional and amateur athletes to seize the day and get it done, no matter what “it” is. Consistency is also about matching messaging to action. If you say you put customers first, but customers consistently feel like they’re put second (or worse, last), your brand won’t stand a chance.
Consistent imagery
The third key to consistent branding is consistent imagery. The images you share need to reflect your values and your value in a uniform way. This can mean different things for different brokerages: if you sell luxury properties, bright photos and stellar staging are critical, whereas if you’re a small-town brokerage, nicely lit no-frills photos will probably serve you just fine. Make sure your images, logos, and colors match across platforms and accurately convey who you are.
Consistent timing
The fourth key to consistent branding is timing. Consumers have poor short-term memories. How many times have you seen a product you wanted, only to forget what it’s called or who makes it? To overcome this, marketers rely on the other consistency tips above and build them around a regular schedule: potential and existing customers are exposed repeatedly and briefly to content and messages that are relevant and valuable to them, keeping a particular brand top of mind for when they’re ready to buy.
Tools for building and maintaining consistent brokerage brands
Today, tools abound for helping brokerages build and maintain consistent brands, both online and in print. It has never been easier to build a stunning, beautifully branded brokerage website backed by the most robust MLS data in the industry. Social publishing applications and automated digital and print marketing tools are taking the hassle out of consistent timing and messaging across platforms. Plus, strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategies have made it easier than ever for leads to find your brokerage and listings online.
Paradym by Constellation1 and Constellation1 Websites can help your brokerage do all of this and more to maintain a consistent brand, no matter what marketing channels you use. If you’re ready to get your listings noticed, contact us today.
