Every broker and marketer knows that agents can be powerful allies in building your brokerage’s brand. But how many of you have a strategic, cohesive way to nurture that brand channel to its full potential?
It’s not as overwhelming as it sounds, I promise. By investing in two areas—brand love and technology—you can optimize your partnership with agents and transform them into vibrant brand ambassadors.
Build Brand Love
Answer the four questions below to begin building that elusive brand love:
- Have you clearly defined your brand story for agents? Your brand is so much more than a logo and catchy slogan; it’s the gut reaction a person has about the possibility of a transaction. Do agents know your unique value proposition and target audience, or are they trying to be everything to everyone?
- Once you’ve created a powerful brand story, how clear and documented are your brand standards? Standards don’t make the brand, but they’re vital to communicating it in a consistent way. It can be as simple as choosing specific colors and fonts, or as comprehensive as identifying photography style, icons and other imagery.
- Do you respect your own brand standards in everything? Consistent branding on your website, at company events and in internal documents shows your agents how much you value the brand’s power. In turn, they’ll respect your brand more and more.
- Are you constantly promoting the benefits of your brand to agents? Never assume that everyone remembers just because you’ve said it out loud once. Just like building a habit takes time and repetition, getting agents to buy into your brand’s story takes consistent communication on your end.
Leverage Technology to Initiate Action
Once you’ve built strong brand love within your agent community, technology opens a world of possibilities to turn those positive feelings into action. Here are three things to consider when evaluating the role of technology:
- Are you able to guide agents from start to finish when asking them to promote your brand? Technology can help create a consistent, repeatable marketing process for agents of all experience levels. For example, too many agents jump into the next deal after a listing closes and forget to leverage an effective lead-generation and brand-building opportunity: the Just Sold announcement. Use technology to help your agents generate future business by triggering a reminder to share the news on social media or automatically sending them a multi-channel Just Sold marketing package.
- How absurdly simple can you make it for agents to market your brand? Technology can automatically translate your brand standards into professional marketing materials optimized for every distribution channel. By giving your agents marketing content for the full marketing funnel, you’ll make it easy for agents to build your brand story and fulfill your marketing promise.
- What repetitive tasks can you automatically accomplish for agents? Agents are your builders, crafting your brand story. When carefully chosen, technology can remove their distractions and give them more time to focus on money-making activities.
To close, the status quo won’t cut it with today’s market volatility and increasing competition. It’s time to start optimizing your agent channel.
Bill Yaman is president and chief operating officer at Imprev, a marketing automation provider for real estate. He is an empowering leader with deep experience in general management, sales and marketing, product management and business development. Learn more at www.imprev.com.
