As a broker or marketer, you’ve invested hundreds of hours and countless dollars carefully designing your brand’s story. You have a plan for every brand channel that allows you to communicate directly with consumers—from TV spots to your website.
What if I told you that you may not be optimizing another just-as-powerful brand channel to its full potential? It’s one that you interact with daily: your agents.
Agents are the true face of your business to most buyers and sellers. Agents prospect within the local community and make marketing promises to clients daily—all in your brand’s name. Neglecting to optimize that channel means missing out on a powerful way to build market share and future revenue.
So, how do you embrace your agent channel and transform agents into brand ambassadors? With two important steps:
- Get agents to opt in to your brand with brand love.
- Leverage technology to turn that brand love into action.
How to build brand love
- DEFINE. Create a brand story so strong that agents WANT to be compliant. 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. Have you clearly defined that for your agents? Do they know what your target audience is…or are they trying to be everything to everyone?
- STANDARDIZE. Set original, clear brand standards. These are standards that you need to write down and refer to constantly. It can be as simple as choosing specific colors and fonts, or as comprehensive as identifying a photography style, icons, and other imagery.
- RESPECT. Stay true to your own brand standards in everything (and I do mean everything). Consistent branding on your website, at company events, and even in internal documents shows your agents how much you value the brand’s power. In turn, they’ll respect your brand more and more.
- SELL. Always be promoting the benefits of your brand to agents. Never assume that everyone remembers just because you’ve said it once out loud. Just like building a habit takes time and repetition, getting agents to buy into your brand’s story takes consistent communication on your end.
How to turn brand love into action with technology
- GUIDE. Technology can create a consistent, repeatable marketing process to guide agents from start to finish. For example, too many agents jump into the next deal after a listing closes and forget to take advantage of an effective lead generation and brand-building opportunity: the Just Sold announcement. Help your agents generate future business by leveraging technology to trigger a reminder to share the news on social media or to automatically send them a multi-channel Just Sold marketing package.
- PROVIDE. Make it absurdly simple for agents to market your brand. Technology can help you translate brand standards into professional marketing materials optimized for every distribution channel. By giving your agents marketing content for the full marketing funnel—whether you create a digital library or automatically share it when they need it—you can make it easy for agents to build your brand story and fulfill your marketing promise.
- AUTOMATE. Agents are your builders, crafting your brand story. When carefully chosen, technology can remove their distractions, reduce tool fatigue, and give them more time to focus on money-making activities. What repetitive tasks can you automatically accomplish for agents?
With today’s market volatility and increasing competition, the status quo won’t cut it; you need to leverage every opportunity to connect with buyers and sellers and deliver your carefully-honed brand promise. It’s time to start optimizing your agent channel!
About Imprev
Imprev provides marketing automation services to brokerages and franchises of all sizes. By automatically creating and delivering property marketing materials to agents throughout the life of a listing, brokerages can help agents generate more business, protect their brand, and change the recruiting conversation. Discover more about the magic of automation at www.imprev.com.