Cultivate a culture that respects and promotes your brand while helping agents do the same. DOORA Properties creative director Janet Pozos provides her branding best practices.
In March’s Marketing and Branding Month, we’ll go deep on agent branding and best practices for spending with Zillow, Realtor.com and more. Top CMOs of leading firms drop by to share their newest tactics, too. And to top off this theme month, Inman is debuting a brand new set of awards for branding and marketing leaders in the industry called Marketing All-Stars.
Whether you’re recruiting new agents or seeking to retain the great ones on your existing roster, brand identity plays a part. Although agents and staff will be looking for in-depth information about your company’s philosophy and mission, they’ll be attracted, at least initially, by your branding.
People frequently think of branding in a limited sense, perhaps as the company name along with a logo and tagline. In reality, of course, branding involves so much more, from visual elements like the color scheme and fonts used in marketing campaigns to conceptual elements like the narrative voice used in written materials or community events that are consistent with the company’s stated purpose.
As a graphic artist, I think a lot about how to ensure our brand translates across all of our internal and external communications and marketing collateral. Here are some of the ways I ensure brand cohesion.
1. Make branding and marketing a core value
At our brokerage, the core values talk about the importance of marketing. Our brand standards involve professional copywriting for property descriptions, not ChatGPT. We provide branded, professionally written and designed content on an ongoing basis for our agents to share with their spheres of influence.
By emphasizing the importance of branding and tying it to the effectiveness of the service we provide, it becomes more than just a nice-to-have bell or whistle. It becomes an essential differentiator for our brokerage.
2. Help cultivate personal branding for agents
As part of the service we provide to our agents, we ensure that their messaging is consistent across our website, updating their bios during onboarding and helping them think through their personal branding.
As we all know, real estate is, in many ways a personal business and agents have to think about how their brand connects with potential clients. By helping agents to find their brand within your brand, you ensure cohesiveness and alignment between your individual agents and your overarching company brand.
3. Provide technology that makes branding and marketing easier
At DOORA, we not only provide exceptional technology for our agents, we also ensure that they know how to use the tech we provide. By helping them help their clients, we keep agents from going rogue and creating marketing materials on their own that might not maintain our brand identity.
We partner with Maxa Designs to create state-of-the-art marketing materials specifically geared toward the needs and requirements of the real estate industry. Their platform includes a library of real estate-related graphics and templates integrated with our brand guide. This allows us to quality control everything that agents send out.
In addition, we have the Lamborghini of professional printing presses on site to ensure that there’s never a delay in creating beautiful hard-copy flyers or mailers.
Because we believe in the power of branding for the brokerage, the individual agent and the client, we prioritize it. The result is a brand that agents are happy to align with and promote through their own marketing efforts.
Janet Pozos serves as creative director at DOORA Properties. Connect with her on Instagram or LinkedIn.
