The things that drive potential clients and brokers to a firm are its niche area of expertise, the individual reputations and relationships of its brokers, and how it stands out from others in its market.
Those are all communicated through branding. Your brand is not only your color scheme and logo—but also how people feel when they think of your company.
To invoke positive impressions of your firm, attract clients, and retain brokers, defining your brand is necessary. Maintaining that brand consistently is a new challenge as your firm takes on more brokers and expands offices.
So how do you do it and reap the benefits?
- Ensure consistency across materials
- Highlight your firm’s professionalism
Read on to learn more about how you can achieve these goals.
Ensure consistency across materials
Create a style guide for language and imagery
The first step to ensuring consistency across your firm’s marketing materials is having a clear style guide for all brokers and marketers to follow.
This style guide should clearly outline the fonts, colors, templated language, and any logos and other information your team should use across all print and web materials.
Everything from the number of photos included in offering memorandums to the structure and length of property descriptions in brochures can help clients receive the same level of experience no matter how many times they work with your firm.
Implement tools to help brokers use the same brand guidelines
A CRE marketing software like Buildout makes it easy for all brokers at your firm to develop proposals, OMs, and any other materials within your firm’s brand guidelines. This helps limit variabilities across materials that can result in confusion among potential clients, and ensure repeat clients know exactly what to expect when they work with your firm.
When using Buildout, we’ll work to ensure that your brand is up-to-date and ready-to-use in our system. If you haven’t established your firm’s brand guidelines or don’t have a style guide in place, our team will help you to create them and set them in motion.
With your brand guidelines set up in Buildout, you can guarantee consistency across docs, emails, property websites and more—no matter who on your team is creating them.
Highlight firm professionalism
Develop or redevelop a sleek, professional brand for your firm
Your brand is the first thing potential clients learn about your brokerage. They may view an out-of-date brand as a sign of antiquated processes and business practices.
So, not only should your branding be consistent, but it should be sleek and modern and represent the level of professionalism your firm will bring to your clients.
Stand out from other firms
It should go without saying that CRE is an extremely competitive industry, and standing out from your competition is extremely important.
A strong, professional brand can help you do just that.
The way you present your brand can show prospective clients what you can do for their properties, especially in proposals.
With Buildout, proposals feature sample property marketing materials that demonstrate to owners the high-quality flyers, brochures, OMs, emails, and websites your firm can create. This allows your firm to stand out in the proposal process and improve your win ratio.
If you’re interested in learning more about steps you can take to address your brokerage’s challenges, read our resource on how to integrate data systems at your firm by maintaining a brokerage-wide listing database and using tools with API integrations.