You’ve designed a logo, picked your team’s signature colors, and placed them on your beautiful site with the template of your choice. You’re patting yourself on the back because you’ve finally developed your brand. Right? Wrong.
While important, creating a brand is more than choosing beautiful colors and a strong slogan; it’s the comprehensive way your customers see you and the feeling they get after interacting with your business. It’s your promise to your clients; it tells them what they can expect from working with you. In a world where people have too many choices and too little time, branding is proving to be a crucial aspect of any business. However, when done right, it can also prove to be one of the priciest investments into your business – according to TechCrunch, the approximate cost of creating a logo and visual identity can take you anywhere from $5K to $15K with a freelancer or small firm and between $15K to $75K when working with a larger company.
Branding is no longer a pain point
Creating a distinctive brand that accurately reflects an agent’s offerings and personality is a non-negotiable. Through branding, agents are able to offer their prospective clients a glimpse into what makes them, well, them.
In real estate, Keller Williams is leading the way in innovating to help agents craft their own unique brand by means of Command. In doing so, agents may craft a brand that reflects their unique identity without the expense of a high-priced agency or the need for a full communication, marketing, or branding team.
With Command, Keller Williams agents can achieve this level of thoughtful branding using business-critical tools that solve pain points like database management, transaction management, team collaboration, and branding solutions. It empowers agents to take branding into their own hands – creating, redefining, and disseminating – so they can stay top of mind with consumers. Best of all, these tech tools are available at no additional cost.
Designs
With Designs in Command, agents have an exciting opportunity to create their own marketing and branding materials, including digital graphics, social assets, print materials, and landing pages. The tool hosts about 1,160 templates created by marketing pros so that agents can focus on propelling their business forward and easily crafting beautiful brand assets to forward their mission.
Zimmer Real Estate Group lead agent Trent Zimmer has experienced firsthand the convenience of Designs. When the team had a townhome listing they were keen on advertising in a specific neighborhood, they leveraged a pre-existing template in Designs to create a mailer in under five minutes. “Thirty-six hours later, I got a phone call from a homeowner,” he says. By creating the mailer, Zimmer secured a $390K townhome listing. “Let’s just call it a $12K paycheck that cost me $26 in Command,” he says. On a different occasion, the team used Designs to create a flier to share on community bulletin boards. “It took two minutes, and I got two phone calls the next day,” Zimmer says.
Campaigns
Advertising is a necessary part of any business’s branding efforts, and Command has a tool to help agents do just that – Campaigns.
With Campaigns, an agent can easily create a single ad and then syndicate it across several social platforms. Campaigns also give agents the ability to target their digital ads by user behavior, interests, and demographics. The goal is to remove as much of the guesswork as possible, allowing agents to easily and effectively amplify their brand.
A plethora of agents have found success by leveraging Campaigns to create high-converting Facebook ads. For a total cost of $25, the EZ Sales Team advertised a luxury home listing locally in Cleveland, Ohio, as well as Los Angeles, California. For a cost-per-lead of 68 cents, they were able to secure a pre-approved buyer in a short amount of time.
Built-in ad spend suggestions let agents better optimize their efforts so they can get the biggest bang for their buck. In Q2 ‘20, the average cost-per-lead for KW agents inside Command was $1.77 in the U.S. and Canada across social media platforms.
The KW App
One aspect of an agent’s brand that’s harder to measure is the breadth and depth of their own local expertise and how that’s imparted to clients.
Clients searching for a home want to work with an agent who not only knows the ins and outs of the purchasing process, but also has a nuanced and intimate knowledge of the areas they’re living. The KW App – which can be personally branded to the agent – allows them to make their expertise accessible, further fine-tuning the way they’d like to present themselves.
Through the KW App, agents are able to collect valuable consumer insights and lay the groundwork for relationships that last a lifetime while staying wrapped up in their unique brand through their personal touch. The customizable Guide tool allows agents to usher clients through every step of the homeownership journey, while the Search functionality allows them to provide their own recommendations for clients, gather insights from their search activity, and ultimately win their loyalty.
Agents can also flex their local expertise through Neighborhoods, which allows clients to view neighborhood stats, see local reviews, and calculate commute times, giving them a deeper understanding of their new location.
SmartPlans
With so many ways to communicate – emails, phone calls, texts, and follow-ups – often, it can be hard to manage client communications, let alone make sure your messaging is consistent and on-brand. We’ve all received a marketing email or text that didn’t speak to who we are or where we are in the buying cycle. And that can leave a lasting, negative impression.
SmartPlans allows agents to create communication workflows so they can respond to a client’s or lead’s needs and actions.
For example, a new contact can be assigned to a SmartPlan an agent specifically designs for new leads. This SmartPlan can include emails, texts, and action items designed to help the contact get to know the agent.
Agents can design SmartPlans to account for any and all types of clients, leads, interests, and behaviors. The application makes it easy to create targeted and intelligent touchpoints instead of mass blanketed emails or texts, strengthening the integrity and meaningfulness of an agent’s brand and letting clients know their agent is truly listening to them.
A Tech-Enabled Brand
With all the options, the noise, and the management that branding involves, agents need a way to streamline, amplify and target their efforts. Through technology, Keller Williams is making it easy – and economical – for agents to share their personality, passions and expertise with clients, and more effectively communicate they’re the best choice among competitors. Eager to learn more about all of Keller Williams’ tech offerings? It goes beyond branding.