6 Key Objectives That Should Drive Your Real Estate Brokerage Marketing in 2024
Developing a marketing plan for your real estate brokerage can be a tricky endeavor.
But before you do any planning or content brainstorming, you need to know who and what your marketing is for. And that means you need to identify your audience and your goals.
In this next section, I’m going to share the six key objectives that need to drive your real estate brokerage’s marketing. These objectives are only the beginning, and you should spend even more time getting more detailed and specific in each section (but that’s for another blog post!).
As you read through this list, keep in mind that your brokerage may give different levels of importance to each item.
You’ll also notice that there is overlap between several of the categories, which will be very helpful once you’re ready to get more concrete with your marketing plan.
6 Key Objectives That Should Drive Your Real Estate Brokerage Marketing in 2024
1. Recruiting.
How are you going to attract like-minded, talented real estate agents to your brokerage? By showing who you are and how your brokerage can benefit them, through your marketing. Of course, marketing is only one component of recruiting, but it’s an important one. In the same way your real estate agents need to impress and demonstrate their value to buyers and sellers, you need to do the same thing for other real estate agents and potential employees.
Ask yourself these questions:
Why would an agent want to join your brokerage?
Are you providing evidence in your marketing that your brokerage satisfies those wants (and needs)?
Next, you need to understand how you will know if your marketing in how it relates to recruiting was successful. At the beginning of the year, you need to set a goal for how many real estate agents you want in your office and what type of agent they are (Brand new? Some experience? Top producer?). You also need to create a tangible marketing plan so you can evaluate whether or not your marketing was successful. This will be important for next year’s planning.
2. Retention
You need to keep your current real estate agents (your clients!) happy. When they see the marketing that their brokerage creates, they should feel proud. Dazzle them, and make them feel like you’ve got the best marketing in town. Of course, marketing is only one element that goes into retention, but I know plenty of agents who were attracted to new brokerages because of the brokerage’s marketing AND the opportunity to get assistance with their own marketing.
Another element of your brokerage’s marketing to consider is that much of your social media marketing is FOR your agents. Often, I’ll see that a brokerage’s agents are the main people who are engaging with their social media; it’s not necessarily the general public or clients. Your marketing helps your agents stay connected when they’re not in the office, or when you have a large brokerage that may not be as close-knit.
3. Marketing Materials for Your Agents
Providing your real estate agents with marketing materials is a huge value add. Anyone who has created their own content (and hired others to help them) knows that creating high-quality marketing materials each year costs thousands of dollars. Not only is it a benefit to your agents, but providing marketing materials to your agents makes it that much easier for them to put out high-quality content that in turn promotes your brand/brokerage.
This doesn’t mean that you have to necessarily create a ton of unique content for each individual agent (although that’s certainly a value add!). For example, if you create a buyer and seller guide that lives on your brokerage’s website, you should also offer your agents the buyer and seller guide for their own use whether it’s online or in print format. They can edit and tweak it so it’s more specific to their work style, and they should also be able to put their own branding on it.
On that note, whenever possible, your agents should build on the marketing materials you provide them with. They need to customize this content so everyone in your office isn’t posting the same cookie cutter content.
4. Setting Standards (& Raising the Bar)
You should be executing your marketing strategy at such a high level that your brokerage’s marketing is aspirational for your agents (or at least most of them). They should feel excited and inspired when they see your marketing material. You also want to make sure that you stand out in your local market, and that you’re keeping up with the times.
If you offer marketing education to your agents, you also want to make sure you practice what you preach! (On that note, are you offering marketing education to your agents? You should be! Check out my webinars.)
5. Building Your Brand
First, you need to figure out what your brand is, and you need to understand and be able to articulate your brokerage’s vision, values, mission, and culture. How can you show everyone who you are and what your company is about? How can you build brand recognition? How can you build trust within your local market and industry? You need to show vs. tell.
In my opinion, many real estate companies still have a lot of work to do to build trust with the public. There are plenty of people out there who have had incredibly negative experiences with unprofessional real estate agents. Add that to the fact that there are so many real estate-related scams and overly sales-y agents out there, and many people are wary of real estate agents to say the least.
6. Attracting Buyers & Sellers
In my experience, individual real estate agents and smaller teams are the ones who really attract buyer and seller clients. I believe that people are typically attracted to a specific agent versus a general brand or company. However, your marketing should certainly still work to attract buyers and sellers, and being able to give referrals to your agents is a huge value add. Your marketing should demonstrate why someone should trust your company (and conveniently offer agents marketing materials that they can build on and customize themselves).
An Example of Marketing That Checks ALL the Boxes
The great thing about these objectives is that one single piece of marketing can accomplish several (if not all) of these points. One effective way to do this is to feature your real estate agents in your marketing. (However, do keep in mind that rarely will all marketing materials satisfy all six objectives each time. That is 100% fine and expected!)
An excellent example of this is a blog series I worked on for Windermere Professional Partners in Pierce County, Washington. For this blog series, I interviewed individual agents at the brokerage and wrote each agent an in-depth blog post that offered a behind-the-scenes look at everything that goes into successfully selling a home. You can find links to each of the blog posts in the series here: “What's It Like to List Your Home with a Windermere Professional Partners REALTOR®?”
So let’s take a closer look at how this blog series meets all six of the marketing objectives:
Retention: These info-packed blogs gave each agent a moment in the spotlight. It is clear that they are doing wonderful things for their clients, and your brokerage wants to tell everyone about it, boosting your agents’ business in the process.
Recruiting: These blog posts are saying: “Look at the incredibly knowledgeable agents who could be your colleagues if you join our brokerage! These are the type of talented, thoughtful, hard-working people who work for us.”
Marketing Materials for Your Agents: The featured agents can use their unique blog post in any way they’d like. It’s on the brokerage website and was posted on the brokerage’s social media accounts. The agents can share the blog on their own social accounts, include a link to it in their email newsletters, they could have the blog converted into a print piece they mail out to their clients or include in their listing presentation, etc. There’s so much that can be done with this content after the initial investment.
Setting Standards (& Raising the Bar): How many brokerages create high-quality, in-depth content like this that shows off their agents? I think you already know the answer: Not many! Plus, this type of content is something an agent could be creating on their own blog.
Building Your Brand: These realtors reflect their specific brokerage’s brand (our vision, values, mission, culture) and this piece of content demonstrates these things. It shows how the agents help people reach their dreams, they are knowledgeable and thoughtful, and more. (These are just a few of the characteristics that describe this particular brokerage’s brand).
Attracting Buyers & Sellers: “I want a realtor like that on my side when I sell my home!” This blog series provides tangible, specific details about how these agents successfully sold listings for their seller clients.
If you’d like to learn more about incorporating your agents into your brokerage’s marketing plan, you’re in luck because I wrote an entire blog post about this!
