Luke:
Your brand director, Art, at MAXA, said that you have an incredible brand with amazing design templates in the Maxa platform. How are you able to create and design compelling marketing material while staying true to the brand?
Kathryn:
One of the reasons we partnered with MAXA is to extend our brand and explore it. Of course, we have a fantastic in house design team, but we were looking for a cost-effective way to ramp up our offerings to our field marketing team and increase local office support. And so we partnered with MAXA, the design services, and of course, working with a vendor that is able to scale with us as we grow our brand and look at it from a different perspective. MAXA’s design studio allows us to add digital components and other ways that we can showcase our brand, market ourselves, and then let that trickle down to our local offices and field teams, which use a lot of social media with different digital promotions. The platform lets us to take our print and digital designs, get them in the field to someone that isn't a designer by trade, but be able to then generate pieces that are within brand, easy for them to edit, and then place in local publications and on social.
Luke:
You mentioned that the company has always done a lot of print marketing. Tell me, how important do you feel that print marketing is or has been and still is relevant now?
Kathryn:
Yes, many commercial real estate publications still produce monthly pieces. When I say print, I mean something that you can pick up in addition to monthly digital magazines. In commercial real estate, some of those tried and true trade publications are where agents, originators and clients go to on a regular basis. In the past year, we have also focused on new ways to market the company, agents and originators, properties, and successes through digital platforms as well. And if we're really consistent with the way that our brand looks and our messaging is communicated, we can be just as successful using other sources to get in front of potential clients, our own agents, and competitor agents that we want to join our team. So utilizing MAXA’s platform has helped us think a little bit beyond what we have in the past. It's important that we give tools like MAXA to our local field teams across North America so that we look cohesive across every client touchpoint.
Luke:
So then, having said that, how important would you say it is for any company and their sales associates to stay on top of their marketing initiatives?
Kathryn:
Right, of course, it's important to not get stale. MAXA works with some of the top real estate companies and they're seeing what other companies are doing, what's trending, what agents love, what gets the highest engagement. And so I think that kind of partnership also helps us with staying true to our brand, while also allowing us to expand, change and grow. That's one of the reasons I wanted to partner with MAXA, because we want to continually evolve our brand and create materials that are built correctly for every type of placement.
Luke:
I love that you said ‘continually evolve the brand’ because I think that's super important.
Now, you've explained a lot about some of the key features and the great things in the MAXA platform, but what would you say is your favorite feature currently in the platform? Or what do you find yourself using the most?
Kathryn:
I like that MAXA has helped us keep the brand consistent across all materials while allowing us to scale and expedite designs. A week or so ago, we had 25 agents all receive an award throughout the United States, and we were able to create a template within MAXA to make it easy for our marketing team to drag and drop and personalize, and then promote the awards and recognitions all at the same time. It allowed us to have that brand consistency. It was timely. I think there were successes on a lot of different levels, both internally and externally. The platform being able to scale as we scale our marketing support is the part of MAXA that I think is a great addition to our team.
Luke:
I didn't really think until you started saying that you'll be able to have complete brand cohesiveness across all of the local offices before it even gets to the agents, which is super important for a company like yourself and for that growth as well.
Kathryn:
Right. We want all of our marketing coordinators to be comfortable, excited, well versed in the platform, and then one day I would personally love to give it to all of our agents. But in the meantime, we're already seeing such great successes because our marketing staff creates a lot of marketing materials for our agents and originators. So having it in our field marketers hands first, I think has been very successful and also helping us grow our library. In the meantime, we're also expanding it out to other partners like our recruiting team to ensure every post on LinkedIn and every email that a recruiter sends keeps within our brand.
Luke:
It's great to hear that, to hear the different perspectives of how the platform can work throughout the company, in different segments of the company.
So what's something that you would say you do consistently in your marketing and communications that's extremely important and key to your success?
Kathryn:
Whenever we design something and create communication or material, it's important for us to think about every way that it could be used. So you're not only announcing something internally, you're announcing it externally. What are the different vehicles that you're announcing? Could it be translated into a recruiting piece, whether that be email, print or social for a manager to use? That's one of the things that I specifically focus on for my team. If we're creating something unique and engaging, spending a lot of time on content and the language, how could we then modify it to target different audiences? It's imperative that we proactively play out all of the use cases of a piece of collateral.
Luke:
Well, I think that's great. What I heard you say is that you're actually thinking of the end person that's going to see the content. So all the way through that process and all the time that you're putting into creating the content, you're always conscious of how that's going to look on the other end to the person that's going to view it. And that's extremely important for communications across the board.
What are you working on right now that's really exciting you, anything in communications or promotions or marketing?
Kathryn:
We’re streamlining the promotion and recognition for our agents across the board. We want to make sure that we celebrate everyone as best we can. It’s important to us that we have materials at the ready and timely to shout it from the rooftops, let them share it on their social channels, or make those announcements because recognition helps them get in front of clients. In addition, we're revisiting all of our recruiting materials - and that's everyone from a seasoned, experienced agent or originator, those new to commercial real estate, and even corporate staff. Our team is focused on creating consistency across recruiting pieces to make that experience seamless and special.
Luke:
I love that you gave that advice and you've given some fantastic advice through all of your answers. I would love to know if there's something specific or kind of unique to your skill set that you go to day to day that could be used as a piece of advice for other agents, recruiters, brokerages that they could implement in their marketing. You don't have to give all your secrets away!
Kathryn:
In our industry, you have to think about the client first and what their expectation is and then layer in the way that an agent or originator would be most successful in delivering said message. Marcus & Millichap is a strong brand and our differentiators makeup the cornerstone of our marketing. But when you're in a relationship business like real estate, I believe in always coming back to the sales process as a best practice. Understanding what gets a deal done is important for a marketer in the real estate space.
Luke:
That's fantastic. There's so many channels and ways that brands and companies can reach the end user or the end client. Where do you see the future of marketing going or shifting?
Kathryn:
With all the distractions and the ways that you can connect with someone, consistency is key. I've seen a lot of struggles in our industry, both in residential and commercial, with keeping in contact with a past or potential client. You have to be doing all of the things to stay relevant and be consistent with calling, email marketing, and social. At the company level, we’re consistent in our advertising placements - like the trade publications next to our competitors - and in our message. You have to take that holistic view, be everywhere and be consistent with frequency and messaging.
Luke:
I'm glad you said consistency. That's my favorite part of communications in general!
As you were talking, I wanted to ask you one last thing. You made me think because you said about being consistent or present in print media next to your competitors. Is there anything you've seen that stuck in your mind that was very much out of the box with regards to commercial real estate marketing that wasn't inside print?
Kathryn:
Yes, we've done some interesting brand ads that I haven't seen done by other commercial real estate companies. I think there's a lot of room for growth and being a little more outside of the box in CRE and we've done that at Marcus Millichap. Our last two brand campaigns have been non-traditional CRE style campaigns. They have featured lifestyle imagery and called out why our agents and originators are experts in the field. We’ve seen great results and I think we're going to try to continue with that style because it’s grabbing people's attention, making them think, and also showing that we're doing something different. Commercial real estate has room to do things differently when it comes to marketing and branding, and our team is at the forefront.
