In real estate terms this simply means that if you tamper with your branding and advertising, even a little, fewer potential buyers will be attracted to your listings because there’s less chance that they’ll remember which brand your property is listed under, and there’s less chance they’ll be able to find the listing online.

Regardless of which product or service a company provides, smart, cut through and (most of all) consistent marketing is absolutely critical.

It’s no accident that some of the world’s best businesses not only have the best brands, but the most consistent and doggedly defended brands. It’s a rule that applies to the professional services sector as much as consumer goods. Think for a minute about which bank you use. I can guarantee that every letter, monthly statement or any marketing materials that you receive from your bank will be perfectly branded and reproduced to a very high, and highly consistent, standard.

Can you imagine an employee of a bank or a law firm sending you a letter (full of spelling mistakes) on photocopied paper instead of a perfect, original letterhead? It just wouldn’t happen, wouldn’t be allowed to happen, and for good reason.

Employees of banks, solicitors and law firms, just as much as retail outlets and consumer goods manufacturers, wouldn’t dream of taking their company’s brand into their own hands and changing it in any way, and this makes me wonder why so many real estate agents do!

I see a lot of real estate agents making the mistake of trying to differentiate themselves or, worse still, their listings from their brand. This is usually by just tweaking the layout and design of a press ad, a sign board or an online listing, changing a font here or an icon there, moving the logo. It might not seem like much, but it will eventually inflict a death by a thousand cuts to your brand and, therefore, your business and ultimately your own income stream.

The power of your brand is your best friend. Every agent should embrace the brand that they’re working under and leverage it to its full potential, not strive to differentiate from it.

How do you know how much to spend marketing real estate?

Some interesting survey data that just became available should be of help. A video marketing company in the US surveyed 1,304 real estate agents to see how much they spent. There isn’t a lot of info here, but what there is is gold.

One thing that jumped out at me: The agents surveyed said a significant portion of their listing budget was spent on newspapers, even though only 20.4 percent said they think this medium is “effective.”

Yet, 49 percent felt that online ads were “very effective.” The reason more agents aren’t putting their money where the results are is that they feel the vendors want print advertising.

Read the press release.

Read the eMarketer story.

Every now and then, the internet just starts to seem too damn complicated.

You’ve got XML, search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine marketing, pay per click, pay per action, PPM, social media, semantic web, viral, web2.0, web3.0 and even some talk of web4.0.

Oh wait; Web4.0 is already dead.

For people like real estate agents and professional communicators, people like me, sometimes you just want to go out back and put a bullet in your head rather than have to keep up with all this stuff.

(Then again, there are plenty of people who don’t keep up with it but feel very happy to spout off about it anyway. Maybe I could learn from them. Maybe I already have.)

That’s why I was so relieved to read this post on online and offline marketing, by Jack Trout. The gist of it is that a marketing strategy should above all be obvious and easy to understand.

That simplicity is one reason good online marketing strategies work so well.

It’s not as easy as just coming up with something obvious. Sometimes, it’s hard to get others to adopt your obvious online real estate marketing ideas because they don’t seem clever or surprising enough.

Trout writes that, in these situations, he gives his “evident speech”, which goes like this: “You’re right, it is evident. But if it’s evident to you it will also be evident to your customers, which is why it will work.”

According to Trout, the handbook for the Obvious Movement is only 40 pages long and was published back in 1916–about 90 years ago. It’s a slender book titled Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Businessman.

I managed to find a free download of Obvious Adams online, from the US Library of Congress. Beware. It’s a scan of the original and weighs in at 1.4 MB. Do not try this on a dial-up connection

Read it, and see what obvious ideas occur to you.