Branding To Sell Homes

A design system is a single source of truth which groups all the elements that will allow teams to design, realize, and develop a product. While there are a myriad of benefits, here are a few...

• Streamline efforts and avoid repetition of menial tasks by reusing components of your Design System, while keeping best practices top of mind.
• Resolve design and tech debt even quicker with a reusable framework in place.
• Communicate your expectations as clearly as possible, with tangible guidelines available via your Design System.
• Provide processes and back-up as team members change.

Chapter One: Getting Started

As a real estate agent or marketer, you want to get as many eyes on your listings as possible. To effectively get eyes on your listings, you should have a marketing strategy in place, and that strategy should prioritize some sort of email marketing. In this day and age, it’s no secret that digital efforts are the most effective, with 99% of consumers reporting that they check their email every day and it’s their preferred way to receive updates from brands¹. Plus, the real estate market is beginning to skew towards millennials, with their generation making up 37% of 2019’s home buyers². It should come as no surprise that millennials prefer technology and are incredibly tech savvy, so how are you staying on top of your digital strategy to position yourself accordingly as millennials (and Gen Z’s!) continue to take over the homebuyer market?

How many times have you gone to create a marketing piece and then realized that you don’t know the hex # of the color that your coworker previously used on a button? You send them a quick message, but now you’re stuck waiting for their response before you can finish your piece. Or, you can pick something that’s close enough, but then you’re headed down a dangerous road where you’ll never really have solid brand standards, just loose ideas floating around the office.

Enter a Design System. A Design System is a single source of truth which groups all the elements that will allow teams to design, realize and develop a product⁵. Beyond ensuring brand compliance, a Design System can alleviate a myriad of problems:

• Help everyone involved understand why decisions were made, while also being required       to ultimately make less decisions, with a single source being the most updated and accurate resource.
• Streamline efforts and avoid repetition of menial tasks by reusing components of your Design System, while keeping best practices top of mind.
• Resolve design and tech debt even quicker with a reusable framework in place.
• Communicate your expectations as clearly as possible, with tangible guidelines available via your Design System.
• Provide processes and back-up as team members change.

Maybe you want to improve the quality of your branding and the consistency with which you’re able to release marketing pieces. A SMART goal for these particular milestones could look like this:

• Create two on-brand sales collateral one-pagers
• Send three targeted, on-brand newsletters per month
• Post on each social media platform with on-brand graphics at least every other day

Now, when you look back at your Design System, you’ll remember where you were before it was implemented and be able to see tangible results. These can be quarterly goals, yearly goals, or maybe even just a weekly goal, but being able to check those boxes at the end of it will feel great (and keep you motivated to continue using your Design System!).

Once you have your goals in place, it’s time to think about the “why?”. Why are you taking the time to organize and streamline your design assets? How will it help you and your business and it’s marketing goals? Who is going to be using it? These are tough questions to answer yourself if you work on a team, so don’t be afraid to collaborate. Find out what your peers are looking to accomplish or what their particular pain points are and how your Design System can alleviate them. After all, how are you going to get the results you want if you don’t know what exactly it is that you want? And how are you going to convince the rest of your team to use the System consistently if it’s not answering to their needs as well? This is the time to get your ducks in a row so your hard work won’t go to waste.