BRANDCAST MAKES IT SIMPLE
Chapter 4
The real estate enterprise challenge
When it comes to delivering on a new and unfamiliar website strategy, smaller firms are better able to move quickly to get their organization set up for success. By contrast, large-scale real estate firms operate like enterprise-level companies in other industries. Business leaders at these corporate firms face a host of internal barriers that hinder their efforts to effect change. Big company challenges—inflexible organizational structures, shared budgets, cumbersome processes, decentralized control—can derail the best-laid plans.
If this is true at your company, you may be faced with difficulties in funding and resourcing your new website marketing approach. Moreover, your enterprise organization oversees numerous satellite, corporate-owned, and franchise offices across the country. Many affiliates will want to create their own local portfolio of websites, making it difficult to enforce brand consistency and marketing control.
Let’s take a closer look at your top challenges:
Inexperience with website go-to-market workflows
Your organization is unused to designing, launching, and managing websites quickly and efficiently. It’s a tall order to deliver individual property websites to market at the speed and scale required to support your business.
Lack of in-house website development expertise
Your in-house creative team includes numerous graphic designers that are experts at creating print materials for properties, agents, and your brand. Yet none have web development skills or experience.
Little or no budget for external developers
With no in-house expertise, you would need to hire web developers to create your portfolio of websites. However, custom development is costly and time-consuming, which may not support your budget or go-to-market timeframes.
Difficulty controlling satellite offices and franchises
As you’ve likely experienced with print collateral, some of your local offices have their own ideas when it comes to design and branding. With your new website plan, you want to prevent local offices from creating off-brand websites that do not align with your company’s guidelines. Your existing marketing and creative teams are already doing great work in print. Now, how do you overcome these challenges and transform your organization into high-performance website superstars?
Your Website Technology Strategy
As a marketing or operations leader, you’ve mapped out your ideal portfolio of real estate websites and gained internal support for your ideas. Now, it’s time for a reality check—you must keep costs contained, yet still support the scale of your business as your inventory grows. You must create content-rich websites as soon as properties go on the market, yet still maintain your current headcount. You want to support branch offices and agents in their efforts to maximize their local business, yet still maintain brand control over all websites associated with your firm.
The right technology solution will help you solve these challenges and deliver your modern website strategy with the speed, scale, and control needed to be successful. Let’s look at two common approaches: traditional web technologies and a modern website platform.
The High Price of Custom Coding
Traditional web technologies are designed for software developers, not marketers. These platforms require developers to custom code, launch, and maintain any type of website. Even a text update on a single page must be coded by a developer. For your marketers, this solution is usually too costly or cumbersome (or both). Even more painful, it requires long lead times for any new project or update. Most marketing organizations do not have plenty of developers on staff who are dedicated solely to their marketing projects.
For small real estate firms, the traditional approach means hiring external developer resources, which can be cost-prohibitive. For large companies, marketers must negotiate timelines with internal engineering or IT teams that are already over-stretched. Alternatively, hiring outside developers forces you to reallocate your marketing spend, which means creating fewer websites and downsizing marketing initiatives.
The Rise of the Modern Website Platform
Website technology has come a long way. Today, there is a new solution for marketing organizations that can help them deliver websites on time and on budget. A modern website platform is a cloud-based technology solution that empowers anyone on your team to design, launch, and manage the entire lifecycle of your websites, from design to launch to archive. This approach creates powerful economies of scale that can help companies maximize their existing resources and better control costs.
Website platforms provide easy-to-use, code-free tools for your creative teams to prototype, collaborate, and share design ideas before completing a website design. Because the platform also hosts your websites, your designer or marketer can push a site live with the click of a button. Later on, they can easily access your websites to update content in realtime. Website platforms also include content repositories to store and control reusable assets, such as logos, brand elements, and page templates.
Here are a few ways that a modern website platform can support your new website strategy: