Is It Time to Modernize YOUR Brand?
Let's face it: many of the most well-respected companies in real estate have not spent a lot of time on their logo in a LONG TIME! The industry is besieged with new players with huge marketing budgets and very contemporary branding. While a logo is not everything, it can certainly set the tone and tell others you're evolving and that your brand is still relevant today. Let's look at a few great examples of brand/logo overhauls:

3 Ways to Refresh Your Tired Real Estate Website
How long has the anchor content on your website been up on the web? Take a trip through your real estate website with an eye on how many images and how much text could be updated for a fresh new look and better usability. As you look through the site, keep one question top-of-mind: If I am a regular visitor, would I be bored having seen this content over and over? Here are some tips and ideas for refreshing your site that will make it more interesting, especially for repeat visitors. You could also generate more leads.

5 Tips to Finding Images for Your Website
Images communicate, draw attention and create interest. Images can keep people on your website if chosen correctly or lead people to leave your website. When choosing images for your website, it is important to choose images that are high quality, relevant, aligned with your brand, aesthetically pleasing and attention grabbing. So where can you get great images? Here are five ways we get images for our own site.

Real Estate Iconography
When it comes to crafting a strong brand for a real estate company, never underestimate the power of being able to express a name without directly spelling it out. And there's no better way to do this than with iconography. I've already discussed how much I love typography here. Its power is in its subtlety, as it gives form to your voice and shapes your brand. And it's a popular tool. Take a look at logos from some of the biggest real estate brands in the world: They all use typography as the dominant element forming their logos, and almost all of them exclusively use text. Century 21 is the only one here that references the shape of a house. In real estate, names give you strength and make these logos iconic. Icons are less subtle. The beauty in them is a bit more apparent, in that a singular icon has the ability to express many words, even sentences, at times. At TRIBUS, we've championed a strong icon in our logo (along with typography that we developed extensively), which you can read all about here. Zillow is another real estate company featuring a prominent icon in their logo. Nike and Apple serve as some of the best examples outside the industry.

How to Be Successful Posting on Pinterest: The Infographic
Want to have your pins re-pinned like crazy on Pinterest? Create an infographic. A few years ago I created this infographic about How to Ensure Your Success as a Real Estate Blogger. After publishing it on my website, I pinned it to Pinterest. I had at times noticed that it was repinned quite a bit, but never paid much mind to it. Then yesterday I looked at the stats and saw that it has been re-pinned over 3,100 times. Holy cow! I looked at the stats on all my other pins and saw that of nearly 300 pins, my second highest pinned image is 66 times (and the third highest is just 33 pins). That's almost 50 times the amount of pinning! The thing is, creating that infographic took me 50 times longer than any of the images I posted on Pinterest. So you could say I got out of it what I put in. I haven't created another infographic since then because of the time it took to do that first one (a few hours). That is, until today! Turns out making infographics is no longer the massive chore it was just a few years ago. Using a tool Canva.com, you can create a great looking, super-shareable infographic in about 30 mins. If the results are anything like my first infographic, I plan on doing a lot more of these. How to Make a Successful Infographic The above infographic was designed to be easily noticed and digested. On the next page is a little more insight on the included eight points.

How One Broker Leverages His Public Records/Tax Solution for Sphere Marketing
CRS Data is among the leading tax systems in America, known for their outstanding system design, great customer service, and excellent county record tax collection. If you use CRS today, you are probably a fan. Today, I want to talk about a CRS feature that is making a profound impact on the effectiveness of direct marketing for Murney Associates, Realtors. Murney Associates is a six office brokerage located around Springfield, MO. They are locally known for their excellence in marketing and a strong believer in sphere/farm marketing. Last week, I had a chance to connect with Kyle Drenon, Director of Marketing for Murney, who shared some information with us about how they are training sales associates in their firm to leverage CRS label export with outstanding results. CRS has the ability for sales associates to perform subdivision searches in prospecting. Agents can quickly pull a mailing list of a subdivision and create a farm. Murney provides a service to develop Jumbo, or oversized postcards to mail to that farm. The company manages this marketing communication at a localized level. For example, adding a very localized primary photo from the community on one side of the postcard and adding very localized market data for the neighborhood along with recent listings, sold listings, etc. Mr. Drenon indicates that agents are getting great response rates from these mailings because the consumer is getting information that is highly relevant to them.

[VIDEO] Marketing Excellence through Automation
Our series on marketing automation culminated yesterday in a live webinar. We heard from leaders of large brokerages who are operating the same enterprise level marketing solution, but using it in completely different ways that are unique to the needs of their companies. They're at the forefront of a national trend of brokers who are turning to automation technology to generate marketing materials for their listings. According to Imprev's most recent Thought Leader Survey, 56% of brokers plan to implement marketing automation in 2016. Want to learn how marketing automation can fit your unique business needs? Watch the webinar below:

Create Great Marketing Content with Canva
In today's highly competitive real estate market, it is vital to have broad ranging skill sets. However, even some of the most seasoned and skilled real estate professionals fall short in certain areas like design. Though you may know your properties or market like the back of your hand and can talk endlessly about them, creating a professional looking marketing piece is a daunting task for many. Whether lacking the eye for creating appealing marketing designs from scratch or simply not having enough hours in the day to devote to such an undertaking, many in the market are looking for ways to address this issue. This is where Canva comes into play! As with many creative projects, the truly hardest part is getting started, but with Canva's twenty plus templates and innumerable design options you can more easily and quickly find the right design for whatever real estate project you're working on. Here are just a few pre-sized design templates that you can currently create: Facebook posts Ads Covers and posters

Vector Images For Your Real Estate Website Explained
When we work with companies to brand products and websites for them, we request vector logos - preferably in an .ai, .eps or .svg format. But what is a vector logo, and why do we want one? Designers always prefer working with vector logos. The simplest reason is that vectors are extremely versatile and give us more freedom to resize as needed, while always maintaining the best quality possible for the treatment of your logo. But what exactly is a vector logo? A vector image is a file that uses coordinates to define the size and position of points, lines, curves and shapes to create an image. This means that no matter how the image is resized (whether it's a small logo on a business card, or a large one on a billboard), it always looks really clear and crisp. The most popular vector file formats are AI (Adobe Illustator format), EPS (Encapsulated Postscript) and the up and coming SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) which can be used on the web. This differs from a raster image (also known as a "bitmap" or "flattened" image), where each pixel is a specific defined color value. The biggest limitation of a flattened image is that it can't be made larger than the original size. Typical raster file formats are JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP.