Marketing in a regulated industry takes work, but it doesn’t need to be overwhelming
By Adam Mohrbacher
No matter what your industry is, marketing can feel like a juggling act. You’ve got to nail your key messages, define your target audience, and ensure alignment between collateral, branding and larger organizational goals. To put it another way, it’s a lot of balls to keep in the air. Working in a heavily regulated industry throws another variable into an already very complicated mix.
Regulatory Considerations
First, let’s understand some of the regulatory considerations for marketing in the real estate settlement services and title industries. One important area is co-branding and co-marketing service agreements. The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) explicitly prohibits any arrangement where a “fee, kickback, or thing of value” is exchanged for referrals of settlement service business; for example, among the many pitfalls to watch out for, it is important that your contribution to the shared cost does not appear to be supplementing or providing free advertising to a potential referrer. Carefully structuring shared advertising or promotional efforts is essential to avoiding regulatory risk.
RESPA is a federal law, but title agencies must also be sure to adhere to state-specific laws and regulations, most of which either mirror RESPA or go beyond it with additional rules around marketing practices. These state laws can add nuances beyond RESPA requirements, so understanding your state’s laws is also extremely important.
Establishing effective workflows
Given the regulatory complexity, title agencies — particularly smaller, independent ones — need to be strategic when establishing effective marketing workflows. Often, that means standardizing as many processes as possible so your team can focus exclusively on being creative. Here are a few ways to do just that:
- Collaborate early: Bring whoever handles compliance for your agency into the marketing conversation early in the campaign lifecycle. Doing this ahead of time makes sure marketing ideas align with RESPA and state-specific rules well before time and resources are spent on campaign development.
- Document everything: Whenever you create co-marketing agreements or joint promotional materials, it is essential to document to demonstrate compliance.
- Clarify your procedures: If you have numerous people working on marketing initiatives, then having strong review and approval processes is a must. It is important to also take the time to train your marketing personnel to establish consensus and reduce friction.
- Use templates: Creating marketing templates that are approved by your compliance department can be a good strategy for eliminating regulatory gray areas and expediting timelines.
Common pitfalls to avoid
Equally important to standardizing your processes, though, is simply knowing the common ways agencies run afoul of compliance rules:
- Think small: When co-marketing, even small gifts or expenditures can be considered as things of value under RESPA.
- Train your team: Everyone who touches your agency’s marketing processes should be trained on regulatory basics.
- When in doubt, seek professional help: RESPA and state compliance are complicated areas of law. If you ever have any doubts, it’s best to contact an attorney with RESPA expertise.
Calm, cool and compliant marketing
As anyone who has done it before can tell you, marketers, at the end of the day, are jugglers. Every campaign has many moving parts, so many, in fact, that compliance concerns can be what causes you to drop one or several balls. Robust collaboration, documentation and standardization can help mitigate these risks, ensuring your marketing is calm, cool and compliant.
