Social Media Strategy: Align Your Social Media with Your Marketing Efforts

One of the main goals of a marketing strategy is to promote your property and generate leads – it's aimed at spreading the word about your property. While many companies segment their marketing efforts into smaller compartments, we’ve found that aligning marketing from all different channels can give you the best results for turning those leads into tenants. Finding measurable results from social media is a challenge because the “metrics” in social marketing really come down to your number of likes and follows and how much engagement your posts generate, while these things don’t directly translate into new lease agreements at your properties. But by aligning your social marketing with all the other ways you market your property, you’ll reap the rewards of the time your team spends promoting your property on social channels like Facebook and Instagram.

Social media is a great medium for distributing content and communicating important things that can garner interest on your properties, but since social allows for very few words and relies mostly on visuals, your efforts may be best served by thinking about social media marketing and content marketing as two parts of a whole strategy. Many companies have different teams handling their various marketing initiatives, where the website, other online efforts, print marketing, and others don’t work in tandem. But with a little shift in perspective, you’ll find that because these things complement each other well, you’ll get the most from your marketing strategy when all your efforts and people align and work together.

Alan See from the Marketing Growth Podcast, which “reveals the most excellent growth marketing techniques used by top marketers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders in the world to generate sales and grow businesses”, recently discussed opportunities for aligning your social media and content marketing plans that we’d like to share in ways that pertain specifically to the commercial property management space:

1. Define Your Consistent Brand Voice

Your management company has a personality, so the voice you use in marketing is a key factor in public perception. Incorporate your core values into your digital identity to ensure your brand voice is consistent across all your marketing channels. This is why our Social Media Strategy series last time talked about why you need a content creator rather than relegating this to an intern.

2. Use Retargeting to Engage Visitors in New Ways

Retargeting is a digital marketing strategy that identifies when a user has already visited your website, allowing you to engage them in new ways. While this technique requires a deeper understanding of site traffic analytics and technical capabilities to steer the visitor, the spirit of retargeting is about reaching visitors in new ways. By engaging potential tenants you’re already working with to learn more about your property via your website and social media channels, you can dabble in retargeting without the traditional technical requirements that actual “retargeting” demands. By engaging with them via social media, you can learn more about what folks are interested in and drive content that moves them further along in your sales funnel. By engaging with your existing tenants via social media, you can drive content that improves their work life and experiences on your campus.

3. Repurpose Your Content Across Multiple Channels

Website content should not just be about your property’s available space. To get prospective tenants interested in leasing with you, your challenge is to show them (in many ways) how your property can meet their needs and benefit their employees – especially in the world we now find ourselves in where employee retention is crucial for businesses. Showing a building picture or site plan and detailing the square footage just isn’t going to cut it. The online experience – for both potential and existing tenants – is increasingly becoming about building community.

When you spend a lot of time and effort on creating engaging website content that gives a real picture of life on your campus, you can repurpose and expand on this content through social media. Get creative with videos, memes, infographics and podcasts to use this very visual medium to paint a picture. Repurposing means taking your existing content and changing the format in which you present it. For instance, you can:

• design an infographic with the statistics from your blog post.
• take the gist of the topic and spin it into a meme.
• create a video that presents a blog post so your visitor can see a member of your property team instead of reading your content.
• promote newly added content pages on your website on your social media channels to draw attention to more visitors.
• use your social networks to promote property events, both leading up to and during events to create FOMO (fear of missing out) in real-time.
• feature content from a lunch-and-learn you’ve hosted in your blog and highlight that on your social media.
• use event hashtags in all your marketing to create buzz.

4. Link Your Website, Print Marketing, and Social Media Channels for Better Visibility

To build your social media presence, your website and print marketing pieces should supply links to your social media channels. Likewise, all your social media handles and print marketing pieces should also direct visitors back to your website. Linking your site, print marketing, and social media handles can increase your brand awareness and visibility. It also makes it easier for potential tenants to find more information about your properties. To further build your social media presence and generate more leads, you can also include social sharing buttons to your email communication and QR Codes on your print pieces; don’t just link your website, but also include your social media channels. When you use a good QR Code generator, you can highlight all your links via a single QR code.

Want to see what we mean? Scan this QR Code with your phone to see how our parent company WTE Solutions uses quick response codes to promote all their channels at once:

 

5. Use a Marketing Calendar to Tailor Your Messages Across Your Campaigns

In addition to Alan’s list, we also want to stress the importance of using a marketing calendar for your planning. Most organizations use a marketing calendar to outline their key campaigns for the year, but you can take this a step further to also define each campaign’s key messages, CTAs (Call to Action), and how they will be delivered in each of your marketing channels. A good campaign will be used across multiple channels rather than in a vacuum of just your website or just in magazine ads.

Tailoring your marketing messages for your different channels is also critical. Use pictures to convey messages on Instagram, but repurpose that into text for Facebook and Twitter, and use a combination of the two for print advertising. Consider that the right amount of text is different for each medium, so repurposing your marketing content and linking multiple channels together may be the best way to grow your reach.

MOBLZ Mobile Amenity Services Provide New Content Opportunties

One of the important things we do every day is communicate with tenants about the mobile amenities MOBLZ brings to the commercial properties we work with. No matter what types of events your property is hosting, they’ll only be well-attended when you spread the word. Marketing your event calendar online and promoting your events via social media is the next step for your marketing team. These are things we can help your team do so you can focus on what’s important to your property and the day-to-day with your tenants. Schedule a free consultation with our dedicated MOBLZ solution representative Becky to see how the MOBLZ vendor certification, reservation, and communication system can help you do more with less.