Creating a social advertising strategy for a portfolio of properties takes organization, trust, and technology. The corporate team needs to trust the individual property managers to provide valuable input from the local level, and local property teams rely on corporate to provide strategic oversight, budgets, and a library of branded content. This combination of local expertise and corporate resources can help a management company excel in localized social media marketing, but it’s only possible with a tool that facilitates this coordination.

Facebook Ads Manager is a powerful advertising tool, but it isn’t designed for multi-location businesses to localize ads. In a property management sense, localizing ads means tailoring individual ads to each property in a portfolio. Each property in your portfolio will have demographic and location differences. The ad text and images should update with the specific amenities, neighborhood information and community perks that make each property unique. Instead of creating an individual ad for each property location, corporate property management companies need a scalable solution, like SOCi, that enables the creation of custom, localized ads to 100s of properties at once.  

Here is how property management companies can implement a powerful localized Facebook ads strategy leveraging a combination of local expertise, corporate resources, and social advertising tools.

Set different ad objectives for different properties

Different apartment communities have different audiences and different marketing objectives. A property manager at a brand new property is going to have different goals than a property manager’s at an established community. A property in the heart of a city might have a waiting list for prospective renters, while a property in the suburbs might need an aggressive approach to finding new residents.

Using a tool like SOCi, property managers can set an ad objective for multiple properties in a portfolio. The ad objective is what you want the audience to do when they see the ad. These objectives fall into three categories:

Awareness: The objective is to generate interest in the property.

Consideration: The objective is to get people to seek out more information about the property.

Conversions: The objective is to get people to schedule a tour or fill out a lease application.

Each property in a management company’s portfolio will need to use one of these objectives at some point. By grouping properties together that require the same ad objectives, property management companies can assign one objective to ad campaigns for multiple properties. If a few properties recently went through renovations, it’s wise to use a consideration objective to get people to learn about the new amenities. Highly-anticipated new properties don’t need awareness; they need conversions. The different property groupings can benefit from dynamic ad messaging, dynamic imagery and different ad objectives.

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Enable dynamic images and text within each ad

Every property has a different feature that’s worth showing off with high-quality imagery. For some, it might be the resort-style pool. For others, it might be the walk-in closets. Using a social advertising tool like SOCi, property management companies can set up a single ad campaign with a unique photo for each property. Through SOCi, you can create one ad with hundreds of different photos, dynamically inserted into the ad, and dynamic text to update the message to reflect the property’s location.

For property management companies, best practices dictate that social media strategies should incorporate a localized approach as much as possible. According to a research report created by SOCi and the Local Search Association, Local Facebook Pages — the pages that are created for each individual property in a management portfolio — receive 66 percent of content impressions and 72 percent of engagements compared to corporate brand pages.

A localized advertising strategy can work hand in hand with an organic localized approach to social media, and property management companies need both in order to be successful in this space. Your Facebook ads will sometimes take users to your Local Business Pages, and those pages need to be updated with original content that users can engage with. The organic content establishes your business’ presence. The ads promote your business’ growth.

Use the hybrid management model

There are three different models that property management companies can take with regards to a localized social marketing approach; a centralized model in which the corporate team manages all ads for all properties; a decentralized model in which local property teams create and manage their own ads without corporate input; and a hybrid model which incorporates both corporate input and local property teams’ expertise. While individual property managers know their target residents and competitive advantages, they might not have time to create Facebook ads or know how to use Facebook’s advanced targeting futures.   

However, ads with dynamic images and text are a prime use-case for the hybrid model of social advertising management. In this scenario, the property teams would provide images of their properties for ads, which corporate can then approve and use in targeted ads. Through SOCi’s platform, localized ads with dynamic text and imagery can be created for 10s to 100s of properties with a click of a button. The dynamic text comes into play when the ads mention the property’s location; the corporate team writes the ad copy, and each ad automatically updates with the property’s location.

The strategies in this post will help property managers set up a successful localized social media advertising strategy, but that’s just one part of a strong multi-channel approach to localized social marketing. Property management companies should also take steps to incorporate local input on social pages, social content and review pages. Incorporating a technology solution like SOCi can help empower property management companies to succeed with social.

Find out what makes SOCi perfect for property management companies