Author: Christina Morello

The Case for Brands to Implement a Local Social Advertising Program

Posted on by Christina Morello

A common thinking is that if you’re a national brand, you should be doing national advertising. The reality is that despite how large your brand is, 75% of all transactions still occur at a local retailer. We’re not saying national advertising doesn’t have its place, but by only focusing on brand-level advertising, you’re missing out on a huge portion of your market. This is more contrarian than you realize for three primary reasons.

Social Media is a Community Platform

Facebook and Instagram, is about connecting with people you know and connecting with your community. That makes national advertising counter-intuitive to the nature of the platform itself – a proverbial orange in the apple cart. Yet Facebook’s communal approach makes it the perfect venue for the 90 million small and medium-sized businesses with Pages on the platform, 88% of which advertise on the platform. Combine those stats with knowing the average user clicks on 12 ads per month, and it becomes incredibly obvious that since Facebook is a community platform, it should be treated as such by your marketing team. 

Not Every Place is the Same

The Cleveland DMA (Designated Market Area) ranges from active downtown, to bustling suburbs, to expansive farmland. At a macro level, New York City may differ vastly from Miami, but within these cities, there’s a different culture and lingo depending on what borough or area you live in. While proximity matters, local personality and cultural norms matter too. For example, if you’re trying to advertise bicycles, your creative will want to address where people typically ride in those areas, (city bikes vs beach bikes vs mountain or trail bikes), and even what they wear while riding. 

Because Facebook is communal, you have to reflect relevant cultural norms if you want to see a higher level of engagement. A national or even DMA-level ad only allows you to speak about yourself, not about who you’re talking to. 

Local Social Advertising Just Performs Better

It’s no wonder that marketers tend to think of Facebook and Instagram advertising as a top of the funnel activity because so many times campaigns that are branding-built are too general to effectively use the power of the social platform. Local campaigns show 2-3x more conversions* than national campaigns. Time and time again we find that marketers are able to collapse the funnel by driving things down not only to a local level, but a culturally-relevant level all the way down to the individual retailer. Local social advertising allows you to reflect your brand from initial exposure to your product all the way down to where consumers can hold it in their hand. 

Learn more about how collaborative advertising dramatically increases content quality and brand awareness through a more personalized, localized approach to social advertising. Read The Indirect Majority – Why the Future of Social Advertising is Collaborative.

*Tiger Pistol Internal Data

Empowering Real Estate Agents with Collaborative Social Advertising

Posted on by Christina Morello

Recently, Dawn Perry, Senior Vice President of Cross Brand Marketing at Realogy, a Fortune 500 real estate services provider appeared on Property Radar’s The Data Driven Real Estate Podcast.

Among other forward-thinking approaches, Perry discussed Social Ad Engine, a purpose-built collaborative social advertising solution developed by Tiger Pistol that enables Realogy agents to promote their active listings or themselves through best-in-class, high-performing Facebook and Instagram campaigns.

“Social Ad Engine allows an agent to do custom marketing,” said Perry. “It’s fueled by our data and our expertise, so we are providing great insights.”

With scores of agents in their networks, real estate brands have a unique challenge in maintaining brand integrity and regulatory compliance on social media. This challenge makes disseminating their brand content through their agents all the more important. Additionally, real estate is a highly competitive industry, with agents moving to new brokerages based on which offers the best tools and products to set them up for success. This makes agent recruitment and retention an industry-wide issue.

By providing Social Ad Engine to its brands, Realogy empowers its brokerages and agents with a collaborative social advertising tool that publishes campaigns directly from an agent’s own branded Facebook Page and delivers business results.

“Social Ad Engine enables us to collaborate with and support our agents like never before. The platform allows our brand to reach into communities through our agents, who understand the distinct dialect of their local neighborhood.”

-David Marine, CMO, Coldwell Banker

The simplicity and integration of the technology allows agents to publish best practice campaigns in less than 3 minutes, with little knowledge of Facebook Advertising. Integrated with Realogy’s agent and listing data, campaigns are pre-built and allow agents to customize, within the Realogy brand’s defined guardrails, based on their business needs. All platform language utilizes real estate terminology, and local compliance features are built in to automatically generate within the ad template, such as including the agents’ license number in ad copy and adhering to Facebook’s HEC Compliance requirements. Social Ad Engine is also integrated with Realogy preferred CRMs. All leads generated from an agent’s Social Ad Engine campaign are shared with their CRM in real-time, allowing for speedy follow up and nurturing.

“It’s easy for them to do a Facebook campaign,” said Perry. “It’s as easy as picking a campaign based on your brand or the product you’d like to offer, like ‘Real Vitalize’ at Coldwell Banker, and then just plugging it and go. It’s fueled by best practices that we’ve learned across the organization.”

Agents can even generate a seller report to show their clients marketing progress on homes they represent to sell. Agents agree that Social Ad Engine drives personalized, peer-to-peer interactions, accelerates home sales, and fosters brand loyalty and agent satisfaction.

“Social Ad Engine generates real results. The one-page report you get is an easy win with your sellers to show them exactly what you’re doing to market their home. I really think it’s the most affordable, easy way for agents to market themselves and their listings online.”

– Realogy Affiliated Agent

While other real estate marketing platforms support Facebook ads, such ads are usually rudimentary, driving impressions around the listing, with little room for the agent to generate leads. Social Ad Engine leverages the most relevant Facebook Ads Objectives to drive the results that matter. No other real estate marketing platform supports the ability for agents to publish Facebook Lead Ads, or auto-creates best practice Facebook Lead Forms that have unique qualifying questions.

“After doing social media advertising for many years and using every tool and strategy available, I can say Social Ad Engine is absolutely the best and most effective tool you can find.”

– Coldwell Banker Affiliated Agent

Social Ad Engine’s collaborative approach increased agent awareness, agent website traffic, and lead generation, all while significantly decreasing the cost of advertising. To date, Realogy agents have accrued nearly 500,000 leads, more than 7 million clicks, and are paying 55% less for lead campaigns and 68% less than the real estate industry benchmark for traffic campaigns.

Learn more about collaborative advertising for real estate. Contact us today!

Proving That Local Social Advertising Works for a Global Brand

Posted on by Christina Morello

The intersection of social and local offers cost-savings, better ability to drive conversions, and increased relevancy with creative and targeting capabilities. So why aren’t more brands shifting their social ad budgets from exclusively enterprise to local? Tiger Pistol CEO Paul Elliott tackled this question and more at the Local Search Association Place19 Conference.

“One of the challenges we’re up against is that for many of these global companies you’re as much proving out a technical capability as you are a model. We see more need to pilot or have a proof of concept – not because they are questioning product or capability – but because they don’t know if the model is going to work for them. So you have to prove that local social advertising works for a global brand, and at the same time, you’re having to prove out why your platform is the best way to do it. Moreover, proving it is more than CPMs or CPCs. We work with the brand to uncover demonstrative connections to local value.”

– Paul Elliott, Tiger Pistol CEO, Excerpt from LSA Panel Discussion

Read the full Local Search Association Article.