Social media is universally recognized as a valuable marketing tool for modern businesses. The communicative, wide-reaching, and viral nature of online social networks have made them the most talked about tools among digital marketing teams, which begs the question: are traditional marketing websites becoming obsolete?
The short answer is no; marketing websites are crucial for showcasing your community, capturing leads, and providing sought-after digital resources to your residents. It is still the central hub of your community’s online presence; however, multifamily businesses must align all of their digital marketing tools in order to maximize the full potential of their marketing website. In other words, your marketing website must work in tandem with your social media channels to create a “marketing loop”—a strategy that begins with pushing unique, engaging content to your marketing website, syndicating the same content to all of your social media channels, and effectively driving prospects back to your webpage.
What is the Marketing Loop?
The biggest challenge that your marketing website faces is being an island unto itself. Think of it this way: it is not directly connected to a vast network of online users like your community’s Facebook brand page or Instagram account. In order to reach those users, your website needs to be fully integrated with your social media channels.
Basically, whenever you publish new content on your website’s blog, photo/video library, event calendar, or press release tab, the update must feed directly into your social media pages. Remember, the marketing loop begins on your website, so you can build a better SEO strategy with your fresh, updated content, which has the potential to create valuable inbound links while increasing the amount of high-quality content published on your website—further establishing your trust with Google and other search engines as a reputable business. Once your new content is posted, it should automatically syndicate to your social media channels, encouraging click backs to your site and further improving its ranking in organic search.
If you don’t have an integrated social media presence, your marketing website is a stifled resource. Without social media channels directing inbound traffic to your site, your audience is limited to people already familiar with your brand and individuals searching for keywords you currently rank for. That’s why syndicated content-sharing on social media is crucial for reaching your target audience. The content will engage with active members of an online community, expanding your web presence and opening new avenues for conversions.
How Do You Use the Marketing Loop to Your Advantage?
As we have covered before on previous blogs and webcasts, content marketing focuses on customer engagement and brand awareness rather than simply attempting to sell a product. The goal of content marketing is to create content that promotes your company as a trusted, relevant source of information as well as a reliable business with search engines and their users. It is an innovative marketing strategy that has been proven to successfully reach next generation consumers.
In utilizing the marketing loop, your content begins on your marketing website before it’s distributed on your various social media channels, but how you choose to distribute this content is completely up to you—just keep your marketing budget in mind. Is it worth it to have a designated, in-house marketer manually doing the work for you? Should you invest in social media management platforms such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social? Or is it worth it to go all the way and adopt a software platform that can manage your leasing, marketing, and retention strategies all through a single dashboard interface?
Despite the method you choose, the more quality content that you put out through these online channels, the more inbound traffic you will generate. But again, it is important to remember the blueprint of content marketing: appealing to modern renters as an established, trusted, and engaging brand. While there are a number of ways to help keep your audience interested and engaged when they visit your marketing website, publishing content in the form of blogs, press releases, photographs, infographics, and videos will always be your most valuable resource in generating web traffic.
Marketing websites are far from obsolete, but without integrated social media channels, your webpage has no way to reach the expansive online community of the 21st century. There’s no better strategy to effectively utilize your marketing website as a point of conversion than the marketing loop. It is an essential tactic for the multifamily housing industry to implement and will only strengthen your attempt to capture modern renters in a highly competitive market.