SOCi Spotlight: How Bridge Property Management Uses SOCi to Strengthen its Localized Marketing Strategy

Throughout 2019, local ratings and reviews have been the single most impactful element in determining a business's local search and social ranking or visibility on key search terms. Finding a tool that can help your property management company manage local social pages and monitor its online reputation at-scale is a necessity.As a part of this content series, SOCi sat down with some of our customers and asked about their strategic approach to different components of localized marketing (LM). Our hope is that other marketers can read through the answers and learn best practices from companies that are excelling in LM! Bridge Property Management truly understands the importance of having a proactive, localized marketing strategy for every property they serve.

Q&A with Bridge Property Management

According to its website, Bridge Property Management has overseen the management of more than $5 billion in investment property over the past 25 years for both large and small real estate investors. Bridge Property Management is completely committed to providing the best in resident management and the best in investment real estate management. Bridge Property Management answered the following questions on their best practices for localized marketing.

1. Tell us about your experience using the SOCi Platform and how long you’ve been using it.

We have been using SOCi since 2015, and it is the best! They make social and reputation easy for us! With the ability to see all reviews in one platform we have complete visibility of all issues that arise, and successes within the communities. Not only has it given us insights into our service but it has brought our relationships with residents to a new level. Oftentimes our community managers do not have the time to respond to every review that comes in or post consistent social media content. With SOCi’s assistance, we have been able to keep our social presence relevant as well as build trust within our communities to a point where our residents feel fully cared for. Every time I show a new employee SOCi I get a lot of “this is so AWESOME” as a response! Not only is it super easy to use, but they also love seeing everything in one spot. We love SOCi!

2. What were your main challenges before you started using SOCi?

One of the biggest challenges we had had was sharing good content on social. We struggled first and foremost allocating time to post on a consistent basis and post content that was engaging with our community. Secondly, we did not have a plan in place to monitor what content was being sent out to ensure brand consistency. With reputation, we did not have a dashboard like we do now where all reviews can be monitored in one place and it’s not only a time saver but a game changer!

3. What have been the greatest benefits you’ve received from using SOCi? And what is your favorite part of the SOCi offering?

I like that our managers are able to have some ownership in the content (if they’d like) or it will just happen automatically. It has been a huge time saver for them but gives them a chance to chime in with updates going on in the community whenever they’d like while still keeping a consistent presence on social. I LOVE the Reputation Dashboard--everything in that area! There are a variety of tools that give us insights into how we are doing with our reputation. From the sentiment tool to the average star rating metrics, we have full visibility and can adjust strategy with a clear direction because of it.

4. Tell me about what surprised you the most or made you the happiest about using the SOCi platform?

I love that they are always in front of what’s happening. SOCi is just as concerned with keeping our residents informed, connected, and happy as we are as well as informing our marketing team on industry changes and strategy recommendations. I love that if something has happened on social I find out about it when I log in. There are no surprises when it comes to issues within the communities, it’s all in the platform. These past few years using SOCi have been nothing short of incredible, I feel it’s a true partnership.

5. Please rank the following areas of LSM on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being not important at all and 5 being critically important to your business:

Local Search Pages like Google My Business (GMB): 5
Local Ratings & Reviews: 5
Local Social Pages like Facebook: 3
Localized Content on the above-mentioned pages: 5
Quick response to consumer questions and reviews: 5

6. SOCi defines Localized Marketing (LM) as marketing efforts that focus on building a local presence for a business, leveraging locally-driven communication channels to reach the specific local communities it serves (rather than a broad/national approach). May include social media marketing, review sites, social advertising, and other two-way engagement channels.

Based on this description, do you see localized marketing (LM) as a key area of focus in your marketing mix today? And what is your localized marketing strategy that has proven to be most successful for your clients?

Yes! I think it’s really important! We’re always striving to keep our residents and prospective residents updated on what is going on in and around our communities. But, because property is unique in that you never know who is going to want to move from out of state, I also think it’s important to mix it up. Some markets have prospects searching way outside of their metro. So while we focus mostly on LSM we also are cognizant of other types of marketing strategies. To learn more about how SOCi can help your property management company manage its localized marketing strategy across 100s or 1000s of locations efficiently, click here!