We recently had the pleasure of welcoming Heidi Albertiri, Founder of digital marketing agency The Life Style Edit (TSLE), to our showroom to present to our clients on all things social media. The key takeaways of this presentation, as part of our quarterly STYLE MINDS event, were both eye opening and of extensive value to both us and our clients.
First and foremost, social media, in particular Instagram, offers a platform to showcase your services, engage with potential clients, and build brand awareness to a far wider audience than any website could ever reach. Social media gives you access to millions of active users with more visibility and reach than any other marketing medium available to you. Put simply, it should be a non-negotiable part of your business.
If we delve little deeper, social media platforms offer robust targeting options, allowing you to narrow down your audience based on demographics, interests, location, and so much more. This enables you to reach the right people who are more likely to be interested in your property styling services, maximising the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Social media is how we talk to our audience, to connect and build trust, and serves to validate your brand in a marketplace saturated with property styling companies. By sharing before-and-after photos, outstanding sales results, client testimonials and a look behind the scenes, you can demonstrate the transformational power of your property styling services.
Social media also enables you to cross promote and collaborate with other brands, by tagging, sharing and mentioning other social media accounts, thereby exposing your brand to their audiences and expanding your reach significantly.
It’s important to note that success on social media requires consistent effort, engaging content, and understanding your target audience. Here are some practical tips from Heidi Albertiri on how to achieve this:
- Content is key: Capturing and banking as much content as possible is crucial. This can be in the form of images of your own styling work, inspirational images, lifestyle images, product images, videos, text/graphic tiles (i.e. a client testimonial, or a quote). Make sure you are creating content that is both relevant and of interest to your audience. Familiarise yourself with editing apps to ensure your content is polished and professional. Photo editing apps include Tezza, Unfold and VSCO. Video editing apps include Capcut, Splice, Vimeo and iMovie.
- Create a content plan: Plan your content rather than winging it! Social media posts should NOT be done at random when you have some spare time or on a whim. There should be a strategy and plan in place. Social media planning apps such as Planoly, Sked, Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Planable can help map out your social media posts for the week, month or even year ahead. They even allow you to schedule your posts for specific days and times, and will take care of automatic posting for you.
- Work to a formula: Start with achievable goals such as posting 1 story, 2 reels and 3 grid/feed posts per week. As you build your bank of content, Heidi Albertiri, of The Life Style Edit, recommends the following formula:
- 1 to 3 reels per week (to be posted on stories and feed)
- Minimum 2 to 3 stories a day (including behind the scenes)
- 1 x carousel of images per week
- 3 x product shots
- 1 x aspirational/inspirational shot
- 1 x graphic/text tile
- Don’t forget to tag! Tagging anyone that is involved in the content (be that suppliers, agents, photographers, etc) ensures that they will see the post, and in turn enables them to be able to share the content via their own account. This will ultimately expose your brand to a wider audience than an untagged post. Also be sure to use relevant hashtags and locations for this reason too.
- Stay active and engaged: It’s not enough to simply post on social media. You need to be interacting with other social media accounts. This is a must. According to the algorithm that is social media, the more you engage with your audience’s content, the more visible your own content will be to them. Follow your real estate agents, like and comment on their posts and share any of their content that is of relevance to your audience. Use call to actions in your captions so that you’re encouraging your audience to engage with your posts. Respond to comments, direct messages, and enquiries in real-time, creating a sense of approachability and excellent customer service.
- Read your analytics: It’s important to know what is and isn’t working when it comes to your social media strategy and where your focus should be. It’s not just all about a pretty grid!
Social media is not only an incredibly cost-effective platform in which to promote your business to the masses but is also an essential tool to ensure you remain competitive in today’s digital landscape. So, our biggest piece of advice would be, if you don’t have time to manage your own social media, hand it over to someone who does, as it should not be something you neglect in your busier times. If someone is considering your property styling services, be assured they are checking you out on social media first!