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With 70+ local agents and 125+ offices, ERA Belgium is the market leader in the Belgian real estate market. With 25+ years of experience, this powerful franchise operating throughout Belgium provides professional services for anyone looking to buy, sell, or rent real estate.
Since numerous ERA Belgium offices have their own social media profiles, the HQ marketing manager Evi Waeyaert creates global content adaptable for individual agents. To do so, she uses a unique Kontentino feature called KontentBase. This feature was created to manage the planning and distribution of global social media content to local branches and offices. In Evi’s case, however, KontentBase simplifies workflow on the local level—she can create, plan, distribute and schedule social media content within one app and provide offices and agents with original content ideas and sources.
“We have just launched our new branding and we want to unite our franchise communication towards potential clients and partners,“ Evi says. “Our social media content is clearly part of this strategy and we use KontentBase to fulfil it quickly and easily.“
A stock of global ideas for local profiles
When it comes to language and topics, Evi and her team create three types of content for social media profiles: a) for French-speaking agents, b) for Dutch-speaking agents, and c) for French and Dutch-speaking ones. They produce a pack of two to three posts for each week and directly plan them in the Kontentino calendar of individual offices. Like this, ERA Belgium can create something like a library of future posts for the franchise branches. To categorize these posts, they use labels to get an overview of the numerous amounts of content.
“We want to take away the ‘marketing burden’ off our agents. Therefore, we create content, applicable to all of our offices. This includes copywriting (texts), design (images), and timing (planning and scheduling). Once the content is created, we dispatch it with one click. Agents get a notification and then they can see and adapt the content for their local profiles.“
The accelerated process of content creation and approval
Evi was creating the social media content before, too, but the whole process was incredibly time-consuming and required the use of several communication channels. “Before using Kontentino, we wrote the content copy in the Excel spreadsheets. Then we send images via WeTransfer or other services. Local agents had to copy-paste the texts, download the photos and upload them again on their social media profiles. We also lacked any scheduling and planning methods. With Kontentino our agents now have a tool that includes not only the general content plan but gives them the possibility to align their own content with it as well. Which gives them a full overview.“
A good example is a recent post on the latest ERA Belgium’s national meeting. Since it is a type of content that is valuable nationwide, Evi’s team uploaded the prepared post into KontentBase → local agents got a notification → they scheduled the post with one click → the post came online.
“Plus, I like the fact that with the Kontentino mobile app, our local agents are able to approve and schedule posts we create from anywhere,“ Evi adds.
Workflow: Headquarters—Marketing agency—Local agent
Out of 70+ ERA Belgium offices, only 8 have their own marketer. “Our agents are individual businesses and we empower and support them to build their own social media profile and create original and local content. With KontentBase, each of them can manage their own profiles but also ask for advice, sources, or opinions. What is more, ERA Belgium HQ can also do a little quality control and check on the local content to see if everything is in-line with the ERA policy and values.“
Therefore, KontentBase oftentimes works as a tool for communication between Evi’s team and local agents who ask for help with content creation. “It is nice to be in touch with local agents and help them create social media content. We set up a monthly call, gather the requests for videos or photos.“ Once all the materials are set up, Evi uses KontentBase to put it all directly into the agent’s Kontentino. “From there, they can feedback, approve, and schedule the content.“
ERA Belgium’s future with KontentBase
Before choosing Kontentino, Evi did her research. “Most social media tools or software are suitable for internal marketers who manage one page/brand. I, however, was looking for a solution that allows me to manage and communicate with multiple clients/profiles so it’s suitable for a franchise business model. KontentBase feature was a game-changer that makes the winner out of Kontentino.“
At the moment, out of the 70 ERA Belgium local agents, almost half of them are connected with the headquarters via KontentBase. “The plan is to have all agents connected by the end of 2022,“ Evi states.
Go global with Kontentino
Global content for local markets—that is the main focus of Kontentino’s KontentBase feature. It was created especially for marketers managing multiple profiles of one brand. With KontentBase, they can create, plan, distribute, and schedule content for branches and profiles all around the world as easily as possible. However, KontentBase works perfectly within one country or region, too—just like in the case of ERA Belgium real estate. If you need to create and adapt global content for several local social media profiles, try Kontentino for free for 14 days.
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