Portfolio

ELEVATING LUXURY REAL ESTATE MARKETING:

Overview

When Fortis Property Group approached Social Thrive about managing the digital launch of their new luxury condominium development, we jumped at the opportunity! The Parker building comprises 168 luxury condominium units, complete with three floors of private amenities. With its coveted location in the heart of the city, The Parker brings an elevated and curated living experience never seen before in Boston.

The Challenge:

There’s no question that more and more social media is consumed via, you guessed it, video. In managing our client’s digital assets, we continued to see an increased demand for real-time, attention-grabbing video footage, ranging anywhere from candid and raw moments to more polished branded content. 

At the same time we were launching and implementing our marketing strategy for The Parker, Instagram continued to roll out various reel and video updates. It was critical for us to ensure our video work for The Parker evolved alongside social platform changes and updates.  

Adapting our skill and content per the social platform changes was not our only challenge, however. At the time we were contracted to market The Parker, the building itself was still being built – a vision in progress. This meant a lack of usable, polished creative, as well as many moving targets with regards to deadlines. As with any building project, we were at the mercy of construction/supply chain delays, timeline adjustments, amenity revisions, and residence modifications.

As the social landscape continued to change and the building phase of this luxury residence building progressed, our team at Social Thrive stayed busy brainstorming creative and flexible solutions.

The Strategy:

In order to highlight a property as unique and impressive as The Parker, we created a diverse campaign with plenty of pieces of movement. We decided to lean heavily into all the graphic design techniques we’ve built over the years, while testing some new ones too! We began to sew together renderings, user-generated content, stock video, and images that matched their brand, along with our own video and photography work. We wanted to seamlessly blend together all creative options to create an entirely new catalog of assets to hold us over until construction was complete. From showcasing the best dining experiences in Downtown Boston, to the most luxurious places to shop, to moody aesthetic photos and videos created plenty of buzz surrounding the opening of the building; the campaign was slated to be nothing short of dramatic. 

We’ll break the strategy down a bit further:

Instagram’s Changing Landscape

One of the best tools to breathe life into The Parker campaign was our use of video. We made sure the videos were playful and sexy, while creating a bit of intrigue so that audiences would be motivated to dig deeper and seek out more information. At this time, “videos” on Instagram, as we knew it, were being replaced completely by “reels”. Ensuring our videos were sized properly to fit within Instagram’s reels for quality viewing was our first step to success. We adapted the way our team filmed, as well as the way we uploaded content. Length of reels went from 60 seconds to 90 seconds, allowing us to capture a few more moments of luxury to feed our audience. 

Successful reels and stories included interview-styled videos with the interior designer, time-lapses from day to night of their views over the Boston Common, short but visually informative clips of what the interior of a unit looks like, trending black-and-white to color photo reels, exterior shots that truly captured the depth of the building, and sprinkles of moody content to emulate The Parker’s private-club vibe.

As mentioned, Instagram video updates during this time included video size updates, as well as time allotment changes. Along with this, trending audio began to affect the algorithm, collaboration tags launched, and story length and features were updated. During many platform-based changes, we always recommend embracing these changes and refining our strategy.

Building Content During Construction 

While The Parker’s construction was underway, we developed meaningful content despite a lack of final visuals. Renderings were helpful, but we needed more than a stand-still clip of what might be a future home in order to attract an audience of high-end buyers. Our most successful content involved all Instagram functions: stories, reels, and eye-catching in-feed graphics:

• • We captured and compiled stylish videos from Boston’s local neighborhoods to establish The Parker’s prime location and mixed in moody stock video to complete the full story. 
    • As an example of this, we created and tested out an ASMR-style reel to evoke all of the senses of city life (both day and night). 
    • As a second example, we featured The Parker’s Gronkowski Fitness collaboration (or #GronkFit for short), blending two very different brands to form launch content. While The Parker’s is a very high-end brand, Gronk Fitness is a very party-forward, fun fitness brand. We submitted several options to the client, but the hands down favorite by all teams was the option that included stock video that matched both brands and we overlaid both logos in white to keep the visuals elegant yet still feel powerful and gym-forward.
  • We turned static images into video, including editing renderings to include movement of the building, resulting in a dramatic effect and increased reach in the algorithm. These are innovative ways to add something more to a static photograph. Another example of this was creating collateral for their Turnkey Furniture Package Launch, where we used static product .pngs and assembled a dynamic video incorporating them all.
  • We incorporated unconventional grid splits, featuring image splits over two, three, or even six squares. Adding in these blocks will not only make your grid more interesting but also stand out from the rest. This allowed us to call out  any major reveal or major residence spotlight, without oversaturating the grid.
  • We built out sexy highlight covers using stock images of their brand colors found in textures like velvet, silk, and gold to intrigue the audience, and actively updated the highlights with our story content. Stories consisted of animated renderings, video clips shot from different angles, sounds, and speeds, as well as local neighborhood events, open houses, and various press stories.

All of the above and more helped paint a picture of The Parker and what was to come, and put us in a strong position with new visuals for every future sneak peek, launch, and celebrity collaboration. We used what we had, and elevated our content to push out pieces that were fun and moody, and that left our target audience curious and wanting more. After analyzing link clips and page follows, it was clear our strategy was executed successfully.

The Results:

The Parker has become one of the fastest growing Instagram pages in Social Thrive Portfolio in under a year. Working with The Parker on their digital marketing campaign allowed us to engage our creative skill set and video expertise, while flexing our innovative use of social media strategies. What we found is that in order to keep up with social media trends, you can’t be afraid to create new material and execute on new and exciting ideas. We proved we are able to navigate high-end content through an ever-changing social media landscape.

Our collaboration with The Parker enabled us to work and sharpen our outside-of-the-box thinking, not only in the content planning itself, but in promoting an elevated brand appearance. This really challenged us to raise the bar on the amount of creativity involved to market such a unique building.

We’re confident that we will be able to adapt our marketing skills for any luxury residential building that comes our way, and know that we can start from the ground up!