Ivanhoe Cambridge (IC), the property investment arm of the Quebec pension fund, tasked Syndctd with a pressing need to update their brand’s digital marketing strategy. The company owns and operates shopping centers across Canada and the U.S., each with its own unique personality, customer base and retailer mix. Each property maintains control over their website and Social Media platforms, which had created inconsistencies in quality, tone, theme and promotional priority within their content mix.
Through our expertise in navigating the creation of Digital Strategy plans – Syndctd set to work organizing the deliverable roadmap for IC. A few large building blocks were going to have to need to be created in order to form a strong foundation from which vibrant and engaged community could grow.
Services
Business Need: The first order of business for Ivanhoe was to educate their widespread team about the legal restrictions and best practices for social media posting, complying with copyright law and appropriate online conduct.
Syndctd Solution: Therefore, we started with a Content Compliancy Document – which describes how content should be acquired, manipulated, syndicated, tagged, and linked in order to correctly credit the source and follow industry rules
Business Need: In addition to Compliancy, the Shopping Centres needed to define, refine, and accurately pinpoint their audience. Many of the Centres had misidentified their target consumers, creating ineffective messaging that didn’t excite or engage those actually engaging with their platforms.
Syndctd Solution: In response, Syndctd created a Digital Personas Document that verbally illustrated 6 unique consumer personas with a tremendous amount of detail and forecasting. These personas pinpointed IC’s most valuable and vocal online audience members, along with invaluable demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information that allowed manager’s to understand this person and what messaging would best engage him or her.
Business Need: The final and most critical need for Ivanhoe was quality control for their social media accounts, a piece that required a complete restructuring of their platform population process and a company-wide education on best social practices. Across platforms, content was inconsistent, non-compliant, and in desperate need of uniformity.
Syndctd Solution: The aforementioned documents were meshed into our larger scope alongside a robust explanation of social media best practices with detailed examples. The Content Strategy Document, a guideline and absorbable utilitarian reference for marketing staff, offered a daily resource for creating consistent, complacent and engaging content.
Project Insights
Syndctd collaborated closely with the Digital Marketing team at Ivanhoe to first build a content compliancy document, offering both national and local teams a set of rules to abide by as they post and populate their pages. The next task was to create a detailed list of consumer personas with accompanying illustration by a local artist. Persona generation is a vital tool used by the team to first analyze exactly who the consumers are, then expand upon their characters with demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information. This exercise allows us to create messaging that directly targets the brand’s specific audience. The final and most robust piece for Ivanhoe was the content strategy deck, used to educate the local market managers and serve as the guidelines for 2016 social media strategy. This final piece propelled Ivanhoe Cambridge into next year’s strategy, allowing them to create content libraries and effectively use their social media tools to drive online consumers into their brick-and-mortar locations.
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