Tips From My Marketing Toolkit: Online Promotional Techniques

Published by Ashton Elder

Ashton has an M.S. in Marketing from Florida International University and has been working as a marketer for over five years. She is currently serving on the University of North Florida’s Department of Communications Professional Committee Board. Ashton has been a guest on several media and marketing panels throughout her career. She also holds a degree from the University of North Florida where she studied political science, journalism, and mass communications. Prior to working in marketing, she worked as a journalist for several news outlets and publications, including an internship at NPR where she produced several radio features. This site features a collection of her articles and radio features from her career in journalism. This site also features some of her insights and projects from her career in marketing. Ashton’s background in journalism has provided her with a solid foundation on which to build enhanced media and social media strategies to provide creative, innovative marketing solutions. Ashton also has first-hand experience with brand design and brand building. Ashton also works on an array of marketing projects from social media to email marketing and everything in between. View all posts by Ashton Elder

branding, content marketing, customer journey, digital marketing, email, email marketing, Marketing, omni channel marketing, SEO

As the Director of Marketing at a Florida real estate brokerage I utilize online promotions often as part of my digital marketing strategy. I’m going to highlight a few of my most effective online promotion techniques below and discuss briefly an insight I have about each technique.

Partnership with Brand Ambassadors

A digital promotion strategy that has consistently been effective for me is to partner with our agents, past customers and preferred business partners and use them as brand ambassadors online. This type of promotional technique is powerful because a company’s target audience is more likely to be persuaded if they get positive information from other customers or recommendations from like-minded individuals. We did a video series on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube of our agents sharing why they love working at EXIT 1 Stop Realty one of those videos is posted below. This year we are posting agent Google reviews weekly.

Utilize Your Email List for Email Newsletters and Promotions

Our company e-newsletter the Door to Door in 904 News is primarily aimed at engaging with real estate agents in the greater Northeast Florida area in order to stay top of mind to potentially recruit them to the brokerage. In this particular monthly e-newsletter we have offered unique classes, podcasts, highlighted our charity events and more in order to promote our company culture and establish our brand as the brokerage with the best training in the area.

Boosting Organic Social Media Presence

One great way to boost a company’s organic social media presence is through promotional contests aimed at engagement through likes, follows and shares. I saw great results when I did an Instagram promotion called, “we love local,” aimed at growing my company’s organic Instagram presence. The contest was aimed at gaining followers and comments where the audience was given a chance to win an entry for a basic filled with items from the best local stores.

Engaging Content Strategy

I believe that creative, engaging content is one of the best tools a digital marketer can have. I often run content aimed at engaging with my company’s core target audience and I usually try to address a pain point that audience has and offer them an item of value.