Let's say you've set your team up to create content and agreed, at least in part, on the types of communications you would like to share with your tenant community. You have a tenant experience platform — the end-user-facing publication outlet — but you need a back-end system to handle the production and publishing of that content.
When it comes to tenant experience technology providers, not all communication solutions are created equal. A CMS is a complex tool with various functions, and you need to select the CMS best suited to your team size, operational method, and objectives.
At Equiem, we have Iris, the most advanced and feature-rich CMS in the tenant experience market. Because we designed it for building management teams, it caters to the working relationships shared between property managers, operations managers, marketing and customer success managers. Different team members can easily create, edit, and proof content within the same system, at the same time. Your Comms A-Team can easily assign posts and tasks to one another by way of automated status updates. If you're interested in learning more about Iris and its many capabilities, check out this discovery video here.
We know the Content Management game — here are some of our recommendations for the features you need to run a successful communications strategy.
1. One-click content syndication
Let's say you only have one asset. All of your creation efforts will of course be dedicated to that one asset, and your CMS will service a single domain. But what if you have multiple assets? Two, three, five, 10, 20?
A syndication feature allows you to publish content posts, or groups of content, to multiple assets at the same time, without manual duplication. Here's an example: You might be holding a portfolio-wide campaign at Christmastime, featuring identical activations run simultaneously at all sites in your portfolio. With an inferior CMS, you will need to manually copy the content and assign it to each site. With one-click syndication, you need only create a single post. Now you have instant promotion, portfolio-wide. Now you can focus on continued production to encourage further tenant uptake in the event.
2. Support for multiple workflows
The duties and behaviours of a content producer are different to those of an editor, and different again to those of a final approver. Each user should have their own workflow within the CMS, with an interface tailored to their most commonly performed actions.
For instance, content producers should be easily able to assign editors to content — and, in doing so, cue an automated notification to the editor that the produced draft is ready for review. The editor, then, should be able to annotate that content with amendments, and directions for improvement. It is important for both team members to accurately track the status of a post, and the version with which they are interacting, in real-time. A poor CMS will not track post version histories, and will force editors and content producers to work on the same file from separate sides of an invisible digital wall. This lack of visibility causes issues. Think of your experiences with Google Docs: if you could not review the history of changes to a document, and someone deleted something, what could you do except start again, from scratch?
3. Omnichannel content promotion
"Omnichannel" in the context of tenant experience technology, refers to the different mechanisms you can use to promote content to your tenant community. Your tenant app is one channel. Email newsletters are another. Most CMS solutions offer these two. But you deserve more than two channels. Your communications deserve to be spread far and read widely.
At minimum, a good CMS will offer promotion via platform, email, SMS, and push notifications. Four different touch points that can be used to reach your tenants, initiate dialogues, gather feedback, and provide value.
4. Support for multimedia content
Content should be beautiful and engaging, both in the way it is written and the way it is presented. But if the communications you post on your tenant experience platform are made up of text walls and simple stock images, you cannot hope to achieve maximal levels of engagement. Sometimes you need audio, video, and supplementary files.
Therefore, your ideal CMS should offer the ability to embed audio and video streams. YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, you name it — these players are coded to fit into most platforms, and they should fit into yours. Same goes for downloadable files: Perhaps your GRESB certification exists in pdf format. Wouldn't it be nice to supplement an article on your commitment to GRESB by attaching that pdf, so it can be easily downloaded and viewed?
5. Segmentation or personalisation
A generic, one-size-fits-all communications strategy will not produce the best rates of interaction from your tenant community. Proper personalisation is the soul of customer service, and a segmentation feature enables you to deliver personalised communications to your customers.
The right CMS will enable you to segment your audiences in a virtually endless number of ways. For one example, you could create content exclusively for tenants of a particular floor, or building, or area. This is particularly useful for emergency notifications.
For another example, you could create interest groups within your tenant community and tailor content posts and engagement articles to those groups. Perhaps your asset is home to a large number of bike commuters, or bakers, or die-hard video gamers. With the right CMS, you can find them, group them, and offer them personalised value. There are few better ways to create long-term relationships, and ensure the achievement of your engagement objectives.
We have plenty more tips for choosing the right CMS for your tenant experience platform. If you need help finding your ideal solution, reach out today.
Topics:
Engage
