Storia Real Estate
A branding makeover proposal
In December 2017 I was hired to work at a marketplace for real estate companies as an Art Direction intern (working mainly on their social platforms), with the promise I would have creative freedom to do whatever I felt like doing as long as it had good results in perfomance. With that in mind, along with another colleague, we started designing a new look for the brand’s Instagram, as a starting point for a bigger transformation.
In real estate, home decór or interior design are topics that usually attract many people, so we wanted to use this to get followers on our medias, as part of a bigger strategy to gain more brand awareness. Along with this, we wanted to show and tell people more about their neighborhoods in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, two of the biggest cities in Brazil. Our product was mainly focused on showing consumers more about the surroundings of their new home so it was essential to keep that in our plans.
A lot of content producers on Instagram like to use grids. They look really good on your profile, but not so much in the timeline, because most of the time you can’t understand what’s going on by only watching one picture, still we wanted to use it. Our main problem now was to find a way of using grids without letting viewers confused with the single parts of the big picture and also make the content in those parts more relevant.
The solution was simple: Why not use videos instead of pictures? Instagram uses the first frame of clips as thumbnails, without losing any resolution. With the confusing parts problem solved, it was possible to deliver interesting content up to 15s by using simple motion graphics, without exceeding Facebook's 15% text rule. Once we realized all that, it was easy to create a strategy around it.
We were going to use 12 image ‘’packs’’ with custom color palettes consisting of 6 interior design posts and 6 neighborhood related posts. Each pack would last for 2 weeks. Within these packs we would have smaller packs with 6 posts, in a 3:3 ''topic'' ratio. The neighborhood posts would be videos that connected with each other, and the interior design posts would be pictures that also connected with each other.
It worked perfectly, because we already had many curated pictures of the districts, and much data to share. The strategy was to catch the audience's attention with the beauty of the images and inform them with custom crafted content about the neighborhood surrounding commerce, tourism, education, urban mobility, and many other topics that we had in our product page. It looked good on the feed, and even better on our profile. With all that, a success in performance was expected.
In January 2018 we had around 2000 followers on our Instagram, and only three months later this number had grown 400%, without increasing our budget.
Also, our promoted Instagram Stories generated more leads than any other ad platform.
Our next plan is to expand those disruptive strategies to other platforms, making the best possible use of the available tools for that, without being repetitive. Each platform has it's own unique style, and this is something we always want to keep in mind.
motion graphics showcase
Below are some examples of animations used to portray the lifestyle and characteristics of Brazilian neighborhoods, one of the brand's most important features.
