Digital marketing is a great tool to expand your business exponentially. Many companies employ digital marketing techniques to increase awareness of their brand and attract more customers. With the right tools and a solid strategy, the internet is an excellent place to promote your brand.
One of the most common digital channels that businesses use and one of the easiest ways to start advertising online is through social media marketing. Unfortunately, not all businesses use it effectively. What many people do not realize is that social media is just a tool to deliver your content. Without a deliberate marketing plan, it will be easy for your brand to get drowned out in the competitive internet marketplace.
Real estate businesses can benefit from using social media to promote their properties and services. More and more buyers are using the internet to search for their potential purchases, to compare property prices, and to look for brokers or realtors. Social media is a powerful tool to influence those decisions and put your brand at the tops of customers’ minds.
If you want to stay ahead of the competition in the real estate industry, promoting your business digitally is a must. Here is a ten-step guide to using social media for marketing to expand your real estate business:
Define Your Brand
Before you start promoting yourself online, you need to have a clear understanding of what your brand is about. In a sea of realtors, developers, and property owners–what makes you different? What sets you apart? What do you offer that others don’t? Defining who you are and what you represent as a business will keep you on the right track as you start to venture online.
Establish Your Target Market
Once you have a clearly defined brand, you will also need to know which customers you are targeting. There are millions of potential customers browsing the internet. Develop a persona, or several personas, of the kind of buyer you want to attract. You will need to know what their concerns, aspirations, and pain points are. Where do they go when they look for properties to buy or rent? What kind of purchasing power do they have? Are you targeting homeowners or investors? These are some of the questions you will need to answer.
Outline your marketing goals
If the objective of your business is to develop, lease, sell, or manage real estate, then your marketing goals should be working towards those goals with your customer personas in mind. Your starting point should be your revenue targets, and working backward, how many transactions do you need in order to reach those targets? If, for example, the success rate of each transaction is one for every ten potential customers, then you need a minimum of ten leads sourced through social media marketing for every successful sale. You need to set a specific number that you need to hit daily, monthly, annually.
Set a budget
Part of any successful marketing venture is to make it sustainable. Sourcing viable leads cost money, time, and effort. Determine how much of your budget should be spent on your online marketing efforts. Your marketing might require a mix of online and offline efforts. If this is the first time you are spending on social media or online advertising, then your budget will need to be more generous. This will give you the space to experiment on which channels work best for you, and which efforts generate the most return.
Create a timeline
Part of putting your goals into action is making them time-bound. For starters, give yourself an initial six-month plan. Six months will be enough to develop a strategy, implement it, and give it ample time to work. You should clearly identify the milestones that you need to achieve within the initial timeline.
Layout your strategy
With the framework of your campaign laid out, you can now choose your plan of attack. Choose carefully what kind of online presence you want to have, what channels you want to use. You can research what your competitors are using and use that as a jumping-off part. If you are working with a social media marketing agency, they may recommend certain platforms that will be appropriate for your brand.
Create relevant content
Once you have all your machinery parts ready, then it is time to give people are reason to talk about your brand. There are many more layers to social media than just posting pretty photographs online. Social media marketing, in a technical sense, is only one way to implement an effective content marketing strategy. If you have clearly identified your target audience, you know what kind of questions they are asking. You want to provide answers as to why your custom home building service is right for them. You should show them how your brokerage firm can help them get their house sold quickly. Your content should provide them with tips on how to invest in a lucrative real estate portfolio. Social media is merely a means of delivering this type of content to your customers’ timeline.
Engage your audience
The beauty of social media is that it offers you the ability to interact with your audience. If you have the right content, you will attract the right customers. Curious customers will pose questions. Happy customers will share your content and refer others to your brand. Engaging people through social media is a means to gain access to people’s network. Compelling, relevant content will be like a stone in a lake, creating ripple effects throughout, and moving your target audience to take notice. Drop enough stones in the water, and these ripples will reinforce each other, expanding your reach across various networks in the process.
Build loyalty
If you have been successful enough to find customers in the sea of people on the internet, then you will not want to lose them to your competitors. Loyal customers are repeat buyers and walking billboards. Nurturing loyalty among your clients is crucial to your growth. In one study, the research found that a brand’s existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more, on average, compared to new customers. Giving them discounts, or exclusive offers, or simply ensuring they get preferential treatment is enough to deepen your relationship with them.
Analyze your performance
When you have had time to deploy your strategy and allowed it to gain some traction online, you will need to review your effectiveness. Sit back and take stock of your accomplishments versus your initial goals. Social media marketing agencies have software and tools to help you track your efforts to see which content garnered the most engagement. Compare every transaction you made against the number of leads it took you to get there. Only then will you be able to start to see the full and direct impact of your social media efforts.
In Conclusion
The real estate market is becoming increasingly competitive, whether you are a developer, an agent, or a landlord. The ease at which information about products and services is exchanged online is fueling this competition. While real estate businesses deal with offline assets, a large chunk of its transactions happens online. Your brand will need to be deliberate and strategic about its use of social media to be able to capture those transactions successfully.
We are a digital marketing agency in St. Louis that specializes in social media marketing, SEO, and PPC advertising. Visit our website to find out how you can get the latest tools and services to amplify your brand online.