Social media presents an opportunity for real estate business professionals to go smart with their marketing strategy by connecting to the mass population on various social media platforms present in our world today.
Needless to say, "social media is now an essential tool to real estate marketing." - it's a space where you can easily connect with billions of target audiences and business professionals to build a relationship that subsequently converts to prospective clients, considering the real estate industry is best suited for the railroad.
Why Do Real Estate Businesses Need To Market on Social Media?
The question here should be "why not!" Recent reports have shown that "77% of realtors actively use social media marketing for real estate business." Social media is where the market is - irrespective of your real estate specialty. Perhaps, you are out for new home buyers, or sellers, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, and a host of others are where you'll find them.
Anyways, the question is why?
Considering going online is overwhelming as a realtor. There are challenges to it - no paperwork, long hours of staring at your screen, and all the challenges associated with growing a business traditionally. However, the benefits are limitless compared to traditional marketing.
Although this isn't to say traditional marketing doesn't work, it works, but the internet provides realtors with access to a larger pool of leads and a more measurable, effective, and efficient way to go about marketing. So, traditional real estate marketing strategy works better when incorporated with social media marketing.
Some of the benefits of marketing your real estate business online include:
- Targeted Advertising
- Brand Reinforcement
- Customer Relations Management
- Instant Engagement
- Fairly Cost-Effective Reach
Therefore, considering the benefits, it's safe to say if you can't find your target audience on social media, you just aren't doing something right.
Crafting Social Media Strategy For Your Real Estate Business
The social media space is booming and the competition is stiff. To stand out and get your message across to prospects is quite a challenge. Therefore, crafting a two-fold social media strategy that would cater to both buyers and sellers is imperative.
These steps should guide you to creating a solid social media strategy for your real estate business:
- Research your Customers Persona
- Define your Social Media Objectives
- Identify the Best Social Media Platform for your Real estate Business
- Create Quality and Valuable Contents
- Select a Target Audience and Utilize Smart Advertising
- Analyze, Optimize and Repeat
Research Customer Customer's Persona
Understand that your customers are unique individuals with relative interest, who are either buying or selling. Hence, considering their distinct preferences for how they prefer to buy or sell properties, it is necessary to create personas.
To do this, you should gather information for your persona creation, determine their age, income, lifestyle, behavior, etc. Personalize your persona, and section the customers into 3-4 core personas. Define their needs, goals and study their unique problems and challenges, which can act as a dealbreaker when flipping a property.
Asking questions such as these will help you define your buyer persona:
- What's their spending power?
- How much property management experience do they have?
- What social media platforms do they frequent?
- Meanwhile, asking questions such as these will help you define your seller's persona - Moving to a new suburb/city?
- Looking to buy a bigger or smaller property?
- Are they aware of the asking price their home will sell for?
Define Your SMART Social Media Goals
Defining a SMART goal helps you stay focused, with a sense of direction. For instance, you may set a goal to increase your gross commission income (GCI) through social media. You can follow this breakdown to set SMART goals and achieve them.
Specific Goals - Be specific to make your social media marketing goals simple. clear and concise. For example, you can decide to increase your CGI by $550k through building and nurturing relationships and closing 50 leads at an average price of $400k, with an average commission of 2.75%.
Measurable Goals - Make sure your set social media goals can be measured through KPIs and Metrics. That way, you can keep track of the numbers of appointments accomplished, signed contracts, deals closed, commissions, and income sourced.
Attainable Goals - There is a difference between goals and realistic or achievable goals, and you know the difference. Make sure you set goals that you are confident you can achieve. However, that's not to say you shouldn't push your limits, just don't get overzealous.
Relevant Goals - Also, make sure to set goals that are significant to the current state of your business effort.
Time-bound Goal - While it's okay to set high goals and push yourself by taking advantage of social media marketing, make sure to set a deadline to achieve your set goals. Set daily, weekly, and monthly goals to help you get effective.
Identify the Best Social Media Platform for your Real Estate Business
What's synonymous with all social media platforms is the investment of time and money. So, it's not wise to say you should jump in the pool without understanding which social media platform will work best for scaling your real estate business.
You may have to study social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google search to have a good understanding of how they work before deciding which is best to guarantee a Return-On-Investment for your real estate business.
Create and Share Quality and Valuable Contents
Irrespective of the social media platform you're sinking in, content is KING. Competition is fierce, hence it is important to make your target audience feel the need to be on a page, and there's no better way to ensure that but by creating and sharing quality and valuable content.
You want to make sure to sell your brand in a positive way by creating valuable content which will subsequently increase your credibility and brand values.
The majority of real estate businesses on social media just stick to listings and advertising, however, the catch is that social media is supposed to be social and not scrolling through some deluge of ads.
- Share your brand story and tell people why you are passionate about real estate
- Share your emergence in the industry and show off some of your works, and workers
- Share customer's stories and testimonies by describing their property problems and how you help them overcome, and accomplish their goals
- Share your location, services offered, and facilities in each geographical area
- Ask your audience questions and give expert answers
Make Use of Visual Contents
One big secret real estate firms hitting it big on social media won't tell you is that properties or listings with professional real estate photos are more likely viewed compared to those without pictures or poor image quality. Therefore:
- Take quality pictures of listings or properties
- Hire a graphics designer to infuse great designs in it
- Share staff photos, pictures of events, and show people your brand values virtually
- Share slideshows that are perfect for how-to-connect, market-information, and serves as quick guides for buyers
Share Video Contents
Considering the human attention span is very short, content without intriguing stories may not appeal much to your audience, compared to property videos. So, you should create videos of the neighborhoods to give prospects a real sense of an area, and do not forget to highlight the USP of the properties.
Select a Target Audience and Utilize Smart Advertising
Of all the aforementioned, this might cost you quite a bit; however, it's part of the business. You should leverage the massive audience on your social media platform by creating tailored and targeted adverts.
While advertising, you may want to follow these cues:
- Target specific location, demographics, interest, and behavior
- Use carousel ads to show multiple images of a property or multiple images of different properties
- Optimize your ad copy and be as transparent as possible to command trust
- Peak periods come with opportunities, so plan ahead to up your ad budget during this period
- Make use of reviews and testimonials (video testimonials if possible) to instill confidence in your services
Analyze, Optimize and Repeat
This process is more of a continual effort at growing your business on social media. After you might have gotten your social profile running, setting up your social media pages, and running adverts, now is when you should take time to study and understand what works for your real estate business.
Without data to monitor your real estate business progress, your effort and resources may come to waste. Therefore, it's important that you're able to measure your progress and then tweak your social media strategy appropriately for better results.
You may want to consider these KPIs to measure the results of your social media marketing:
- Website Traffics
- Followers Count
- Leads from contact form submission
- Produce more property inquires or sales
- Engagement rates
In Conclusion
Social media marketing is worth it if you understand the perils. Take proper time to understand how your selected social media works, and what works on the platform. It's a lot of work, but it's worth it.
