By now you have realised that social media has become the best marketing tool in modern times.
Not only is it dynamic and widely accepted, setting up your social media marketing campaign correctly can guarantee exponential benefits for your business.
The real estate industry is not one to be left behind, as it has leveraged social media to thrive since the global pandemic affected physical and social interactions.
But is social media marketing effective and profitable?
When you invest in something, such as promotions and advertising, you expect to get your return on investment.
While opening up a social media account can be free, initiating campaigns can cost money and without careful planning on your social media marketing drive, you might not see that ROI and cause you to bleed money.
But truth be told, many real estate agencies can agree that social media has been a blessing for them and helped them thrive during these uncertain times.
Here are the most common and effective points to consider if you want to be realistic with your social media ROI.
The common types of campaigns
Remember that social media is a broad subject that covers numerous applications with unique characteristics and can both be simple and complicated at the same time, depending on what your goals and aims are for your real estate business.
Here are good examples of social media campaigns to embrace so you can target your ROI.
Funding Campaigns
The primary objective of a funding campaign is one that can be used when you are targeting to generate immediate revenues. You invest in marketing to promote and sell your listings.
For instance, you spend $100 on sponsored ads for your business and close a deal out of it.
This is one of the most convenient campaigns that you can wrap your head around, to begin with, since it is easy to see how much you have spent and the return on that investment.
For this campaign, you must know the basic key metrics that must be tracked on a weekly or monthly basis, whichever suits you best.
It is best for you to figure out the average cost to win a customer and your average revenue for each of your clients.
Your key metrics shall be your total ad spend, total revenue and return on investment.
Awareness Campaigns
For this campaign, your objective is to present yourself to the most number of people possible using your brand message.
Do take note that awareness may be a bit difficult to track since you are not directly channelling your investment on direct income-generating activities since you are more focused on investing to get people’s attention and may not be able to see the immediate impacts of such activities.
Admittedly, you may not be able to equate this on a dollar for dollar basis, but would be more on setting a value in terms of the salient benefits you get out of it, such as building your brand and image.
Your key metrics for your awareness campaigns are your reach (the number of people who saw your brand), impressions (how many times were your sponsored posts seen in total), CPM (cost per thousand- how much it will cost you for a thousand eyeballs which means the lower cost the better), engagement (the percentage of people who like, comment or share your paid posts, number of followers per month and growth rate, and the percentage of web traffic thanks to your social media posts.
This type of campaign is commonly adored by businesses since it produces lasting results as it helps develop brand awareness to help in lead generation campaigns, it boosts organic growth since you can experiment with different types of audiences and demographics, and it allows your potential clients to reach out to you when they have concerns or would like to know more about your brand or what you have to offer.
Lead Generation Campaigns
Your objective through this campaign is to generate leads for your business which may be a tad harder than funding campaigns but definitely more measurable than awareness campaigns.
You can track this by simply measuring performance through each step of the funnel, which you can calculate by the end how much you have spent to win a client and how much it was worth per client.
Your metrics are your total ad spend, total leads, cost per lead, lead conversion percentage, cost per client, average value per client, and your return on investment.
Now that you know what to do with your social media capabilities, it is always important to know how to plan your strategies, set your goals, and gauge your profitability to know if you have the right formula to realise your social media ROI.