The real estate market has changed considerably over the last two decades, as have most businesses since the rise of social media platforms and digital marketing strategies.
Studies from the National Association of Realtors have shown that social platforms and marketing strategies are becoming increasingly integral to landing clients across the real estate space. And this is a trend that’s been forecast to continue and strengthen over time.
The fact is, if you’re in business, you need to be on social media, and this is especially critical within the real estate market.
In today’s business world, as related to real estate, research has shown that an estimated 99 percent of Millennials along with over 90 percent of Boomers and Gen-Xers all begin their real estate search online in some form. This is a huge pool of potential clients that all real estate brokers and realtors want to tap into.
If you’re looking into real estate social media marketing packages, the following guide will give you a comprehensive overview of what these packages contain, and the benefits associated with each component.
What Exactly is a Social Media Marketing Package?
Social media marketing packages vary, but all generally include bundled services for marketing a particular business across social media channels. Initially, a consultation is required to better understand your business goals, and which services will benefit you the most.
A standard social media package generally includes building and maintaining social media profiles and might include a select list of deliverables, along with special services.
Some special services might include:
- Accessing data collected by social media analysts
- Account set up
- Account optimization
- Consultations
- Weekly or monthly reporting
- Management of accounts
A quality real estate package for social media will have all of your needs met, plus, the ability to deliver real-time data and allow you to meet your monthly and quarterly business goals.
Why Use Social Media for Real Estate?
Social media has become a platform for everyone. Whether you want to stay in touch with friends and family, air your grievances, share your life with the world, or sell within a specific marketplace, social media has all the tools you need.
As such, with a broad user base, landing potential clients through crafted content built for social media has become an effective marketing strategy in recent years. Perhaps the most effective platforms to consider for real estate marketing are LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, with the latter being the most prevalent.
As a platform, Facebook is a literal giant. With 2.89 billion monthly users as of 2021, Facebook is the largest social network in the world.
The vastness of this network is what allows businesses to tap into any potential customer pool across the digital landscape. Along with this, Facebook’s user demographics clearly show the target audience that people like you in the real estate business are trying to reach.
Additionally, Facebook’s features make it simple to navigate, post content, curate reviews, share listings, book appointments, and correspond with clients all from one platform. And for any realtor, you can also utilize Facebook ads, which allows you to target users who have shown interest or have searched for properties within your specific area.
All in all, Facebook is where your potential clients are most likely hanging out. And you’ll want to use this platform and all the tools it comes along with to your advantage.
Though Instagram is now owned by Facebook, the platform itself still holds a good bit of originality. Let’s face it, Instagram is where the younger user base is, and this user base also comprises a large percentage of first-time home buyers. You can utilize Instagram to your advantage to establish yourself as THE top realtor for first-time home buyers.
We use images more and more in our lives, and people are drawn to images and infographics on social media. As such, Instagram is the perfect place for click funnels that correspond to a beautiful image of a home you might be trying to sell or rent.
Instagram also has the “story” feature, which is much like Facebook. Using this, a realtor can give daily updates to any property listing along with images and links to landing pages for additional information.
With Instagram, it’s more about consistent content and less about interaction and customer engagement as with Facebook, but by utilizing both tools, you can reach deep into the hidden vault of customers that you might not be seeing in other areas.
While LinkedIn isn’t the most popular social platform for sharing content with a potential customer base, it is the most popular social platform to showcase your professional credentials.
Yes, you can also share content via LinkedIn as well using LinkedIn Publisher, but the number of users viewing content on this site is much smaller than with Instagram or Facebook. Regardless, any realtor or real estate broker should have a presence on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is more of a professional resume site where you can share your relevant experience, education, background, personal philosophy, and any reviews you might have from past clients.
In addition, the content you share on LinkedIn can be used to link to other sites as well, such as your other social profiles, your company website, or any other relevant sales materials that you might have.
At the end of the day, LinkedIn acts as your online business card, and this gives potential customers a little glimpse of who you are before they decide to work with you. So, ensure that all of your information is polished, accurate, and up to date if you want to take full advantage of this network.
Customized Strategy
Each business has unique goals, especially realtors and brokers in the real estate space. As such, you want to develop a customized strategy rather than be led by some one-size-fits-all approach that some marketing agencies might try to set you up with.
With a personalized campaign, your real estate business will be set up for success and be able to target the demographics that will bring you the best results, according to your sales goals. In addition to ad campaigns and remarketing efforts, you’ll be better positioned to attract clients and track the actions of previous clients.
Each strategy must be customized to suit individual sales goals. With this in mind, if you’re only interested in sharing monthly listings, your marketing package would be a cinch. If, however, you wish to pull in clients and specifically target a customer base, your package might be customized with data analysis and other tools which will benefit your needs.
Working with a marketing management team will ensure that your real estate social media marketing package is tailored to suit you specifically, instead of going down the “trial-by-error” road.
How to Customize Your Social Media Package
Prior to customizing your marketing package, you should be clear about your goals and answer a few questions that are specific to your space in the real estate market. The reason for this is that there are so many options to include in each package, and you’ll want to select only the features that will benefit you the most.
The following list includes proactive steps that will give you greater insight into what you’ll want to have included for your real estate social media marketing strategy:
- Create a detailed checklist of what you want your social media strategy to produce
- Decide your monthly spending budget on social media marketing
- Select specific social media platforms that you want to advertise on
- Research your target audience to find out where they spend their time online
- Mind-map your advertising goals as related to social media
- Dedicate time to selecting imagery that best displays your business
The clearer you are about your monthly and quarterly business goals, the easier it will be for you to move through the details of a social media marketing package.
This gives both you and your marketing team a succinct plan to go by and keep in mind that this can always be modified or augmented along the way if need be.
Benefits of a Social Media Marketing Package
Social media marketing and management offers a busy real estate professional to better utilize time and resources. Simply put, if you’re in the real estate business, you’re a busy individual. You likely don’t have a surplus of time at your disposal that you can use for marketing efforts beyond the occasional post on social media.
With a marketing team and a package in place, your efforts will be better utilized doing what you do best: actively selling real estate on your own time. Additionally, marketing professionals do what they do best: market your business and bring you more clients.
Believe it or not, many real estate professionals decide to try to market their own properties, and this is usually a path that leads to more time wasted. As a real estate professional, you’re naturally good at selling. But a marketing professional is naturally good at engaging and bringing clients to you. And, that’s where you’ll take the lead.
Allowing the professionals to do their job will free up your time, and give you more opportunity to develop personal relationships with clients, reach out to colleagues, and search your area for new or up-and-coming properties that you’d want to acquire and sell.
Examples of a Typical Social Media Package
Keep in mind that each social media package will be tailored to suit your specific needs within the real estate space, according to your business goals, your demographic data, and the region in which you operate.
If you’re looking for a starter package, and you wish to target the three main social media platforms that are the most beneficial to real estate professionals, i.e., Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, the following would be ideal:
- 45 posts per month divided over 3 platforms
- 15 boosted posts (5 per platform)
- 15-20 custom images per month
- Daily comment monitoring
- Daily engagement
- Monthly consultation
- Monthly reporting
- Select deliverables (contests and the like)
Though this is simply an example of a basic package, it covers most of the bases that a larger, comprehensive package normally would. As you develop your business strategy with your marketing team, you’ll be able to further customize your package to only include what works best for your overall strategy.
Advertising Packages
An advertising package is generally included in an overall social media marketing package. And these can also be customized to suit your specific needs. For example, for one social profile, you might have the following ad package:
- 4 custom ads
- 2 advertising campaigns
- 4 monthly advertising modifications
- Included weekly consultations
For multiple social profiles, you’ll want to multiply the number of ads. So, for three social profiles, you might want a package that includes 12 custom ads. But, keep in mind that you can also start small and see how far only a few targeted ads and campaigns get you each month.
You have to remember that the social media landscape is always changing, and events going on around the world and here at home have a lot to do with the behavior of local markets, and with a user’s online behavior as well.
For example, you might find that during certain parts of the year your ads do fairly well, and they might remain consistent at bringing in clients for some time. But, during an election year, many users have their attention on political matters, and the engagement you receive during times such as these could change considerably.
All in all, there are several moving parts to an ad campaign. Not only does setting up the ad require crunching data, but it also requires promoting it amid a host of other online distractions.
Why Does Social Media Marketing Work?
We’ve entered the generation of brand awareness. With this as a factor, we all have to tailor our professional efforts down to the most minute details.
Social media marketing works by giving a personality to your brand. As a real estate professional, your brand is what a buyer will associate when he or she thinks of you and contemplates using your services to buy a home.
In this busy world, with distractions at every glance, it’s becoming difficult to gain any attention at all. As such, it becomes a vital necessity to enlist the expertise of marketing professionals and use them to your advantage when it comes to social media marketing.
Social media requires engagement and consistency, and this is something that is hard to come by when you’re a busy professional. Social media marketing works because it employs those who understand the space and how to mine the attention that you need in order to become successful.
Going Forward
Once you’ve had time to do some preliminary research on your target market and draft a strategy, you’ll then be well-equipped to go select a proper-fitting real estate social media marketing package that will be tailored to suit your every need.
Social media helps you develop brand awareness. And brand awareness helps you establish a name for yourself in the real estate space. Because without a presence online, you’ll basically be reduced to tools from the ancient past.
Even if the ancient past worked well for real estate professionals of a time gone by, today, you have to have engagement across all digital spaces, no matter which industry you’re in if you want to succeed in the competitive real estate marketplace.
Social Espresso can help you with your real estate social media marketing. Click here to learn more!