Social Media Marketing: “No way a Quick Return on Investment”
Everyone would favour a quick return in marketing investment though most of us know that it rarely works out that way and consistency is key as is patience. Having high expectations for your business is a great mindset, though this must be pacified with realistic goals. Marketing takes up a big portion of annual spend for most companies, lots of this budget will go towards online communication and especially, more and more so, social media.
With many channels of social media to choose from and a continuously growing audience with easier and faster accessibility, getting our brands on to them is quite vital for successful returns on marketing. Social media remains relatively free to use and cheap should you wish to explore paid for marketing opportunities. You can easily target your audiences with social media and all audiences will be using it. The limit of the marketing success that you can achieve on social media is limitless so long as you follow relevant trends as what worked yesterday could be a distant memory today.
Viral was the key word some years back within social media, especially with video content (Youtube more so). Many of us was seeking that ultimate viral video that would explode in popularity and build us fame overnight, there was no guidelines to go by and certainly nothing could be made sense of as to what went viral and why – Who remembers classics such as ‘Charlie bit my Finger‘ or ‘Evolution of Dance‘.
So if social media is such great way to marketing you / your business then why does it take so long to get results?
The competition on social media is huge and even if we are just focusing in on UK Estate Agency usage. It was impressive not long ago to see that an estate agency had bothered to create a Twitter / Facebook account even if they contained zero updates or only a random post here and there. Today we are seeing estate agencies giving a greater proportion of their marketing time (and spend) towards social media with full video tours on TikTok to regular sales tips shared on Facebook. Millions of views, engagements, members, subscribers and more are already happening so you are already going to have to work hard and play big time catch up to stand a chance of standing out and gaining satisfactory results.
Today you will no longer see results by posting a new property listing here or there on Twitter, setting up a TikTok account and remaining silent or securing merely your estate agency name on Facebook. If you want results from social media then the following guidelines you should consider:
- Find yourself / your agency a presence on social media and learn about the audiences you are targeting: Spend a little bit of time to see how your rival agencies are engaging on social media to learn about what competition you are up against. Who is your target audience and what social media channel, if any, are they likely to be using and equally as important, what style of content are they likely to engage with. Also, the importance of when you post can determine your success as our timelines are full of updates so a post can easily be lost or missed. With these initial researches carried out, you should then think about the style of social media posts you should be aiming for ie young and trendy or serious and informative.
- Quality of content and being unique: You will have researched thoroughly what kind of content your local competition is sharing and ideally you will have spot a gap in the market to deliver something different. Please note that boring, everyday content will just be ignored whereas something clever and attention grabbing will pull someone in – This phycology means that you may come away from sharing what house prices are doing locally (as every other agency maybe latching on to) to sexiest colour schemes for bedrooms or buy to let hotspots locally. Original content is always important so spend time to either outsource to professional content generation agencies or do your own research and share quality relevant content that would engage local readership / viewers.
- Collaboration: The idea of doing it alone doesn’t sound easy and neither should you put yourselves in this situation – Social media is awash of influencers and you will undoubtedly have many in your local region too. Connect with these people / brands and look to build relationships and organise activities such as interviews / competitions / paid for posts with them. Influencers will likely already have a target audience following them and your focus should be on communicating with them and trying to draw some over to your own following.
- Engage with your followers / members: Try and get your followers to communicate with you such as asking for feedback / survey replies etc. People like to get involved and especially if they need to get something off their chest. Surprisingly so, either positive or negative, reviews can lead to an improved customer loyalty – Negative reviews that are remedied to the customers satisfaction can increase customer loyalty over those who initially left a positive review.
- Maintain your presence: I always say that results will not happen overnight and it is sensible to give a campaign a good six months in order to study any results. If you fall off at any time during your campaign(s) then it will hinder your progress and especially if you have built up a loyal audience who come to rely on your content.
- Study your progress: How is your social media strategy working? Are your followers / members growing? Are interactions (comments / likes) increasing? Are you using analytic tools to see if your social media activities are working / improving? What is working, what isn’t working – Maybe you should be focusing all your attentions on one social media platform over spreading yourself too thinly over three platforms?
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