Social media is one of the most valuable marketing tools available to marketers in the mortgage and real estate industries, as social media platforms provide you with an opportunity to reach a wider audience and engage with your current and prospective clients in real time. However, measuring the effectiveness of your efforts can be a bit more complex, especially when tracing them back to measurable objectives.
Here are six ways to determine whether your social media marketing efforts are successful.
1. Did you clearly define your goals? A crucial first step in assessing the success of your social media marketing activities is having clearly defined goals. Without them, success can only happen by luck.
Start by identifying the areas where social media marketing might benefit your company.
Here are some key areas where social media marketing can be advantageous:
- Increasing brand recognition within your target market
- Producing leads
- Increasing web traffic
- Increasing participation (The number of likes, comments, shares, and other interactions with your content are examples of engagement signals.)
- Increasing sales by advertising your goods or services and employing rewards to persuade potential customers to do business with you
- Improving customer service by offering assistance, responding to inquiries, and considering criticism
Next, you can make concrete, measurable goals that are in line with each of the objectives that are most important to you.
To boost brand exposure, for instance, you can aim to get 20% more social media followers over the course of the next six months. If generating leads is your primary goal, you can decide to raise the volume of leads created via social media by 10% over the upcoming three months.
You may maintain your focus on the results of your hard work by setting clear goals. It also makes it simpler to monitor your development and assess how well your social media marketing initiatives are performing.
It’s crucial to be realistic when creating goals and to take into account things like your resources, timeframe, and money.
2. Are you maintaining a metrics log? You can monitor your social media performance by tracking several critical KPIs, including:
- Reach: The overall population that views your material
- Engagement: The quantity of shares, likes, and comments
- Click-throughs: The quantity of users who went to your website after clicking a link in one of your social media posts
- Conversions: The number of people that clicked through from your social media post and then completed a specified action on your website, such filling out a form, setting up a call or meeting, or completing a purchase
- Revenue: The amount of money you make from using social media for marketing purposes
Keeping track of these metrics over time will inform whether you may need to adjust your strategy. For example, if your reach is lower than expected and does not improve over time, this could be an indication that your content simply is not resonating with your target audience.
Or, if your click-through rates are high but your conversion is uncharacteristically low, you need to assess the quality of your landing page(s), assuming that you are targeting the right audience that would be most interested in receiving what you have to offer.
To be most efficient at tracking, you’ll need a good social media analytics tool.
Keep in mind that as you deploy your social media strategy and analyze it, not all metrics are created equal. Some, like conversions and revenue, are best at predicting business results while others, like reach and engagement, are better at demonstrating brand recognition.
3. Analyzing post interactions. Analyzing interactions with your social media posts is an incredibly important aspect of the process of evaluating the quality of your social media. This review and analysis will help you further clarify what is important to your target audience so that you can speak to their needs and questions in future posts and content you publish. This is especially important in the current environment because the mortgage and real estate industries together are moving quickly to adapt, and homebuyers and homeowners’ questions and concerns evolve as times change and the market shifts.
As an added bonus to reviewing post interactions, you may well discover what types of posts drive the most interactions. Adapting your strategy by publishing more in a fashion that is attractive to your visitors will drive further interaction which helps both you and your visitors learn more about each other.
Also, be sure to evaluate your competition as well. This can also yield some great intel on what works and what doesn’t.
Utilizing social media analytics tools can help you spot trends in your competitors’ content strategies as well as track their activity and engagement numbers on social media.
4. Evaluate your competition against your own efforts. This warrants further explanation because it is crucial to determine how effective your social media marketing is.
To keep an eye on your competition and receive information of the most value to you, follow these steps:
- Utilize your social media analysis tools to follow their accounts: By doing this, you can learn more about their content strategy and how well it engages their audience.
- Conduct a competitive analysis: Carefully evaluate their social media presence in order to determine their competitive advantages, and disadvantages and uncover any opportunities for your engagement as a result.
5. Evaluate your content quality and engagement. The quality and quantity of your content ultimately dictates how effectively you will compete and survive.
Accordingly, here are some pointers for assessing the quality of the content you are posting:
Examine engagement metrics: By examining engagement metrics including likes, comments, shares, and click-through rates, you can determine how well your audience is interacting with your content and make improvements as needed along the way.
- Track conversion rates: If your goal is to drive conversions like website visits, lead generation, or purchases, it’s crucial to track conversion rates for your content. Use tools like Google Analytics to track how many conversions result from your social media activity.
- Evaluate your content mix: Analyze what you are publishing on social media. Do you publish a variety of content such as text-based articles, pictures, videos, and infographics? Do you deploy various media types, such as stories, reels, and live streams? You may uncover gaps in your content strategy and improve your approach to better engage your audience by analyzing your content mix.
- Keep up with the latest trends and best practices for social media engagement in the mortgage and real estate industries: Social media is continuously changing, so it’s critical to keep current with these developments so that you can adjust your strategy as needed.
- Leverage audience feedback: Last but not least, remember to pay attention to and act upon the comments you receive from your audience.
6. Measure your ROI. Assessing the performance of your social media strategy over a three- to-six-month period of time against your investment, while showing continual improvement, is critical to reinforce the financial commitment.
Follow these steps to assess the ROI:
- Consider the costs associated with content development, managing each of the social media platforms you are involved with, and any paid advertising or sponsored posts.
- Consider direct income from social media, including sales that can be tracked to social media recommendations, and income that could reasonably be associated with improved website traffic and brand recognition. ROI is then calculated as (Net income/Cost of investment) multiplied by 100.
Social media will continue to be a very powerful tool for marketers in the mortgage and real estate industry. Therefore, keeping on top of these best practices for evaluating how well you are doing at leveraging it is critical to your longevity in the marketplace. If you need help with evaluating your social media efforts or developing a winning strategy, contact us for a free consultation.
