Launching a new brand or re-launching an old one in the real estate or mortgage industry is a significant event that requires a lot of coordination and planning. And the social media aspect of the launch is a crucial component of the entire integrated marketing and public relations effort.
You should do more than simply post once on the day of the launch. A successful brand launch requires more than just the bare minimum. Instead, think about building anticipation, ramping up to launch day. And make sure that the effort combines an organic and paid approach, meaning you should also use advertising platforms to pay for the promotion of your posts, targeting a very precise audience on the social media platforms you choose.
Your key social media platforms should include LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you’re a retail or distributed retail lender or a real estate brokerage, we recommend adding TikTok.
Here are 7 tips for leveraging social media to help launch your brand.
1. Define Your Goals
Setting SMART goals is the key to your social media strategy. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. They hold you accountable, guide your budget and ensure that you focus on essential metrics to succeed.
Your brand launch’s social media goals should include increasing awareness, driving website traffic, boosting engagement, and generating leads. Here’s a review of each and what metrics to track for success.
- Building brand awareness: Increasing brand awareness is one of the most common goals for social media campaigns. An effective social media campaign lets your audience know the value you provide them. Metrics you should use to track success here include share of voice, social media post reach, and follower count changes.
- Driving more website traffic: Driving your audience to your website to learn more about your company and offerings should always be one of your goals. Through Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can track unique website visits and see which social media networks are driving your website traffic.
- Boosting engagement with your social posts: The number of likes, comments, and shares is a crucial metric for discovering how your posts resonate with your audience.
- Generating leads: Successfully generating a lead is when you acquire pieces of information that make your interactions with your visitors easier. For example, getting their email addresses, names, phone numbers, or any other key information that can help you communicate or target them more precisely are all marks of success. Depending on your target audience and your offer, there are many ways to do this. Here are a few:
- Lead magnet offers: Using incentives like a case study, discount code, whitepaper, on-demand webinar, on-demand seminar, and any other compliant (especially as a lender) will entice more people to respond.
- Testimonials: Using testimonials to drive leads for a new product offering is especially effective.
- Targeted ads: Using targeted ads with special offers to drive click-throughs to your landing page and a form fill-out can increase the amount of information you gather.
- Retargeting ads: Setting up a sequence of ads to retarget someone who went to your landing page but never filled out the form is a proven, useful lead generation tactic.
- Virtual events: Hosting a live seminar for first-time homebuyers, investors, or business referrers to learn about a new loan program are all examples of virtual events that can drive leads.
2. Develop Buyer Personas
Building personas for your target audiences helps you better understand and target them with the right content that speaks directly to their needs and concerns. In addition, they will help you build trust because your audience will know you understand and can empathize with them.
Personas are fictional representations of key segments of your audience. Examples of audience segments for lenders or real estate agents could be fix and flippers, first-time homebuyers, young couples that live downtown and new parents. Other categories exist depending on the type of business you are in, whether B2B or B2C. For all audience segments, you need content that speaks to them whiich showcases the reasons they should engage with you.
To build out your personas, look at your client database and begin categorizing your contacts, like investors, first-time homebuyers, or any other category, depending on your business.
Also, talk to your team to gather feedback on life situations or goals they become aware of from fielding calls, form fill-outs, or any other information they have from direct interactions.
Finally, use surveys to gather deeper information on each category. Focus on what they liked about working with you and why they picked you. For example, you could ask about marital status, children, if they own other properties, what they considered when selecting you, financing challenges, social media involvement, and more.
You only need a handful of completed surveys for each category, so consider offering a small incentive, like a gift card, for their participation
3. Select Your Social Media Channels
Whether you’re a lender, real estate brokerage, or a vendor to the mortgage or real estate industries, you need to engage on these vital social media channels. Let’s review each:
- First, Facebook is the OG of social media. Whether you like it or not, it’s the most used social media channel on the planet.
- LinkedIn is the place to build industry recognition, trust, and credibility, which helps in recruiting and other business efforts. And if you’re a TPO, LinkedIn has a great ad platform.
- Instagram is a place to show your company’s personality and share tips through pictures and short videos.
- TikTok cannot be ignored! It has over 138 million U.S. users, with 67% over the age of 20, and 37% having a household income of over 100k/year. This channel is great for B2C, but the more progressive-minded marketers may also explore this for B2B. We’re all consumers, and TikTok continues to age up, so do not be afraid to experiment with this one.
- Finally, Twitter is where news breaks. You can also set alerts for specific phrases and jump into an evolving conversation that helps build your brand’s relevancy.
4. Conduct a Competitive Analysis
To win on social media, find out what your competitors are doing through a deep-dive competitive analysis. Doing this will help you set performance benchmarks for your company, learn about audience’s pain points, use the right voice on different platforms and discover how you can differentiate yourself. So first, identify competitive keywords and use the free Google Ads Planner to help. Then, plug your keywords into Google and make note of top organic results and who’s placing ads so they can appear above the organic results. Digital marketing agencies have additional tools that allow both competitor discovery and analysis.
Next, plug your keywords into Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok to see who ranks for them in your area or industry.
See what they’re up to on each of these platforms, including the type of content they post, followers, post frequency, hashtags, engagement level, when their last post was, the time between posts, and anything else that stands out that could inform your strategy.
Finally, do a SWOT analysis. Conducting this analysis will help you see how you stack up against your competitors and think through how to approach the opportunities you see and deal with the threats.
5. Analyze Performance
Consistently, weekly or at least monthly, you should develop a social media report for yourself and your stakeholders that tracks and analyzes performance. Of course, your digital marketing agency partner has tools to make this easier and help you understand how the data can drive your strategy.
First, include a quick overview of the goals to set the stage. Then, review your success metrics to validate them.
Depending on your audience, your reporting metrics should include leads generated, conversions, follower numbers, engagement, the volume of posts, and the best and worst performing posts. You can get this data from the social media platforms themselves or the software you use to deploy your content.
Be sure to provide past results for context so you can analyze trends and find the factors that could be affecting those trends.
Finally, highlight anything you consider a big win and any opportunities you see going forward. For example, maybe an industry influencer liked, commented, or shared a post of yours. This would be considered a nice win as it’s a clear endorsement of your content.
6. Leverage the Ad Platforms
A purely organic social media strategy is not enough, especially if you have a small following and need to build new connections and brand exposure to hit your business goals.
Organic social is great for establishing a personality and voice and building relationships by sharing great content. It’s also great for company announcements and other promotional posts, especially after you build your following.
However, relying solely on organic reach is slower. It will only deliver a small percentage of your followers, or your followers’ followers, if the post is shared, in addition to the people following your hashtags.
Paid social media posting is the best way to target new audiences to raise brand awareness and attract new followers. Paid social media placement is also great for promoting your latest content and promotions to a wider audience to generate leads and conversions, especially when launching a new brand.
A paid approach will help you hit your goals faster and target your ideal audience very precisely in a way that a purely organic approach cannot.
7. Nail Your Hashtags
Knowing what hashtags to use is incredibly powerful to grow your influence and attract optimal attention to your social media posts.
Hashtags allow you to expand your influence well beyond your current audience and help you increase engagement. This is why businesses spend so much effort picking the right ones.
Here are 4 ways to select your hashtags…
- First, look at the social media influencers you know in the mortgage or real estate industry. Rank them by their followers and reach and concentrate your efforts on them. Check out their posts and see what they’re using. Next, look at bloggers, editors, speakers, and podcasters… you get the idea.
- There are also advanced search tools on social platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook that allow you to dig deep and drill down to see what hashtags are used by those who turn up in top search results.
- Also, take advantage of free social media search tools like FollowerWonk to help you determine who is influential and research their favorite hashtags.
- You can also look at 3rd party hashtag aggregators and analytics tools to discover the right ones. Check out Influencer MarketingHub’s top free hashtag tracking tool suggestions.
Always ensure your hashtags are clear and on message so that they don’t distract or could be read wrong and reflect poorly on your brand
These social media brand launch tips can play a significant role in promoting your products and services in addition to providing some competitive advantages for your new brand. If you have not been utilized of these tips before, now is your turn to leverage them and reap the benefits.
However, as you can see, launching a new brand on social media or running any social media campaign is a lot of work. In addition, social media agencies have specialized tools and experience to develop and execute a successful social media strategy effectively. If you need help or would like to speed up your social media launch, our team is standing by and ready to help. Contact us for a free initial consultation and valuable guidance.
