Online marketing requires more than counting cash to succeed!

Ha!  Based on the title above, I bet you thought we’d be discussing the more ephemeral elements of social media marketing today.  Surely you know me better than that by now! We’re Streetsmart for a reason:  when the chips fall, it’s all about results (real results – be they increased visibility online to actual conversions in property sales).  I’d be willing to wager: most estate agents out there don’t have the first clue about what results to look for, or how they came to the results that exist.  How many of you are actually tracking your source enquiries? In other words, do you ask each and every customer how they found their way to you?  Hands up!  I see very few hands…  Naughty.  So the billion pound questions remains:  how do we know what to spend where? How do we calculate the value of our digital and social media activity in business terms our bookkeeper can get their heads around?  Simples!

Keeping it Real

Results are everything.  In our hard pressed economy, and our beleaguered sector, results make a very real difference in our lives. On a personal level, it’s the difference between sipping champagne or enduring Gallo.  On a professional level, it means flourishing in a troubled economy and setting yourselves up to rapidly expand and take advantage of the downturn in all of its opportunities, or clinging to mere survival.  But in a world with so many customer ‘actions’ and in the case of many businesses, a lack of hard ‘conversion points’, what metrics are needed to make sound business decisions about which marketing channel works best for you?  Everyone bangs on about social media – but is it working for your agency?  Are you seeing the return on investment (ROI) you’d expect?  If not, you’re not doing it right.  That’s as real as I can get, though let us not digress from today’s most serious of topics: return on investment.

ROI: More Bang for your Buck

You’ve got property stock and you either a) need more, b) need to shift it or c) need to accomplish both.  Your chief concern is property marketing.  You have multiple channels to get your business in front of the right customers.  But how can you measure what’s working and what isn’t?  Smart business owners know that diverting budgets from underperforming channels to more effective arenas pays big dividends, rather than following the herd and simply marketing in the way ‘everyone else’ does it.  You may feel safe reviewing your portal statistics, but it’s just not enough.  Property marketing portals, provide monthly reporting and analytics to show how much your property listings were engaged with on their site.  But that’s only the beginning of the story.  What happens when the customers arrive on your doorstep, or pick up the telephone and ring you, or navigate to your website and request a viewing?  How do you know where they came from?  The ads? The billboards?  Google search?  Facebook?  Portals?  Tracking your source enquiries at the point of contact is the single most important thing you can do for your business.

“But it will take time and customers don’t like it!”  You know, if you can’t ask a quick question in all of your customer contact with ease, then you’re in the wrong business.  Creating lasting relationships and trust is key to swaying customers for big ticket items.  If you’ve got time to get their email, you’ve time to find out where they’re coming from.   Why?  It’s VITAL in determining a true ROI figure.  We cannot do the math without it.  Okay, I am getting bored with the marketing lingo and for lack of a simpler language, we’re going to provide some clear examples and instructions.

Brains & Brawn: The Daniel Craig Way

I admit it. The above title is a shameless, unaffiliated plug for a current obsession of mine (flying the flag and setting standards for all of our older gents! No excuses!).  But there is substance too.  Bond isn’t just a pretty face.  Nor is he all cutting edge technology.  He’s a smooth operater, cunning, shrewd, fit and debonair.  He knows what he’s doing, why and how – which makes ad libbing under pressure all the more successful.  He’s got it all.  And so should you.

ROI Defined

ROI is simple:  is what you’re doing making or saving you money and / or generating positive brand experiences?   Any communications channel you use should be designed from a business point of view to do one of these three things.  What ROI is not:  black magic.  You cannot massage the balance books, or hang on to outdated modes of marketing simply because you’re fond of seeing your properties in glossy printed magazines.   You must examine everything (print advertising, direct mail campaigns, your website, PPC, and social media channels) with the same impunity.

Math Lesson Alert

Are we all still awake?  Good.  Time to grab a coffee to keep you going!  So the calculation is simple. There are a few ways to calculate ROI, but let’s go with the most commonly accepted, expressed as a percentage.  ROI = money (and/or time)  spent divided by money (and/or time) made x 100.  Yes.   That easy.  So let’s represent that a little clearer:

ROI = x(money/time spent on a particular marketing channel) / y (money/time earned or saved from a particular marketing channel) x 100

So you spent 20,000 GBP on your new website.  You’ve generated 10,000 more views of your site in the last quarter as a result.  From those views, you’ve had 30 new customers, each with a value of 5,000 GBP to your business (this figure should be calculated based on the average profit margin of each customer to your business in each service level of your business – i.e. lettings/sales).   Here’s how it looks:

£20,000/£I50,000 x 100 = 13.333%.

Calculating time is fairly straightforward too.  Simply assign the hourly value of your team members and apply this value to the units of time saved.  The math lesson is over folks.  Now let’s tackle what we’re measuring.

BUT WHAT TO MEASURE?

Let’s go back to business basics.  The first step in any successful business effort is determining your key business objectives.  Whether they involve cutting costs in certain departments, getting more traffic to your website or expanding your online real estate – you can’t demonstrate ROI unless you’ve nailed this.  Take a look at all the core areas of your business performance and review your strategic objectives.  Here are some questions to ask to get to these bare bones essentials:

• Marketing and Communications:  How are we spreading the word to our customers and potential business partners/investors?  Are we doing this most effectively?  How can we cut marketing / IT costs while increasing business?
• Customer Service: Are we managing online complaints about our services?  Are we effectively servicing our customer needs?  Is there a way to do it better?  Can we make it cheaper?
• Brand Building:  Do new potential customers know who we are?  How can we ensure that we have most visibility online?  How can we make sure our customers feel valued by spending less time, not more?
• Human Resource: Are we attracting the right employees to our business?  Are we utilizing all tools and resources to do so online?  Can we cut recruitment agency / advertising fees by utilizing social media?

Brainstorm each area of your business and apply strategic objectives to the department(s) you are responsible for.  This allows a firm foundation for all of your future metrics.  Here are some example objectives and targets (but bear in mind, you must set reasonable and specific goals to each of them:

• Sell more products or services (10% increase in new home sales, 5% rise in property stock, etc)
• Cultivate influence and authority (more press inches and more online real estate, including engagement with key influencers in social)
• Customer Loyalty (25% higher customer retention rate, year on year)
• Cut business overheads (reduce customer service overhead by 20%)
• Optimise business efficiency (15% reduction in time spent on sharing property details in social media)
• Optimise marketing efforts
• Open new market demographic (50% increase in traffic to site from foreign markets)
• Increase Visibility in Market

Visibility in search engines for:

• - Company Profile (20% increase in rankings)
• - Property portfolio & intellectual property assets (i.e. area guides, etc) (100% improvement in ‘owning the search page’ for our properties and assets
• Increase Influence

Developing profile of key executives to:

• - Develop Partnerships & Relationships (2 new partners and business relationships developed via LinkedIn per quarter)
• - Increase share of voice with key influencers (5% increase in trade/ press enquiries for key market issues)

The Holy Trinity

Once you’ve decided your key business objectives, it’s vital to round them up and assign into areas that you can focus on with ease.  With so much to calculate, I can feel your pain.  However, we recommend using our Holy Trinity (Social, Digital and Business Objectives) to help you get started segmenting your measures of success in getting to your eventual ROI calculation.

Social Metrics:  From Likes, Shares and RTs to engagement with key market influencers online, you should set up your measurement system to include:

Quantitative Metrics – The numbers: Fans, Followers, Likes of FB page, etc

Qualitative Metrics – The value of the numbers:

• Clicks on content
• Re-tweets
• Shares
• Likes of content
• Comments on content
• Positive customer service experiences/referrals in social
• Social Bookmarking

Influencer Metrics

• % of following comprised of market influencers
• Volume of engagement with Influencers vs customers
• @replies
• Conversations in social (@replies, comments on blog, social bookmarking, forum discussions)
• Increased reach via Influencer Engagement (number of new followers reached through engagement with Influencers

Digital Metrics:  These are by far the easiest measures to collect (usually via a combination of Google Analytics).  They give you everything you need to know about how customers arrive at and interact with your website.  You should look at digital metrics in two segments: micro-conversions and macro-conversions.  Metrics should map back to your original business objectives at all times, so ensure you’ve accounted for them.  Sample metrics could include:

Higher macro-conversions

• Increased traffic from foreign markets
• Increased traffic from key search terms
• Property details download
• Registration onsite
• Requests for viewing
• Social shares

Higher micro-conversions

• Multiple category views (i.e Looking around your site for longer, in different property areas)
• Download of property brochure or informational pdf
• Increased dwell time on site
• Customer Survey responses
• Increased activity in registered log in area on site

Business Objectives:  These are by far the simplest measures.  Have you increased business in key areas?  Are you selling more houses?  Are more customers finding you in social media or online?  This is where your source enquiry tracking pays the most dividends.

Bringing Home the Bacon

Once you’ve gotten to grips with what to measure, your ROI calculation in social media, digital and other marketing channels should be straightforward.  Of course, we’re always here to help answer your questions and guide you.  Feel free to email me at tracy@streetsmartsocial.co.uk with your issues and we’ll continue this discussion in weeks to come.  But before we leave you all to counting, there are two key points for consideration:

• Measuring impact on brand, sentiment and reputation is hard to measure.  If you’re getting it right, you’ve ‘averted a crisis’ – so it’s hard to measure something that you’ve avoided (like www.ihateyourestateagencyname.com or an all out petition discrediting your property management expertise),  but it’s no different to measuring PR activity in a traditional since!
• Most marketing uses for social are about relationship building. Measuring the return on a relationship happens over an extended period of time, and you need the technology in place to capture this customer data to really calculate full return on investment.  Social, of course, can be a campaign channel, but social relationships just don’t work this way.  It’s about constant relationship building through trust and giving good content/value, to get real monetary return.

Happy number crunching!

*  This article first appeared in PropertyDrum magazine.

Streetsmart Social & PropertyDrum invite readers to take part in the world’s first real estate social media survey.  Please email tracy@streetsmartsocial.co.uk to participate. We’ll be collating the results and publishing them in a special PropertyDrum article in the near future!

What are they on about?

The core of any search or social media marketing program centers on content. Digital assets, rich media, web pages, MS Office and PDF docs as well as content created and shared by consumers all offer opportunities for optimization. If it can be searched, it can be optimized!

Online marketing is increasingly competitive and brand marketers world-wide are seeking real advantages that will improve the efficiency and impact of their social media and SEO efforts.

Tracy gets some unique insights from Lee into content based optimization strategies and processes as well as tactics for sourcing, creation and promotion of optimized content on the social web. Tracy also asks Lee about ways of educating the next generation on the subject of content and Lee brings up several examples of today’s social networks for kids, including Club Penguin.

• Can you contract STDs from sitting on the bus?
• Where did my baby go?
• What happened to the days when I baby-proofed every room in the house so she wouldn’t trap her little fingers?

Remember how proud you were when she had her first steps? As she turns to smile at you & step out of the door for her first prom night, you almost shout “Stop!” You want 10 more minutes to coach her on all the things you should have said, the things she needs to know to protect her innocence from the perils sure to come. But you stop. You smile back & let her walk away, praying that all the advice you’ve dispensed over folding the laundry together sticks. You’ll know she’ll be back & she’ll be ready to listen.

Your brand is your baby. Social media is…scary.

I work for a digital agency with a portfolio of clients who’ve just entered the social media space. After years of careful, reluctant acceptance of the ‘Learn, Measure, Engage’ model, they’ve moved from baby steps to full on careening round the house with the big headed balance of a toddler. Of course I’m scared. Of course I’m worried. But here’s how I sleep at night.

Good Old Fashioned Values: Social Media ROI for B2B Clients

So you taught her that it was better to be herself, to know what she was good at & to work hard to be the very best she could be. You taught her manners & the basics of how to get on in the world. But when she’s standing on the dance floor with some over developed goon breathing down her neck — will she remember these fundamental lessons?

For your business, it’s the same. CEOs, CMOs, PRs & marketers across the globe are worried about sending their darling brands out into the uncertain & tenuous world of social. They know they have to do it. They’re also expected to make this endeavour into a commercial & PR miracle. All eyes are on their interactions in these spaces with a global scrutiny that leaves little room to fail. So how do you prepare your brand for the adventures surely to come? How do you turn what you thought might be a new marketing fad into a profitable way to expand your business & satisfy your stakeholders?

Let’s lay it out in no uncertain terms:

Understand your unique selling points: Back to marketing 101. What does your business do very well? Why would I choose you to provide me with products & services? What would I look for as an investor to ensure your organisation was fit for purpose? Why would I want to work for you? What is your company doing that deserves column inches with my media group? If you haven’t hit all the stakeholder bases, go back to boardroom with some post it notes & your top level execs & hash it out.

Understand your audience & their issues: Beyond the simple “Who?” of your target market, think: “Who’s sitting on the other side of the computer screen?” What are their dreams? How would your business make their life easier? What are their sales objections? Have they been burned before? How do they educate themselves online to continue their development within the business they work? What might they type into a search engine to find this info? What are they interested in that might overlap with your company’s objectives (eco-friendly policies, corporate social responsibility efforts, innovative technologies). You get the gist. Find their need. Fill it.

Understand your objectives: It’s not all about the other person. When you enter the long dance of funnelling a big business lead into a tangible conversion, it’s also about getting what you need out of the situation. In the end, whatever you’re doing to engage with your audience & stakeholders, it should also come down to protecting & improving your bottom line. What can social media offer you in tangible, real numbers you can take to the boardroom? How will you use these metrics to get you from “We want a website/app/social media campaign” to a fully fledged, integrated digital strategy?

Understand SEO: If you do nothing else I say, please do this. Learn as much as you can about search engine optimisation (Bruce Clay’s training courses are a great start) & use this power. If you can find the words that people use to discover you or your offering, you’re onto the best thing since sliced bread. Sound keyword research & planning these keywords across your digital activities (from press releases to CEO blogs to how you create new content pages on your corporate site, or what you Tweet or upload to Facebook) will be the core of your success. Good SEO knowledge can help you discover where your audiences are, what they’re talking about, & how they’ll find you. Use this more advanced method to audit your keywords, & you’ll soon be on the way to completely targeted, perfectly crafted SEO, PPC & social media campaigns (read: more money with less time & effort!).

And when it comes to the pay-dirt of SEO — inbound links — you’ll find that your knowledge of the keywords & keyphrases you’ve discovered will not only allow your audience to find you, it’ll make them happy to link to your relevant content, too.

Understand Digital: Build with integrity from the bottom up. More important than any other weapon in your arsenal, digital provides answers. But only if you’ve married your analytics bone to your CMS, CRM & your Social bone. Execute your web development with every consideration for search, your audience, & your objectives. Work every back end system & front end interface to the max. But it’s not just about technology. Make sure you integrate the whole of your marketing efforts, matching your digital & social media strategy to every single outreach carried out in your organisation. Across the globe. Use analytics systems to prove increased traffic referred from social networks. Give these ‘micro-conversions’ a monetary value, just as you’d tag a banner ad. Use these systems to document your social interactions, then feed them into your CRM systems so that you can begin to prove the kinds of things that make financial directors smile. We promise.

Understand why IT departments hate Social Media: Imagine it, you rode the crest of the digital wave & found yourself transformed from closet computer games geek to Head of IT. Suddenly, you have power. With that power comes a lot of anxiety too. People come to you for everything from a faulty computer cable to a missing email. The last thing you want is the nightmare of potential viruses that social media can unleash. So how do you release the corporate shackles of group IT policies so that all relevant members of your staff can be your very own army of brand ambassadors? Give IT back the power. Ask an outside agency to audit their perceived challenges with opening up your business to social media platforms. Then ask them for solutions to these challenges (tiered security profiles for different levels of the business, restrictions on downloads, etc.) Re-package this feedback in a way that presents a good business case for social media & your job is done. Kick it up the chain as high as it needs to go to get it done. After all, you won’t find many boardrooms that aren’t chattering away about social media these days.

Understand Social Channels: Social media is dead. Gotcha. Never have four words elicited so much attention online. But it’s the truth: it’s just the way we ‘do the internet’ these days. So get out there. Experiment in the channels on your own time, use the platforms you hear about so that you understand their functionality. More importantly, follow the FedEx ‘Launch a Package’ model & spot the gaps in what these social environments offer so that your business can provide a solution. What else can I say about social media that you don’t already know? Be polite, be just as you would be when you’re standing in front of another human being. The clue is in the name of this new media: be social. Like you’d tell your daughter: you don’t need to wear revealing clothes & tons of makeup to attract attention. You just need to be there & be yourself. It’s about opening up, knowing the audience, being confident in your organisation, & using these channels to spread your word. If you build it, they will come. Which leads to my next point:

Understand Crisis & Reputation Management: Like your daughter, out on her first prom night, it’s important to understand that bad & weird stuff, so it’s best to be prepared. What am I talking about now? When you’re being ‘social’, you just can’t stop. You’re there. So if your organisation makes a mistake, or there’s a bump in the road, don’t lie. Be honest & open. Because social media platforms are much, much more than a campaign channel. If you begin to engage in these channels, you have to keep the dialogue going. Your social media properties (the Twitter handles, the Facebook page, the LinkedIn & YouTube accounts) are permanent digital communications. Get them optimised & running like a well-oiled machine so that if disaster strikes, you have a real & immediate way of both communicating your messages to interested stakeholders as well as protecting the first page of your search engine results. Remember: don’t go Nestle, get even. Flood your networks with well-optimised copy that protects your brand values & your corporate site’s position in the search engines.

Leveraging Social Media: It’s All About How Much You Put In

The way you leverage social media in your business & beyond is all down to the right upbringing. The success or failure of your brand & business in these environments depends entirely on how much you’ve prepared. If you love yourselves & your babies, do it right. Once you set this prolific marketing machine running, it will keep on going. Whether it comes back to take care of you in retirement is entirely in your grasp.

How Much is This Going to Cost Me?

Worried about resource, time & the amount of hard work that organising your social media strategy will take, don’t panic! Need to understand the finer arts of how to work each social media channel to your corporation’s best advantage? Get in touch —tracy@streetsmartsocial.uk or sign up to Streetsmart Social’s  newsletter for more!

[This article was originally published by Bruce Clay International Blog, reproduced with permission by Streetsmart Social | Social Media Digital Agency]