Today more than ever, agents need to be more intentional with their marketing — especially with social media and digital outreach. Automation tools can help keep you on schedule, but finding ways to engage your audiences and keep them engaged is vital. 

Generating engagement is one of the essential steps to creating a consistent system for converting clients.

The good news is that growing your online engagement and increasing its effectiveness may be easier than you think. With the right approach, despite facing significant competition for attention online, your social media and digital marketing efforts can cut through the clutter. 

The key to successful, ongoing engagement with your sphere — and expanding it — is using the right tech tools and tactics. Most importantly, you need to commit to investing enough time and effort to achieve your engagement goals, turning more prospects into clients.

Let's look at how you can take your social media and digital marketing to the next level with a few simple steps.

1. Know your audience.

The first question you must ask yourself is, "Who am I trying to reach?" Now dig into the answer, thinking about your audience from a 360-degree perspective. What is their age range? Where do they live? What is their typical family makeup? What are their wants and needs? What information do they seek? What are their online habits and preferences? 

If you don't know the answers to all these questions, demographic information can help inform you. If this is the case, putting your audiences in buckets by generational profiles might be easier.

Suppose you mainly target Baby Boomers, Millennials, Gen Z — or even all of these groups. You can use the internet, which is filled with data about these generations that can give you insight into common interests, online behavior, and their real estate wants and needs, which are all different.

Knowing your audience will help you craft your marketing plans and strategies, impacting your website, social media, digital marketing, and traditional marketing. This insight will help you create and curate the right website content, social media posts, newsletters, market reports, and even your printed property flyers.

2. Be tactical with your time spent on marketing.

One of agents' most common mistakes regarding their social media and digital marketing efforts is not budgeting their time. However, when it comes to marketing activities, time blocking can increase your marketing effectiveness and efficiency and contribute to greater productivity in your business.

Social media can be a black hole for some agents, sucking up too much time because you can easily get caught up. However, when used correctly, social media and its return on investment can be nearly impossible to top when compared with other business growth efforts.

The key to maximizing the effectiveness of social media is to use your time tactically. In addition to setting aside time in your daily schedule for social media, one of the best ways to do this is to automate the routine and personalize the important activities. 

This means using tools — like the social features built into your DeltaNET® — that automate routine activities such as listing posts. Whenever you can, you also should schedule your posts in advance and focus your efforts on engagement that works.

Here are a few ways you can unlock the full potential of your social media and digital marketing efforts:

Less about you, more about them.

Another one of agents' biggest missteps when using social media is making it all about themselves. Social media engagement works best when your activity focuses on others, not yourself.

When creating original posts, think about your audience's interests. What do they want to know? What do they need to know about today's real estate market? What's happening in your community that's interesting? What about local housing design trends — are adding pickleball courts hot or not?

You can facilitate great engagement when your content delivers value to your audience. Content is what connects and engages.

Want to fuel more engagement? Ask questions.

You can spark new conversations and get your audience to engage quickly by simply posing the right questions. For example, you might take a quick poll, asking your audience to vote on the style of home they prefer. Or you can ask if they could have a second home anywhere, where would it be — and why?

Open-ended questions also can generate great engagement. For example, ask your audience to share their best and worst real estate experiences, the scariest moment when buying a home, or what it felt like after buying their first home.

You could also have some fun and create posts based on local real estate trivia to test your audience's interest — and knowledge. These questions can be open-ended or multiple-choice, which can drive significant engagement.

People also love to discuss home design. For example, ask a question about a new home design trend that is becoming popular, i.e., do they like mostly all-white kitchens? Or do they prefer white kitchens with dark contrasts? Or do they not like white kitchens at all — and why? You can adjust these questions to fit the design trend in your local market. Moreover, using photos as an example to accompany these questions can drive engagement further. 

Overall, it's best to try and keep your social post topics real estate focused. Best practices also suggest it's best to avoid potentially controversial or polarizing issues, such as politics. Instead, stick with your knitting and what you know; you are the trusted local real estate expert. 

And remember that social engagement is a two-way street. When viewing the social feeds of your audience, you need to answer the questions they ask too. So don't just be a drive-by liker, solely hitting the "Like" or "Favorite" icon as you scroll. Instead, spend time crafting a meaningful response; your engagement success should skyrocket.

Connect your social activity and website.

Whenever you can leverage one marketing task to support another, you save time, increase productivity, and become a more effective and efficient marketer. Consistent content between your website and social media posts amplifies your messages. 

Connecting a social post to information on your website can be an excellent way to cross-market your content. For example, if you maintain a blog on your website or offer a regular Market Report, social media may be the best way to boost your engagement on both channels.

Finally, your website should feature icons and links to all your active social channels. And be honest with yourself about where you're active on social media. For example, putting a link to a Twitter account with five followers and the most recent post showing a 2018 date stamp does not reflect well on you. If you are only active on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, post only those links and icons. This is a great way to ensure your clients and potential clients can easily find you on social media.

Create a social schedule and stick to it.

Remember, the content you create is what generates the most engagement. But if you don't make the creation of content and the distribution of it a priority in your workload, you will fail to maximize engagement. Engagement is what can grow your business by becoming one of your most valuable lead-generation resources.

Establishing and maintaining a schedule is a prerequisite for increasing engagement through social media and digital marketing. It would be best to add your plan to a calendar with specific days, dates, and times for your social activity. Then most importantly, you need to stick with it and execute your plan each week, week in and week out! If you need a little self-motivation, remember the adage, "Failing to plan is planning to fail."

Leverage the power of storytelling.

Sometimes, agents struggle with figuring out what content they need to create. Or they find writing difficult and time-consuming. One approach that can often help overcome these obstacles on social media and in digital marketing is to have a conversation with your audience.

Use storytelling as a purposeful method to connect. It is one of the best ways to educate and engage your audience. Sharing a real-life story puts things in perspective for people, particularly when the topic might seem tedious or difficult to understand. Stories help simplify things by using real-world examples. It helps your audience relate and creates a natural way to ask questions at the end to evoke audience engagement. This way, the questions you leave as a prompt for your audience to respond and engage are not forced but fit naturally.

By getting personal and sharing stories, people get to know and understand you better. They can better relate to you as a person. And whether you are creating a "reel" or a video post, visual storytelling works excellently on social media as well. Video or reels can be among the most engaging and effective posts you will ever create. People do want to see you and hear your voice. Making visual content for social media and your digital marketing efforts can also keep your audience on your social channels and website longer.

Track results, review, and adjust.

When finding out what works best to increase engagement on your social channels and digital marketing efforts, you will benefit by doing two things: testing and measuring.

Not every engagement strategy you try will work. Not every piece of content you create will work. But testing is the key to succeeding, so trying new things is great. 

You won't know if anything works unless you monitor and measure the results. The good news is, almost all social media and digital marketing are measurable. So you can quickly see what is working and what is not.

But you need to take time to stay on top of the results. First, you need to figure out what is working. You can test, then test again and discover what moves the needle if you commit to monitoring the results.

Once you know what works and what does not, you can adjust your social and digital marketing to create more of what is working. This may be the most important thing to generate more engagement, yet many agents skip this part. But engagement activity can soar for those who track, review, and adjust.