It’s 2020 and you need to get savvier with your marketing strategy. Digital marketing highly outweighs traditional marketing. So, what can you do to generate more leads digitally? You can leverage Facebook advertising to generate more leads, collect valuable information and drive traffic to your real estate business.
Whether you’re a realtor, broker or own an investment company, Facebook ads can be an incredible tool for your business. Not enough people in the real estate industry are taking advantage of digital marketing in general, let alone Facebook ads. Facebook ads can be used to generate buyer or seller leads through targeted advertising campaigns. But they also are a great way to build brand awareness and increase your exposure.
Throughout this guide, we’ll dive deep into Facebook ads tailored specifically toward real estate personnel.
Getting started
In order to get started with Facebook advertising, you first need to have a Facebook profile and business page. If you need help getting setup with all of the tech aspects, we’d be happy to help get things started.
The reason Facebook ads are so prominent in real estate is because you are able to reach people based on their interests, behaviors and demographics. In addition, you can target people based on their geographic location, which especially helps in real estate when you want to focus on the area you’re farming.
Real estate Facebook ads 101
Let’s review some of the technical aspects so you get a better understanding of how to effectively run Facebook ads for your real estate business.
When creating a new Facebook Ad there are three essential parts:
1) Campaign — your overall marketing objective for the ad
2) Ad Set — your ideal audience and detailed targeting features
3) Ad — your creative, copy and visual aspects of the ad
We’re going to mainly focus on the ad set portion which is where you choose the audience you want to target. But the first thing you’ll choose when creating an ad is the objective. Each ad will serve its own unique purpose, so your marketing objectives will change. Some common objectives used in the real estate field include brand awareness, reach, traffic, lead generation, engagement and video views.
If you already have a great website, we recommend installing the Facebook pixel and optimizing towards conversion events. Otherwise, you can get started with lead generation and collect user information directly on Facebook.
Moving on to the ad set portion…As a real estate agent, you can target a very specific type of client through your Facebook Ads. This is what makes the ad platform extremely beneficial for agents. You get to choose the demographics of your ideal customer such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Language
- Marital Status
If that doesn’t sound good enough, you also get to pick the exact location you want to target. If you’re farming a specific area, this is a huge win! And if you don’t farm an area yet, you can choose zip codes that you want to farm. When it comes to location, you have the option of targeting anything from zip codes, city radius, specific address radius, and people traveling in a location. You can also exclude zip codes and locations.
Based on your recent client data, you’ll likely know who your target client is. Look at your recent sales and analyze the data. Perhaps millennials aren’t buying as many houses as people ages 35–55, so you’ll target them instead.
Here’s where it gets really powerful…
The targeting platform on the Facebook Ads manager proves why Facebook advertising is the most effective paid option across all social media networks. After you’ve established a basic demographic for your ideal client, you can use the targeting features to narrow down your audience based on their interests and behaviors.
For example, most of our clients in the real estate industry will choose to run ads that target people who are active on Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com.
For behaviors, most real estate agents would want to include some of the following attributes:
- People likely to move
- Recent mortgage borrower
- First time home buyer
- Recently married
I know what you’re thinking and yes, Facebook actually has a behavioral category for people who are interested in buying a house and people that are likely to move. How awesome is that?
As we both know, people who are likely to move probably have a higher likelihood of needing a real estate agent. Facebook collects an abundance of data, both online and offline, that allows us to receive detailed information from a consumer standpoint.
The Facebook Ads platform allows you to get specific with all of these fine details. By choosing interests and behaviors such as people who frequent Zillow and Trulia that are likely to move or first time home buyers, you’re basically “pre-approving” your ad set in a unique way.
As you can note, the Facebook Ads targeting platform provides numerous powerful and unique options for generating leads. If you want to gain a strong competitive advantage, Facebook ads for real estate agents are an efficient way to grow your business and increase your overall brand awareness.
Content ideas for realtor Facebook ads
It’s more important than ever to brand yourself and stand out. It’s said that real estate is one of the most saturated fields. By utilizing Facebook ads, you can get a leg up on everyone else.
As a real estate agent, Facebook ads can be used to:
- Promote your listings
- Attract new buyers and/or leads
- Build trust and brand loyalty
- Increase your exposure, grow your audience
- Retarget people who interact with your content
- Capture contact information for emails, etc
To accomplish these feats, you’ll want to:
- Utilize photos from your listings with engaging copy and CTA’s
- Run lead generation ads targeting people who are likely to move
- Create educational video content to build your personal brand
- Use lead forms to capture contact information such as name, email, etc
We hope this real estate ads guide was helpful!
Thanks for reading! If you haven’t started advertising on Facebook for your real estate business, there’s truly no time like the present! Get started today. If you need any help, don’t hesitate to contact us.
We know that running a social media campaign can seem like a lot to do, so we’ll do it for you! Our proven Facebook marketing strategy for Real Estate Agents will bring motivated sellers and buyers to you.