Jan 13, 2023 by - LabCoat Agents

How To Maximize Your Facebook Real Estate Ads In 2023

Advertising on Facebook can be an extremely effective way for realtors to reach new customers and grow their businesses. With over 3 billion monthly active users, Facebook still has a vast reach that can help realtors connect with a more targeted audience in 2023.

According to Fit Small Business:

  • In 2021, 97% of buyers used the internet to search for a home.
  • 90% of realtors use Facebook to promote their businesses.
  • Inquiries for listings with videos had a 403% increase.

However, to see success with Facebook advertising, it’s important to understand the key elements that go into creating effective ad campaigns.

Identify Your Target Audience First

By understanding the demographics of your ideal customer, their pain points, and what motivates them, you’ll be better equipped to create ads that resonate with them. Additionally, creating buyer and seller personas can be a helpful tool in identifying your target audience.

Here are some tips to get you started:

Use broad metrics at first
If you’re trying to sell a starter home, your target audience should be first-time homebuyers, who are typically young people. It is crucial to remember, however, that not all young people are at the same stage of being ready to buy a property. Consider the case of a hypothetical young individual who is about to move into their first home.

Fill in the details
By using broad characteristics to identify your target market, we can then narrow it down to specific interests. By recognizing that your ideal prospect likely resides in an apartment, we can infer additional information about their interests. For example, this person probably spent some time looking for apartments in the past, so we could target interests such as sites that help when apartment hunting.

Audience Size
Facebook does a great job of providing metrics when you are dialing in your audience size. Ideally, you will want the needle on the Audience Definition scale to be somewhere in the middle between “specific” and “broad.”

Adjust your targeting by age, location, income, etc. until you find this happy medium, and then test different ad sets using different variables!

Creating Effective Ad Campaigns

Use video ads! Creating awareness and positioning yourself as an expert in your local market can be achieved through the use of video content and social media advertising. By producing videos that highlight the community and its features, as well as by interviewing locals about their preferred restaurants and shops, you can establish a connection with potential clients and demonstrate your familiarity and expertise about the region.

Here are a few things to consider when creating short-form video content for your ads:

  • Keep it short. With attention spans at an all time low, it’s best to keep the video under 15 seconds in length
  • The main message should be delivered in the first 3-5 seconds
  • Include your branding / logo within the video
  • Have a specific call to action telling watchers what to do next

Leverage Automatic Email Follow Up

Combining your Facebook ad campaigns with email marketing is a surefire way to increase your ROI. According to data from Litmus, for every dollar invested into email marketing, it returns $42.

To set up an effective email follow-up system, consider using a CRM, personalizing emails, and providing value to leads. Additionally, you can use Facebook pixel to retarget leads who’ve visited your website.

When writing your follow-up campaigns, keep the following in mind:

Re-introduce who you are and seek to add value!
Don’t rely on your leads to remember who you are, regardless of how long it’s been since your last contact with them. Introduce yourself and keep the conversation light and friendly while providing as much value as possible.

Address Any Potential Objections
Try not to say anything in your emails that would build objections, rather personalize your emails, place yourselves in their shoes and aim to address potential objections they might have.

Get Creative
Your emails don’t have to be blocks of boring text and market insights. Test out embedding video into your emails with tools like BombBomb that integrate directly into Gmail. Make your emails unique in some way, whether that’s with your design, hyper-personalization, or adding a bit of humor, the extra effort will go a long way.

Measure Your Ad Performance

To truly see success with your Facebook advertising campaigns, it’s important to measure and analyze your ad performance. The first step is to install the Meta Pixel on your website so that you can track visitors between Facebook and your landing page.

The tricky thing with real estate leads, is that it could be months or even years before a lead becomes profitable. This is why it is important to view your return on investment (ROI) historically. With that being said, here are 5 different metrics you can use to gauge the success of your ad campaigns:

1. Cost-Per-Lead (CPL)
A typical CPL for realtors is $1-$2, however, with an optimized campaign they can be much lower.

2. Total Number of Leads
This metric is important because you can expect to close around 1% of the total leads. So if you generated 500 leads over a 6 to 12 month period, you should be getting around 5 transactions, allowing time for the sales cycle.

3. Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Your CTR measures how many people are clicking on your ads. A good CTR is anything higher than 5%. If your ads are not at this level, try updating your creative and/or your ad copy.

4. Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
Your CPC is how much it’s costing you to get someone to click on your ad, whether it leads them to your website, a form capture, etc. If you have around a 5% CTR, then your CPC should be around $0.20

5. Cost-Per-Impression (CPM)
Your CPM shows how much it’s costing to have your ad shown. Facebook measures impressions by counting the total number of times the ad was shown.

In Conclusion

Facebook can be a powerful tool for realtors looking to reach new customers and grow their business. By understanding the importance of targeting specific demographics, creating effective ad campaigns, leveraging automatic email follow-ups, and measuring ad performance, realtors can achieve a higher ROI and see real results from their Facebook advertising efforts. It’s always recommended to take the time to test and optimize different tactics to see what works best for your particular business and demographics.

Download Facebook Ad Results For Realtors

If you are interested in seeing the results from some of our successful ad campaigns, head over to our resources page to download our case studies.

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