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6 Tips for Real Estate Agents Looking to Find More Buyers Using Facebook Ads

Written by Posted On Monday, 12 March 2018 11:40

Real estate agents are no strangers to marketing. From word-of-mouth referrals to glossy postcards and bus benches, many home sales professionals have mastered grassroots and guerrilla marketing tactics.

What’s still new to this group, though, is Facebook advertising. Marketing your real estate business online may seem overwhelming, but it’s one of the most cost-effective and precise ways to find more buyers.

1) Outline Your Goal

Before you jump into running Facebook campaigns, you need to have a goal in mind. What is it you want your campaign to do, exactly? Do you want to find more buyers by getting more people to follow your page? Do you need to get one of your listings in front of potential customers?

When you brainstorm, be specific. Wanting to “find more buyers” isn’t a specific enough goal. Instead, you need to write down exactly how you’re going to find more customers. With this information in mind, you can start to outline your campaign.

2) Identify an Audience

Before you run a campaign, you need to have a Facebook business page. If you are already using a Facebook real estate page to get more leads, you have a leg up on the competition; you can mine Audience Insights for target data.

To take advantage of this feature, load Facebook’s Ad Manager and click on “Audience Insights.” A window should populate, and you’ll then click “People connected to your Page.”

This will open yet another pop-up that shows your follower’s information. More specifically, it’ll show you their demographics, other interests and more. Equipped with this data, you can select a new audience for your campaign that shares traits with the current people who like your page.

In the event you don’t have a Facebook page, the first step is creating one for your business. Then, you’ll want to consider about your current customer base. What’s their average age, income level, education and marital status?

Think about the traits most commonly seen in the people you work with and write them down. With your list in hand, you can create a Facebook advertisement with a target audience that’s similar to the people you already do business with.

3) Use Geographic Targeting

As a real estate agent, geographic targeting will be key to your success. Advertisements should be run specifically for people who are close to your location. It’s no use spending extra money to reach people far away from you, as they’re unlikely to take advantage of your services.

When you create a Facebook advertisement, make sure it has a geographic targeting component. You’ll want to bid high in hot-spot geographic areas near you, too, such as cities.  

4) Write an Attractive Headline

Writing an irresistible headline is internet gold—especially on Facebook. Every time you come up with a new title, think format, emotion, type, promise and topic. For example, “5 (format) Amazing (emotion) Homes (type) That You’ll Want to Move Into Today” (promise/overall topic).

The format above is a list, as your audience is going to see five homes. The emotional word is “amazing,” which performs exceptionally well on Facebook. The title also has a clear promise and topic—stating that a viewer will want to move into every home they see in the post.   

5) Use Eye-Catching Images

Albeit cliché, a picture really is worth a thousand words. In real estate, you can only talk about a property or yourself so much. At some point, you have to let a photo express what language can’t communicate.

Every time you advertise on Facebook, include an attractive image. Facebook users are likely to scroll past text that doesn’t catch their attention, but photos are harder to ignore.

6) Reconsider the Budget

Real estate advertising success and spend are positively correlated. The more you’re willing to spend, the more people you can reach. In order to succeed on Facebook and connect with the people you want to work with most, you need to have a healthy budget.

When you’re planning out your next campaign, you can define your budget based on your goal. If your goal is simply to get more followers, you likely won’t see a ton of monetary compensation quickly. For this reason, your budget can be a bit smaller.

Budgets that seek to sell a property can have relatively larger budgets. If you have success on Facebook, your return on investment will be large—in terms of commission. So, you know you can spend a bit more upfront to sell the house and make a larger profit overall.  

The Bottom Line

In today’s competitive world, a polished, thorough real estate marketing plan isn’t complete without a Facebook advertising section. Running paid campaigns on this platform is critical if you want to rise above the competition and put your real estate business on the map.

To start, implement the six strategies above. Once you have them down, you can expand your core competencies to include more advanced techniques, such as A/B testing and retargeting.

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