Facebook is a visual medium, ideal for real estate ads. It provides you a wide variety of ad formats from which to choose, from carousels to videos, slideshows to collections. Not only that, Facebook helps you reach the right audience by providing ad targeting options that target relevant behaviors. For example, you can target prospects who are likely to move, who purchased a house for the first time, who recently got married, or who obtained a new job. Indeed, Facebook is a great place for real estate advertising. With your ads, Facebook marketing can be propelled to new heights.
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Two Timeless Strategies That Work
To succeed in Facebook advertising, you must implement a strategy. Of course, every real estate agency is different, every agency serves a different clientele, which means no two real estate campaigns will be the same. Still, here are two strategies that work for all.
Know Your Goal and Your Audience
First, you must think of your marketing objective and the strategies you plan to use to achieve your goals. Are you trying to generate leads, build awareness for your brand, maximize video views, or boost conversions? You can set your campaign objective in the campaign level of Ads Manager, where you’ll be treated to a slew of objectives.
Next, you need to consider your target audience’s demographics, including age, gender, job status, interests, and income. For example, you can target prospects who have liked Zillow’s Facebook page, who make a certain amount of money each year, or prospects who live in your area. You can set the criteria for your target audience in the ad set level.
You also need to align strategies with the stage of the buyer’s journey your prospects are in. For example, if they are at the top of the funnel, then brand awareness would be the ideal objective for your campaign. If they are at the bottom of the funnel, then you should run ads with the conversions objective.
Scale When Ads Are Performing Well
Scaling is an important part of growing your clientele. However, not all ads are scalable. An ad that costs too much for too few leads, for example, is one that you shouldn’t scale. An ad that generates the conversions you desire at a lower cost is one that you do scale. A/B test ads to see which ones perform the best. If your ads are underperforming, try changing them; for example, refreshing the creatives, targeting a different audience, or changing your bid.
3 Real Estate Facebook Ad Examples
Not all Facebook real estate ad campaigns are created equal: Some muddle along while others are extremely effective in achieving your marketing goals. One of the best ways to ensure your Facebook ad campaign ends up in the winner’s circle is to emulate the practices of successful campaigns that came before yours. Here are three examples of innovative real estate campaigns on Facebook.
1. Touching on Customer Pain Points: Vakil Housing
Before launching the ad campaign, the marketing team at Vakil Housing carefully analyzed its target audience. The team discovered that finding an affordable house for a large, growing family is its prospects’ chief concern. The discovery spawned an effective tagline: “Keep your whole family together.”
This is a stellar example of using your prospective clients’ pain points to your advantage. To do it successfully, you need to understand the specific problems they’re trying to solve, and you need to create ads that effectively respond to those needs with killer copy and great images. That’s what the team at Vakil did. You can do the same based on your own audience analysis. For example, you might discover that prospective clients are concerned about their credit histories or that they want a home with lots of privacy. Whatever their principal pain points, show them how you can solve their problems in your ads.
2. Leveraging the Virtual Tour: John and Melissa Steele
Using virtual tours is nothing new in real estate advertising, but John and Melissa Steele, two San Diego realtors, took it to the next level by creating an extended, eight-minute virtual tour of a property they were selling. They pushed it out on Facebook Live.
The live broadcast gave the Steeles the ideal format for instant interaction with prospective buyers. It’s one of the best ways to address key prospect concerns and answer their most pressing questions. Use Facebook Live to highlight a virtual tour or to tell prospects more about your real estate agency. Because of the emotional connections it forms, it’s the perfect way to build trust and increase sales.
3. Launching Drones: Holley Real Estate
Using drones to highlight the beauty of a home’s exterior and property is another good real estate marketing strategy, one which Holley Real Estate has leveraged. Take a look, for example, at this drone footage for one luxury home, Eric Parc Manor. The footage is brief (just a few seconds) but powerful, and it worked wonders for the agency.
Drones are relatively inexpensive to rent—according to Thumbtack, you can get high-quality drone footage for as little as $250—and they’re still new enough to grab your prospects’ attention and get some value added for your properties. Keep in mind that video is among the best Facebook ad creatives to use. Real estate listings that use video on average get 403 percent more inquiries than those that don’t.
To sell more properties, you need to connect with your audience in ways your competitors don’t. You need to employ innovative marketing strategies with proven results—in other words, you need to do what successful realtors on Facebook have done before you, but you need to do it right, and that means partnering with a reliable Facebook advertising agency with deep experience in social media marketing.
By David Conway, contributing writer