Hello again, and welcome to Farm Friday! I hope last week’s haunted house tips helped all of you attempting to sell a stigmatized property or entertained those of you who wouldn’t dare touch a haunted house! This week, we’ll be discussing how to get started on Facebook Ads. As mentioned in previous articles, Facebook is an excellent way for a real estate agent to find potential clients.
Key Terms Defined and Common Questions Answered
I’ll start by addressing a couple of commonly asked questions when it comes to this topic.
What are Facebook Ads?
In general, Facebook Ads are a way for any company or individual to market themselves on Facebook to a target audience. Many real estate professionals use social media ads to generate buyer and seller leads in the real estate industry.
Do Facebook Ads work for real estate agents?
Yes, Facebook Ads work for real estate agents and other professionals in the real estate business. Your potential customers spend more time on Facebook than any other marketing channel. Facebook ads can be a valuable addition to your real estate marketing strategy.
How much do real estate Facebook ads cost?
Not as much as you’d think. The cost of an ad campaign on Facebook depends on various factors, such as the target audience, your ad quality, and how many of your competitors are targeting the same audience. However, most ad campaigns can cost as little as $4 a lead and up to $100 a lead.
How to Get Started with Real Estate Facebook Ads
Whether you’re looking for potential buyers for a particular listing or you’re looking to gain leads to nurture through your advertising campaign, the ability to display your real estate ads to a custom audience is a handy feature on Facebook.
1. Identify Your Marketing Objective
Before running your campaign or even establishing a campaign budget, the first thing you need to do is identify what you want to gain from your campaign. Are you looking to capture an email address from your ad for you to follow up on? Do you want to generate traffic to your real estate website? Make sure you know what you want to gain from your Facebook Ads campaign before you start planning it. Hot tip: buyer leads are easier to generate on FB than seller leads.
2. Gather Branding Materials
In a previous article, we talked about the importance of a brand for your real estate business and how to develop it. Make sure you have up-to-date logos as well as a recent headshot. Additionally, now is the time to check your website and optimize it for capturing leads (most of your ads will lead your potential clients to your website). If you’ve used professional real estate photography services, those images can be used in your ads. You can create a real estate video ad using this content or implement a carousel ad. Using professional real estate photography doesn’t just help sell listings faster; a single image can be reused many times throughout your marketing strategy, making photography an essential resource for content creation and social media marketing.
3. Calculate Your Budget
Once you’ve determined what kind of leads you need, sit down and figure out how much money you’re willing to spend for each. Calculate this by dividing your gross commission from Facebook deal closures by the total number of leads you get on Facebook.
Example 1:
Let’s assume you typically sell $500,000 houses and that your split is standard. As a result, each transaction nets you approximately $6,250. Now let’s say you convert 5% of the leads you speak with into customers and close 40% of them. So, five become clients for you out of every 100 cold leads, and you close two of them. Now, you’ve grossed $12,500 from Facebook Ads.
This means that if you spend $125 per lead, you’ll break even. If you spend $100 per lead, on the other hand, you can expect to make a profit of $2,500. You’d earn a profit of $7,500 if you spent $50 on every lead. This information is valuable for establishing how much you’re willing to pay per lead as well as your daily budget.
4. Set Up or Optimize Your Facebook Business Page
To show ads to people on Facebook, you need a Facebook Business Page. Most likely, you’ve already created one. If you haven’t, Facebook makes it easy to fill out all of your information. My advice to you is to fill out every single field when it comes to your business page. A well-maintained business page builds social proof for real estate companies. Make sure that you link to any of your other real estate sites as well!
5. Set Up Your First Campaign
Creating a Facebook page is similar to building a website, except that you must have a Facebook account. After you’ve made your page, the next step is to set up your first campaign on Facebook. In internet marketing, a campaign refers to the overall aim you intend to reach when promoting something.
For example, if you want to start a buyer lead campaign, you may have one ad set for it that includes a free first-time homebuyer’s guide and another that gives a list of off-market houses. Within each of those ad sets, there may be various variants of each ad or retargeting advertisements targeted towards consumers who have been to your website before or have reacted favorably to your past campaigns. To set up your first campaign, click on “Ad Center” in the left column of the FB interface.
6. Establish Ad Settings
After that, you’ll need to create a campaign objective and name it. Click “lead generation” and give your campaign a name like “Buyer Lead Ads.” Then hit the “Continue” button.
Lead generation is not the only type of campaign you can run on Facebook. There are multiple different campaign types, including traffic, engagement, application installations, and video views. However, in most cases, I bet you’ll want to use lead generation (especially considering the state of the real estate market).
Now we’ll add our ad settings. Select the campaign you created on the next page. Click housing under “special ad categories.” Facebook has a legal obligation to use this category and no others due to fair housing regulations. You may set up A/B testing for your advertisements and tighten your budget on this page. Spending money across multiple ad sets will help you optimize your budget.
7. Set Your Contact Method
You have three options for how you want your leads to contact you: instant forms, automated chat, and calls. Next, choose your Facebook Business Page under “Page” and click Accept to accept Facebook’s terms. Then, under “Dynamic Creative,” select yes. This will allow Facebook to optimize aspects of your ad to get more leads.
8. Set Your Budget
Remember all that work you did calculating your budget? Here’s where it comes into play. The bidding system for Facebook advertising is what determines pricing. Advertisers bid on how much they are prepared to spend to reach a particular audience. Fortunately, all of this bidding takes place automatically. All you have to do is pick your daily maximum; Facebook will decide when and how much to bid for your locations based on that limit.
9. Target Your Audience
Create a new audience under “Audience” and fill out the form. Next, you’ll tell Facebook which audience you want your advertisements to appear on. Over 2.4 billion people are using Facebook. As a result, choosing your audience is a crucial stage in creating successful Facebook real estate ads. Click “Create New Audience” under the “Audience” section.
Location
Facebook used to allow brokers to select a ZIP code for location, but they now only allow you to add a pin and target people within a 15-mile radius. Make sure you set your farm’s geographical center as the drop zone for effective targeting.
Language
Next, choose the language that your audience speaks. If you are marketing to a bilingual audience, make sure to select both languages.
Demographics
Now, here’s where targeting your ideal audience gets tricky. In the past, Facebook allowed realtors and brokers to target audiences by income, ZIP code, gender, marital status, and other variables that indicated someone might purchase or sell a property soon. They even had a category called “likely to relocate,” making targeting dead simple. Ah, the days of yesteryear.
Due to fair housing laws, Facebook no longer offers these sorts of filters. However, you can still target an audience likely to purchase a house by choosing some of the following interests:
- Zillow
- Redfin
- Real estate investing
- First-time buyer
- For sale by owner
- Holiday cottage
- Home equity loan
- Refinancing house
- House hunting
- Housing.com
- Land and houses
- Luxury real estate
- First-time homebuyer grant
- Mortgage loans
- Property finder
Remember that the more interests you choose, the smaller your audience will be. I also recommend showing your ads to your “connections,” which are people who have liked your page or visited your website in the past.
10. Choose Placements
Select the country or region where you want your advertisements to be displayed. You may choose whether to have Facebook or Instagram display your ads. You can also show advertising on Facebook’s “Audience Network,” which includes participating applications. For now, I recommend that you select “automatic placements.”
11. Create Your Lead Gen Forms
You can skip this step if your website already has lead capture and landing pages. However, if you don’t, Facebook allows you to create lead forms.
You need to make the lead forms that your prospects will use to contact you. To begin, go down to “Instant Form” and select “Create Form.” You may opt for which picture your lead sees, as well as your headshot while setting up your form.
12. Set Spending Controls
To begin, make a monthly budget for your ad spend based on the cost per lead you found above. Starting at the top of your budget will allow Facebook to optimize your ads more quickly. That means you’ll receive better leads faster. Also, the more ad placements you have, the more likely it is that someone will click on them.
Your objective for a lead generating campaign will be to entice someone to provide their contact information, so Facebook will automatically select “leads” for optimization. Now that you’ve created a campaign, there are a few more settings you’ll want to consider: an objective, targeting, placement, and expenditure controls. Make sure your target audience is big enough to support the quantity of leads you decided on in the third step. If everything appears to be in order, proceed to the next stage. If not, you may modify your settings to attempt to increase your reach.
13. Pick Your Ad Type
Facebook allows you to choose between three types of ads: carousel ads, single image or video ads, and collection ads. You’ll most likely use either carousel ads or single image ads.
Carousel Ads
Carousels are advertising units that change automatically as your audience scrolls through them. For instance, you may have four open houses scheduled for this weekend and include a picture or video walkthrough of each in your carousel. Your audience can enjoy many listing photos at the same time thanks to one ad like this.
Single Image or Video Ads
That’s all there is to it. Instead of having a slew of pictures for your audience to look through, you only have one picture or video to pique their interest.
Collection Ads
The majority of collection sites are built for e-commerce firms. A video is included, after which a variety of items below it. If you’ve been shopping for boots recently, for example, you may see a collection of boots.
14. Create and Design Your Ad
After you know what kind of ad you want to produce, the next step is to make it. Typically, if a piece of content is a lead magnet, the best approach to write and design it first. Now it’s time to get started creating your ad. You’ll need to pick pictures, design your layout, and write the text for your ad. If you’re advertising a video, you’ll have to film the footage yourself or you could order aerial drone video from a professional real estate photography company.
Use Facebook Ads to Grow Your Farm
There you have it, folks: the basics of how to get started on Facebook ads. In a future article, we’ll share examples of successful Facebook Ads for real estate professionals. In the meantime, sign up for The Good Stuff to get content like this in your email inbox every week!
