Organic real estate traffic and leads are not won easily. Not surprisingly, brokers and agents want to get better at social advertising and finally making lead generation more predictable. If you’re one of them, let this 7-step process of running better real estate social ads guide you to get better results with each new ad campaign.
7 Steps to running better real estate social ads
1. Define your audience
You know your audience already if you run a real estate website or have ever run any offline ad campaign before. Geographic reach, demographics, objectives (e.g., first-time buyers, sellers, renters, investors), marital status, etc. – all of this is fairly easy to figure out based on your local market and inventory.
You will then use this info during each step of your campaign, from crafting an ad copy to choosing targeting options.
2. Set up your campaign objective
The main objective of any campaign is in order to improve some process, right? In a nutshell, real estate online ads have four most common goals:
- engagement. You want to be better recognized in a local community, cater to the local needs and be seen as a prominent expert in what you do. For agents, engagement also means building a personal brand and connections with people and local businesses;
- traffic. To put your listings in front of potential clients, you need more traffic to your real estate website and landing pages;
- leads. Promoting market reports, buyer and seller guides and neighborhood guides helps to get not just traffic but qualified leads that could potentially become customers;
- sales. Promoting listings or real estate information results in people taking action to contact you to start a home buying or selling process.
Of course, increasing sales seems like the most important goal to pursue. But at various stages you often need to build brand, visibility and traffic first.
3. Pick the best social platform
This step is actually quite easy. Most agents unanimously agree that of all social media, Facebook delivers the best results. This is hardly surprising:
- 95% of people use social media to learn about agents’ services;
- 45% of clients walked through a home found on social media including Facebook.
Either way, it’s a good investment of your time and budget to try Facebook advertising before turning to Instagram or Snapchat.
4. Set up the one essential campaign
Real estate social ads can be overwhelming. There are lots of campaigns agents can run but if you feel frustrated and don’t know where to start, try this. Set a Facebook ad campaign that would target all visitors that landed on your website within the last month. Chances are high that you’ll manage to engage with them because they may still be interested in what you have to offer.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to setting up this campaign: The #1 Real Estate Facebook Ad Campaign You Should Be Running.
5. Use organic content
Overly promotional content is left unnoticed on social media. The winning formula is offering information that carries value for your audience. For example, promoting educational real estate info usually brings much more traffic to your site than creating a purely promotional message.
Of course, this is not to say that you shouldn’t promote your listings or services. Just remember to mix and match and do not target the same audience with listings over and over again.
6. Refine your settings to spend less
Real estate social ads can eat up your budget in an instant. One of the benefits of starting with Facebook first is that, in a way, it offers a better way to control your expenses. With Facebook, it’s ad frequency that is an underlying factor for the total costs. Why exactly?
If people see your ad too often, they can report it and choose to stop seeing it. Facebook advertising works in real-time and negative feedback lowers your ad’s Relevance Score and drives your costs up.
So you need to figure out the best frequency that would reach a maximum number of people through the optimal number of touchpoints. This is how you can do this: Real Estate Facebook Ad Campaigns – Figuring Out the Best Frequency.
7. Test
To improve your results, you can test:
- ad copy and visuals. Try changing your call to action, image and button color;
- landing page. Once people click on your ad and land on one of your website pages, do they find the info they are looking for?
- targeting options. Find more info in this post.
What’s next?
Follow these 7 steps to run better social ad campaigns. Over to you!
