Facebook Ads For Realtors: 10 Strategies To Find Sellers & Buyers
Facebook ads for realtors are a game-changer! This is true even if you’re on a lean budget.
There’s truly no other marketing that can be as hyper-local, visual, affordable, and trust-building as a Facebook ad that crafts the right message to the right audience.
But when you think of finding home sellers and buyers, Facebook often does not immediately come to mind. After all, real estate is an old-fashioned business dating back thousands of years.
Real estate agents are more likely to attend networking events, send out mailers, cold call, and even door knock to drive new deals their way. Though none of those has the reach and scalability of Facebook to drive local home buyers and sellers.
And how many hours a month do you waste using these old methods that everyone else does? I bet it’s 10, no 20 hours a month, at least.
We’re here to give you 10 tips using Facebook ads for realtors that are ROI-positive and save you 20 plus hours a month.
Don’t worry if you have zero momentum on Facebook, you’ll be up to speed by the end of this.
1. Build A Convincing Facebook Page
The first step to using these ads is to have a Facebook page for your business.
Once you go on Facebook you’ll click the ‘Create’ button in the upper right hand corner.
It will produce a drop down menu that offers you some options (page, event, group, etc) on what you want to create.
When you click on page you will be able to decide what category you fall under.
Since you are a realtor, you’re going to choose business or brand.
From there you’ll fill in some basic information like the name of your page, what category of business you fit into and the address of your office. Facebook makes including a phone number optional but it is highly encouraged that you include multiple ways to contact you.
Once you complete that, you have a Facebook page.
Now that you have a page it’s time to fully complete it.
You will need a profile picture. We recommend you use to familiarize yourself with prospects as well as establish yourself as a professional realtor.
You will also need a cover photo. Using the brand logo of the company you work for is a good idea. This way viewers of your site know what firm you are affiliated with immediately.
Finally, you should completely fill out your about section.
You should include the following:
- A link to your website
- Forms of contact (phone number, email, address)
- How long you have been a realtor
- Any certifications you have received
- Awards you have acquired as a realtor
- The area that you buy and sell in
Take this Cincinnati realtor’s page for example. She has all of the boxes checked.
Her page is well equipped to experiment with Facebook ads for realtors.
2. Increase Page Likes
Now that you have a convincing Facebook page, it’s time to connect with people.
A great place to start is to connect with other realtors that are similar to you. This could be other realtors that work with your company or realtors that work in the same area as you.
When you connect with people that are in your industry you are added to one of Facebook’s algorithms. Facebook has a feature that suggests pages to users based on pages they have interacted with.
You also want to advertise your new page anywhere you can.
One place to advertise your new page is on your website. You can download a like button on your site that connects the user with your page without taking them away from your website.
Another place to advertise your new page is on your personal Facebook page. This can be sharing it on your feed and including a link in your bio.
Ultimately, your content is going to be what gets you the likes, and credibility, you’re after.
The more images of you, the better. Since you’re the face of your business and the client will be working with you, establishing facial familiarity goes a long way.
Users are attracted to photos and professional looking images. They will also establish your brand as professional.
Your written content can be a mix of professional and casual.
Including the occasional post that reminds your followers that you’re a real person can add a comforting component to your page. You can do this by means of holiday celebration posts, fun events you’re doing on off days, or pictures of your dogs or loved ones.
Now that you have the likes you can start using a variety of different Facebook ads for realtors.
3. Run Video Awareness Campaigns
You now have a stellar page and tons of likes. All that you’re missing are some compelling ads.
Facebook is all about paying to play, aka using pay-per-click marketing to increase awareness. You can’t rely on just your organic content anymore. You need to start paying for advertising.
Any ad campaign you create on Facebook requires a goal.
Facebook has four types of campaign goals:
- Brand awareness
- Traffic
- Lead Generation
- Conversions
Right now we’re going to focus on brand awareness. Brand awareness allows you to advertise to a wider audience and to interact with people that have not encountered your brand before.
This option is great for people just starting out on Facebook because it offers a lot of brand exposure.
Video content has taken over Facebook recently. In fact, studies show that users that view videos are 1.81 times more likely to purchase a product than users that don’t view videos.
Reaching a new audience with an engaging video can be all your page needs to find buyers and sellers.
The best video ads on Facebook don’t require sound. Creating video ads that have captions will produce better results.
You also want to take length into consideration.
The human attention span is gradually decreasing in today’s “I want it now” culture.
Ads that are less than 30 seconds get the most views. Let’s be real, most people don’t have time to watch a 60-minute video that is only an ad for your business.
The final component to your video awareness campaign is a specific target audience.
Facebook has the best targeting options on the planet.
To get the best results from your campaign, you’ll want to refine your target audience.
You’ll want to specify your target audience with features that resemble your current customer base. You want to make sure that your ad is reaching people that will be interested in your services.
You can do this by means of targeting demographics, interests, and behaviors. For example, a startup baby food company can target people who are fans of Gerber to try and steal market share.
That’s it! You’re now ready to launch your first video awareness campaign.
4. Install Facebook Pixel And Run Retargeting Ads
Before you started your page you likely had an existing client base.
Your existing clients still need your services too. This is a very good situation to be in as a marketer. Studies show that current customers spend 67% more than cold prospects.
With this information, we’ll run retargeting ads to put a specific message into an audience who has visited your website before.
Retargeting ads have the purpose to advertise to people that have interacted with your page or business before.
Facebook has a great tool that tracks your existing customer base for you.
The tool is called the Facebook pixel.
It does a variety of things:
- Measures cross-device conversions. It collects the conversions you get from your Facebook page, your website and any other medium you use for b2b marketing.
- Optimizes delivery of your ads to people who are likely to take an action. It keeps data on your previous buyers and sellers and advertises to them and people like them.
- Creates custom audiences from website visitors. Pixel knows the characteristics of everyone that has interacted with your business.
- Helps you learn about your website traffic. It provides you with data about who has been getting to your website through your Facebook ads.
Every time someone visits your site and takes an action (buys something, signs up for an email list) because of a Facebook ad, Pixel tracks it.
Pixel creates a custom audience based on the people they track, ensuring that they will be targeting again.
The more conversions you get, the more likely your ads will be targeted to people that will take action.
5. Drive Traffic To A Persuasive Webinar
Another type of Facebook campaign is a traffic campaign.
The goal of a traffic campaign is to send viewers to your Facebook page or website to take an action.
It is best to use a traffic campaign to get users to your website since that is where you have all of the realtor services you offer.
A great feature to use on the back-end of a traffic campaign is a webinar.
Webinars are the new craze: The majority of marketers trust webinars as the most effective way to generate leads.
In this webinar, your mission is to be relatable, build trust, give value to their current home buying or selling situation, and ask them to work with you to buy or sell a home. Alternatively, you can make the call to action a PDF where they download the top 5 tips to making or saving the most money in your local market.
The ultimate goal of your webinar is to prove that you are the right realtor for the client.
To drive traffic to your webinar, you will need to advertise it on your page.
Facebook has an option that lets you feature splices of your webinar as a video ad. You can choose to give a sneak peak to your followers. By showing your viewers the most compelling part of your webinar, you are encouraging them to sign up and view the entire thing.
Make sure to keep the topic of the webinar engaging and relevant to your audience.
The final step is to launch your webinar and watch the leads pour in.
6. Try Forms To Drive Leads
When you first start using Facebook ads as a real estate agent, you will be starting with the basics and then building up to more complex ads.
We discussed earlier simple call-to-actions that don’t require any extra effort except the click of a button. The problem with simple call-to-actions is that you don’t always get the customer information you were looking for.
Using forms with a C-T-A generates leads while supplying you with customer data.
It will ask for simple information like the viewers name, email, age, location, etc.
You might be skeptical since it sounds like extra work for the customer. Don’t worry, it benefits everyone in the long run.
Once a user fills out the information on the form they become a lead.
Their information also gets added to your database, including your custom audience.
Now that you have some more information about them you can send them targeted ads.
A good place to start is a response to the user that just filled out the form.
A simple thank you and welcome to our business can go a long way in the eyes of the customer. You also have information about them like their name and their age to make the message you send a little more personal. General messages can be off-putting and make a negative first impression on the user.
You can use this information for even more targeted advertising.
You can periodically send messages to your clients based on the information you gathered in the form. The more they interact with you will allow your messages to be more personal.
Using forms to drive leads helps you establish your brand as reliable and personable.
How many realtors can say that their advertising actually makes their customers feel valued?
7. Experiment With Targeting Options
The key to Facebook ads for realtors is understanding your target audience and how they interact and behave.
Facebook has what we believe are the best audience targeting options of any social media platform.
It has such advanced options because the have insane data on every user and their online habits.
Facebook has a number of targeting options:
- By location
- Age (Usually you will put a range of ages that your target audience falls in)
- Gender
- Languages
- Custom lists (You can input the custom audiences that Pixel creates)
- Detailed (A more advanced search than your custom list)
- By connection (advertising to people already connected to your page)
Those are just some of the many fantastic options Facebook has to offer.
You don’t have to only use one. You can use as many as you need to ensure that your ad is being seen by people that are promising buyers and sellers.
With some of the more advanced options, you can target based off behavior.
Knowing how your audience thinks and acts is what will put your ad apart from that of your competitors.
You can also target your audience based on what device they use and what operating system they use.
A user that is viewing your ad on a laptop with Google Chrome will not see the same ad that a user on a phone with Safari will see.
You should modify your ads so they don’t lose effectiveness.
Your users aren’t going to be viewing your ads on the same platforms and you shouldn’t create your ads thinking they will be.
Experiment with different combinations of targets to figure out what works best for each type of ad.
8. Create Lookalike Audiences
One of the more advanced targeting options on Facebook are lookalike audiences.
Lookalike audiences help you connect with people that are similar to your current clients.
Remember that custom audience list that Pixel is constantly changing? The data that is collected in this process can be used to target an even wider audience.
When you get data from your current customers you develop audience insights. You are constantly gathering information about the characteristics of your clients. You can then use these audience insights to target people just like them.
There are three different data sources that compose your lookalike audience:
- Custom audiences
- Website visitors
- People that like your Facebook page
Using those three sources, you can reach people that have yet to interact with your brand but are likely to become interested since they have similar tendencies to your current customers.
Lookalike audiences allow you to generate highly-targeted leads that you would not have organically come across.
This is why it is so important to master the knowledge of your customers.
You need to know the way they interact and their behaviors inside and out.
9. Facebook Traffic Campaigns
The goal of a traffic campaign is to get people to your website.
You will want to run this type of campaign once you’ve completed your page and increased your likes.
A traffic campaign will typically come after a brand awareness campaign.
The ads you feature in a traffic campaign can be anything from a specific listing you have or a new feature on your site that helps clients find their perfect home. Pretty much anything that can only be found on your website.
You’ll want to make the ad you run in a traffic campaign enticing because you’ll be directing the user away from their feed and onto your website.
That can be seen as an inconvenience so you’ll want to make the trip to your site worth their while.
A traffic campaign won’t typically be sharing your blog posts from your website.
A traffic campaign should be a specific offer on your website that takes the user to a landing page. Something that is going to be valuable to the individual.
A compelling call-to-action is absolutely necessary in this case. The user should see your call-to-action and decide to take the next step to becoming a client with your business. Your call-to-action should prompt the user to enter their home address that they’re looking to see or enter the neighborhood or city where they want to buy. Anything to get them invested in you as a realtor.
Traffic campaigns are going to drive traffic to your website and organically generate leads.
10. Never Stop Advertising
Finally, you should never stop advertising.
It’s getting increasingly hard to organically reach your intended audience on Facebook.
After years of testing, it’s crystal clear that paid advertising plus quality content is going to bring you the most success you can get on Facebook.
You should try out different campaigns with each campaign goal and compare which goal produces the best results. You can also try the same campaign with different goals to see which goal works the best for that type of ad.
We have a guide that offers you tips on how to create the best Facebook ads.
Clients, old and new, are out there and need your services. They might just not know it yet.
Continuously advertising on your Facebook page is going to keep you top of mind and grow your business. The Facebook algorithm will learn about your target audience and who are the best individuals to show your ads to. And you’ll create a reliable lead generation machine on the back of Facebook.
To accomplish this, you must never stop advertising.
Conclusion
We have given you 10 tips for running Facebook ads for realtors. Now it’s your time to take action.
Remembering the reward can help: If you invest strategically in Facebook, it can single handedly make you the #1 real estate agent in your city. I say that with 1,000% conviction.
We are rooting for you. You are one Facebook page away from a world of success.
If you aren’t confident in your Facebook abilities, contact us to run these campaigns for you. We specialize in Facebook advertising and would love to show you the ROI we can cook up in our kitchen.
Now it’s time to get out there and welcome the world of Facebook with open arms.
Good luck and happy advertising!