Our Top Tips For Reducing Marketing Spend and Generating More Leads for Your Real Estate Business
According to a stat by Facebook themselves, 79% of home buyers use online resources (including mobile resources) along their search.
As the largest social media platform, both on desktop and mobile, it only makes sense then that you’d want to advertise your real estate business on Facebook.
Whether you’re just getting started, or looking to refresh an old strategy that isn’t cutting it any more, we’ve assembled some of our top tips for how best to advertise your real estate business on Facebook.
1. Target What Works
One of the main benefits of Facebook as a marketing platform is how we can use their built-in targeting features to precisely target consumers on the platform.
Aside from the obvious benefits, this also lets us experiment and refine the audience we’re targeting over time, and this is one of the best ways we’ve found to reliably bring down your CPL (Cost Per Lead).
Here are a few great targeting options you may have overlooked:
1.1. Location Targeting
Location targeting presents two very interesting opportunities for us.
Firstly, we can target people in certain locations who are looking to move locally.
For example, people who have been renting and are now looking to buy property in the same area. If you can correctly anticipate this as a trend, you can run campaigns targeted specifically at these people for great results.
Secondly, you can use location targeting as another lifestyle/demographic feature. Where somebody currently lives is usually a fairly reliable indicator of their lifestyle and price bracket, so use that to your advantage to bump up that lead quality.
1.2. Age Targeting
What kinds of listings do you have? Are they “forever-homes” or apartments aimed at first-time buyers? Filtering down by the age brackets most likely to be interested in your listings can be another great tool for reducing CPL and improving lead quality.
1.3. Detailed Demographic Targeting
Your experience may vary since many of these features are less supported in the South African market, but Facebook actually offers detailed demographic targeting specifically for real estate businesses.
You can try filtering people by their income, their homeownership status or dipping into behavioural targeting and looking for people who are most likely to move.
Assuming they don’t narrow your audiences too much, and you find the data is accurate for your business, these are amazing tools for refining your targeting.
1.4. Lookalike Audiences
If you’ve been running for a while, you probably have enough data for creating a lookalike audience.
Lookalike audiences automatically generate a profile of similar customers based on the common traits of a list of people you provide Facebook with, e.g. your Facebook page followers.
This is another amazing tool for expanding your audience with high-value leads, assuming you have a solid customer base already.
For the best results, try generating your lookalikes from only people who’ve purchased houses if possible.
2. Use Multimedia Formats
Another great thing about Facebook is that we’re not constrained to only one format for the contents of our ads.
So, why not make use of that?
Here are some great formats for showcasing your listings you may have overlooked.
2.1. Video Ads
What better way is there to showcase a listing than to take consumers on a virtual tour and showcase the property?
Video ads are an exciting format because they’re more dynamic and appealing than a picture could ever be. Consumers get a better sense of the scale, flow and layout of the property which means you’re more likely to get really interested leads.
Another interesting opportunity is in 360-degree video, a newly supported format on Facebook.
Film the entire property in 360-degree video and you have a digital house tour ready to go, an invaluable resource in times like these where people are reluctant to leave the house.
It doesn’t have to cost a fortune, either. You can get very far with a good smartphone camera, some basic knowledge of lighting and some basic editing software.
2.2. Carousel Ads
Why show a potential customer one property when you could show them many?
Give people options by running carousel ads filled with many similar properties to increase the chances of someone reaching out because they see something they like.
This can also be a great way to emphasise a deal on a listing, by placing it next to another one that’s not discounted to emphasise the price savings.
2.3 Branding
Not a true ad format per se, but rather something you should consider across all your advertising is cultivating a brand around your business.
Are you the agent that deals with high-class exclusive listings, or someone who specialises in affordable properties in growing areas?
Think about how you position yourself, and this can be a great boon in attracting the right kinds of customers.
Of course, you might not want to “put yourself in a box”, but having some key element that differentiates you from the competition is always a good thing long-term.
2.4. Content Marketing
Instead of just running ads, why not take it a step further and expand your business into content marketing?
Creating helpful content for your customers is a great way of introducing your business unobtrusively, and staying top of mind when they are looking to purchase a new property.
You could do things like buying guides, design ideas, area reviews and more.
This has the secondary benefit of tying into an SEO strategy if you modify your content to target specific keywords that people are searching for.
3. Build Trust Quickly
More so than most industries, real estate businesses are built on trust.
Any property is a hefty investment, whether you’re looking to buy or rent, and so the number one thing people look for in a realtor is trustworthiness.
Thankfully, Facebook also has a wide variety of tools that can make it easy to build trust as quickly as possible.
Here are a few options to consider:
3.1. Testimonials, Reviews and Comments
Testimonials and reviews on your pages, as well as comments on your posts and ads, can be a huge trust signal for new customers.
Encourage your previous customers to leave reviews by being as helpful as possible, or incentivizing them in some way.
Think about it this way, who would you trust more: A business telling you “We’re great, go with us” or another customer saying “They’re great, go with them”?
3.2. Be Transparent in Your Ads
Not everyone is going to be your ideal customer.
Too many businesses fail to realise this and in the name of casting the widest net possible deliberately obscure key information like pricing or detailed specifications.
Don’t do that. You want to be as upfront as possible with all of your ads, for two main reasons.
One, it signals that people can trust you. As we said, that’s absolutely crucial.
Two, it eliminates bad leads early on. If somebody can’t afford a property, you’d rather they don’t click on your ad (because that costs you money, whether they become a conversion or not).
Focus on working the good leads instead of generating leads from people who were never going to be your customer, to begin with.
Conclusion
We hope that gave you some food for thought on how to boost your real estate business’ Facebook advertising strategy.
Follow those principles, and you should have a great head start in starting (or revitalising) your strategy.
If you enjoyed this article or found it helpful, check out more e-commerce marketing content on the inSyte blog or listen to the inSyte Podcast.
This article was brought to you by Syte.
We’re a specialist e-commerce digital marketing agency dedicated to driving up your bottom line.
We have tons of experience in the real estate industry, so if you’d rather outsource your Facebook marketing, get in touch with the form below or check out our case studies page to see what we’ve been able to do for our clients.
