We’ve talked about how Facebook’s advertising platform can be a great tool for real estate professionals who are trying to build online brand awareness and generate online leads.
But even within Facebook’s advertising platform, there are a number of strategies that you can use to target new customers and engage existing ones.
Here are 3 Facebook advertising strategies that you can use:
1. Target First Time Homebuyers
Facebook has targeting features which allow you to target first time homebuyers, renters and other people who might be looking for a Realtor.
This is fantastic because Facebook has so much information on people’s “life events” (e.g. moving, starting a new job, etc). Where does Facebook get this information from?
From people’s profiles, their status updates and pretty much anywhere where they enter they data inside the social media platform. Facebook takes this data, aggregates it up and then allows marketers to target people by these life events. As a consumer you may feel a little icky about this kind of marketing data getting sold, but as a marketer this is a gold mine for targeted advertising.
Here's an example of Facebook's audience targeting features:
The strategy behind targeting people who might be looking for real estate and getting them to convert to a lead is pretty simple: offer up useful content that they can download it in exchange for their contact information.
We highly recommend that you put together content that is useful to people who you are targeting. What does this mean?
It means if you’re targeting first time homebuyers, maybe you need to put a PDF guide together that focuses on helping first time homebuyers to your community. The idea is to put up a Facebook advertisement which offers this piece of content to your targeted audience.
Theoretically, if you did your targeting right, when the audience sees this piece of content, they should be interested in it. In order for them to download the content, they’ll need to provide you with a piece of contact information (usually an email address) via a landing page that the content is hosted on.
And there you go! You just got a lead that is interested in a first time homebuyer guide for your city. It's important to note that this lead may not be ready to buy, but they are very very early on in the buying process, so it may not be appropriate to reach out to them and give them the full sales talk.
We’d recommend that you nurture that lead with a solid email campaign, where you continue to provide valuable, relevant content.
2. Retarget Visitors Who Visited Your Listing’s Landing Page
Many Realtors that we talk to have never heard of the concept of a Facebook Pixel before. A Facebook Pixel is essentially a snippet of code that goes on a webpage. That snippet of code then tracks users who visited your webpage and allows you to build a “custom audience” inside Facebook of people who have visited that specific web page.
This is a powerful tool because it allows you to “re-target” (in a way… re-advertise) your content on your website, directly to people on their Facebook news feeds. You know how you browse a product in Amazon and then you’ll see that same product pop-up in your Facebook newsfeed that same day? That’s an example of using pixels to retarget a customer.
We’re starting to see a lot more real estate professionals build custom landing pages for their listings (great idea!) with great pictures and contact forms, but many of you know that you’ll be lucky if you achieve a 5-10% conversion rate (e.g. capture a lead from the person that visited your landing page).
To increase your chances at conversion, we’d recommend that you place a Facebook Pixel on your landing page, then place a Facebook Ad which targets the audience who visited your landing page.
The copy in the Facebook Ad could give the audience a little bit of context by saying something like “Did you forget to sign-up for our open house at 1234 Main St.?” The goal of this would be to get people to get people back to the landing page so that they can submit their lead information (e.g. an email address so they can RSVP and get more information for the open house).
3. Build a Custom Audience Using Your Previous Customers’ Email Addresses
Facebook has a powerful advertising tool where if you have a list of email addresses of current customers, you can load them into Facebook. Facebook will then match those email addresses to their actual Facebook profiles and build an audience of those profiles. Once you’ve built a custom audience of previous customer’s email addresses, you can then put together a Facebook Ad campaign which targets that custom audience.
So what do you actually put in the ad? This is where you need to have useful content to share with your previous customers. Maybe you put a PDF guide together on how to continue to add value to the home or maybe you highlight a blog post that you created around gardening, architecture, interior design etc.
The point here is that the content should be useful to that custom audience and that the main idea is to put your brand BACK in front of that customer in a useful and non-salesy way. The content is easily shareable, so if your previous customer has a friend who is looking for a house, it's easy for them to tag their friend in your post, which gives you another impression.
What strategies are you using with Facebook Advertising to drive more buyer or seller leads? We’d love to hear from you!
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