How much of your marketing budget did you spend on Facebook advertising last quarter? Are you happy with the results?
What if I said to you that I can make you the happiest you’ve ever been with your real estate marketing efforts?
We’ve managed hundreds of thousands of leads; tested tens of thousands of ads; and run thousands of marketing tests on Facebook. From these efforts in our marketing laboratory, we’ve identified tried and true strategies for successfully marketing your real estate business through Facebook; and for immediately scaling your business by generating leads almost instantly.
We do this by using a combination of Facebook ads, lead capture systems, follow-up systems, databases and landing pages. This is not a get rich playbook. We’re offering a strategy that we know works; and that is easy to set up, cost efficient, and effective. However, it is still up to you to execute the strategy and framework we can provide.
Before we dive in, it is critical that we understand and acknowledge that the value of social marketing has not been fully exhausted even as we move through 2017. Our customers are in the social landscape and this is where you can harness the most growth in your business. The social game offers immediacy, not results in 2-3 years, if and only if you know how to do it right.
This, however, is not what is being taught by today’s mentors. They haven’t moved past the practices of yesterday: cold calling, door knocking, print ads, and so on. Those strategies take years to see the kinds of results that social marketing can produce for you in a matter of days.
“You have to learn the rules of the game, and then play harder than anyone else.” – Albert Einstein
Getting Started
Remember that expression for teaching surgery, “See one, do one, teach one,”? We will show you how to market through Facebook. You’ll then go and do it yourself. Ideally, you’ll learn so much from us and do so well on your own that you’ll be able to teach others. This is one of our goals for you.
Of course, the real goal is to capitalize on your marketing dollars, but developing coaches is something we’re interested as well. We’ll get to that later. For now, let’s take a look at some of the best practices we’ve identified:
#1 Boosting Your Post
Facebook offers its own calls to action like “Book Now,” “Launch App,” “Contact Us,” “Shop,” and a few others. We have found that calls to action are important, but a call to action that sends people off of Facebook is a better way to generate a lead. Boost a post that links to an external landing page where visitors can obtain the information they seek in exchange for some contact information (name and email, for examples).
#2 Promote Your Page The Right Way
Facebook “Likes” do not increase the size of your bankroll. Don’t spend time and money on campaigns to promote awareness of your page. Promote your page to generate leads not to grow your Like count. Focus on getting names, email addresses, and phone numbers.
#3 Reach People Near You
Facebook can provide you with a lot of exposure, particularly when used in conjunction with crowd-sourcing platforms like Yelp. Yelp makes it easy for local businesses to own a basic presence on the Internet and provide an enhanced presence through advertising.
#4 Increase Brand Awareness
Remember, the goal here is to make your sales funnel overflow with leads. We have systems in place for managing all of those leads which we discuss elsewhere. For now, it’s vital to understand that any effort to increase brand awareness must be framed with an end goal of generating leads. This should be a guiding principle for you.
#5 Send People to Your Website
Much like strategy #1, you need to send people from Facebook to your website. In this case, however, you are sending visitors to your main site and not a specific campaign’s landing page. Some of the same principles apply, though. Remember, you want to send them to your website to generate a lead, not just to provide them with information about your business. Therefore, it is important to still add a call to action that allows you to capture contact information.
#6 Get Installs of Your App
“Targeting” is the process of defining your audience for your ad. The next section is all about targeting audiences step-by-step. For now, you should be aware that Facebook allows you to target people who like apps. Targeting these people increases the likelihood that they will download your real estate app. More downloads equals more leads.
#7 Increase Event Attendance
When done the right way, Facebook can increase attendance at open houses for a minimal time investment. Obviously, you’ll want to include event details like time, date, location, and a photograph in your invitation.
One advantage of Facebook over traditional event marketing practices is that you can target your audience with a few clicks by tagging and sharing with specific individuals or groups. You can ramp up your reach by posting everyday, and tagging and sharing with different groups each day. This is not something that can be done easily with traditional marketing strategies.
#8 Get Video Views
Facebook offers some valuable video features you can take advantage of to generate even more leads. You can upload a video of a listing, use Facebook live, and even target different video audiences with different offers. For example, Facebook can create audiences for you and segment them according to who watched an entire video versus who watched a portion of it.
#9 To Collect Leads From Facebook You Have To Get Off Facebook
You’ve heard us say this already, but it is important enough to repeat more than once. If you want to use Facebook to generate leads, you have to be willing to drive traffic from Facebook to another destination; and you have to make certain that that destination is set to offer something of high value with a low barrier for access.
How To Target Audiences Step-by-Step
Targeting is the method of setting up parameters within your ad campaign to ensure your ad reaches the proper audience. The success of any of your Facebook campaigns will be based on how well you identify your audience.
Step 1: Select your campaign objective.
Campaigns correspond to each of your advertising objectives. These can include things like getting people to visit your website; promoting a specific conversion; getting more page likes; or increasing attendance at an event.
Step 2: Give your campaign a name.
This seems like a no-brainer, but it is important to follow a few simple guidelines. The title should be relevant to the audience, the offer and the timing of the offer. This will help you keep your campaigns organized which will save you time as your pool of campaigns grows over time.
Step 3: Set up your custom audience by considering two factors.
Location: Select your city, but narrow the geography down to a 10-mile radius.
Age: Select a range that includes the average age of your desired prospects or current clients that can acquire property inside the location you selected.
PRO TIP: Including a higher age can be beneficial. Many grandparents spend a lot of time on Facebook and often tag members of their family when they find something relevant.
Step 4: Detail your targeting efforts.
Focus each campaign on more narrow, detailed targets like FSBO, first-time home buyer, or open house.
Step 5: Optimize your ads.
Facebook ads can generate 5-15 leads per day for just $5-$10 per day, but you have to make them the right way. When you have 5-15 leads rolling into your business every day instead of having to chase them down, conversations become a lot easier.
Step 6: Place your ad.
It seems like a time saver, but running concurrent ads on different social media sites do not perform well. Different sites use different algorithms. What works for one will not necessarily work for another. The potential for wasting time, energy, and dollars is high when replicating ads concurrently on multiple platforms. This is a case where one size truly does not fit all.
Top Real Estate Marketing Strategies for Facebook
One of the most most effective ways for generating leads and collecting important information about prospective clients is to use Facebook and landing pages together. You don’t have to spend scant resources on building a full-scale website.
Instead, utilize a simple program like Instapage or LeadPages to quickly create different landing pages for different campaigns for different audiences. Imagine how long it would take to build a full-scale website each time you wanted to launch a new campaign. That’s simply not a sustainable model so go with a simple platform and save yourself a ton of time, money, and energy.
All of the research and testing we’ve done in our lab helped yield 6 strategies for using landing pages in conjunction with Facebook to leverage all of the data Facebook offers.
Top 6 Strategies
#1 Landing Page for a Free Report
Create and boost a Facebook post that invites your prospects to get a free report on homes for sale in your market. Your prospective clients click through to your landing page (which says basically the same thing as the Facebook post), but they are required to fill in their name and email address to receive the report.
Then, after they have entered that information, they are directed to a squeeze page which offers another freebie. For example, your squeeze page might be asking them to fill out information to get a report on the value of their home. This form would require additional information (contact information not collected through the initial landing page). Now you have collected even more information on this lead through a very simple form and process.
#2 Landing Page for a Quiz or Poll
Polls are converting at $2-$3 per lead so you need to create a post that invites people to take a poll or quiz. Use your landing page platform to ask a few questions that will help you understand your prospects’ needs and interests.
- What’s your favorite home type?
- Do you prefer to drive around and look at houses or cars?
- Do you think the first step to buying a home is finding a home, finding a real estate agent, or finding financing?
- When do you think you’ll move into your new home?
In order to receive the answers to the survey, your prospects need to enter their contact information. We use a program called Witly to store our leads and generate pre-written email scripts that are set to auto-deliver once the quiz is complete. Anytime you can simplify a process and free up some time, you should do it.
#3 Social Listing
Create a post with a picture of one of your listings. The post should link to a landing page that invites interested parties to view picture(s) of the inside of a home in exchange for their name and email address. Pictures can be as simple as the ones coming from the MLS.
Remember: real estate is visual. Facebook is visual, too. Look at any feed. It’s full of pictures. Facebook users have come to expect photography to accompany a real estate listing. The higher quality the better.
PRO TIP: Connect one listing to other listings so people can see additional homes when they visit your page.
#4 “Coming Soon” Listing
This is one of the easiest wins.
Create a post featuring an image of a house that will be listed soon. Collect the name and email address of interested parties. CRITICAL POINT: Put a timer on the post to create a sense of urgency. This will give you a headstart because you’ll have a ready-at-hand list of interested parties before the property even hits the market.
#5 Virtual Buyer’s Presentation
Create a guide such as “Top 10 Things to Know When Buying a Home in Alexandria.” Create and boost a Facebook post that links to a landing page where they enter their contact information in order to receive a copy of the guide via email.
Once they enter their contact information, they see a message confirming that their guide is on its way along with an invitation to watch an embedded video while they wait on the guide. The video should be approximately 90 seconds and explain the process of buying a home and why they should hire you to handle this process for them.
#6 Sellers’ Guide/Free Guide for Selling Your Home
Selling a home can be a long, drawn-out, arduous process that, when done the right way, requires specialized expertise acquired over time and continuous learning. Most sellers, for example, don’t even know the true value of their home. They are selling it for less than they should be. It’s up to you as a knowledgeable real estate agent to show them that.
By doing so, you are proving your worth, showing them your value, and justifying why they should hire you to sell their home instead of trying to do it on their own.
“If you do things the right way, the right things will happen.” – Grant Wise
CONCLUSION
These strategies are our free gift to you. Why did we give them away for free? We see the frustration from the people who are not executing properly and we want to add value to the conversation.
We can show you the best strategies, how to set up campaigns, where to focus your efforts, and some of the costs involved. Once you have all of the pieces, you can grow and expand in ways you didn’t think were possible.
Our goal for you is to take this strategy, implement it, and go make some money!
Are You Ready for More?
If you are interested in receiving additional free content, join our mailing list. You’ll receive daily emails and videos to coach you through the systematic way to set up your ads to build your database that you OWN.
Imagine how much faster you’ll be able to sell houses once you have a buyer’s list. Imagine 3-4 sales a month just because you’re marketing in ways no one else is. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Our emails will bring awareness and education every day to show you ways to generate buyers and sellers on demand and smartly leverage the data Facebook makes available. We will help you create warm leads by putting the right campaigns in place and targeting people effectively through a combination of landing pages and CRMs.
Don’t just hope for building relationships. Use an approach that is already proven to work. Set up your ads and watch the leads fly in!
Or Are You Ready for the Full Program?
If you know this is the right step for you to take for your business, and you want to make sure you do it right, apply to speak to one of our lead coaches. We have a team that works with you every single day to make sure you are successful at this strategy. We will get into your business and show you exactly how to put these strategies in place.
Those who are accepted into our program (which is only about 30% of the people we interview) will receive:
- The “How-To guides” to set up all of these processes and strategies
- The complete Facebook Ads training so you know what to post and how to post it
- Complete targeting campaigns so you know how to reach your ideal client
- The complete email and automation guides for building your database
- Complete Conversion Guide so you can close more of the deals
There is no guessing in this process. We’ll help you put it in place step-by-step. Our clients are able to generate leads for $1 per lead (on average) and are closing these deals. $100 turns into $5000 within 30 days. We can show you how.*
If you’re an action taker and serious about this program, apply now for a call.
*Figures based on current client results.
