Even if they don't realize it, a real estate agent relies heavily on their marketing success. One of the most common marketing strategies for real estate agents is word-of-mouth, which is the sharing of your business and past selling history from person to person with face-to-face interactions. As well, many real estate agents rely on referrals from family and friends, another level of word-of-mouth.
As many businesses have grown to rely more and more on digital platforms, making the most of your digital marketing is foundational to success, even for real estate companies. Facebook is one of the biggest social media platforms and acts as the playing field for your social media marketing tactics. With roughly 2.9 billion current Facebook users, making the most of the platform means reaching an extremely large pool of potential clients.
Real estate agents and professionals should take steps to understand Facebook as an advertising platform and craft strong campaigns that reach their current and potential buyers.
Getting started
Before you even begin posting advertisements on Facebook and start building up engagement, you want to take a step back and make a plan. Your advertising plan will act as the backbone for all of your advertising components and will help tie your brand together with key messages and goals.
What are your goals?
Crafting ad campaigns for Facebook starts with determining your goals for your real estate company. Maybe it's to generate leads and bring in new clients, or maybe it's to drive traffic to your website and target people who haven't worked with you before. Whatever your goals are, you have to make sure you have determined them before you start your campaign.
Creating strong goals
Strong goals are measurable, specific, realistic, and attainable. They should also have a time limit or deadline associated with them. These characteristics will help you create goals that can yield success and help you grow your real estate business through your Facebook advertising campaign.
Marketing on Facebook
While advertising takes skill and expertise to be done well, it's not hard to get started with, especially with social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Facebook for businesses is quite easy to work with as there are many tools that are available right on the site. Understanding how to use these tools is what will make real estate business pages stand out to potential clients and reach a target audience.
Business tools on Facebook
Facebook for business is a free way to start growing your business or real estate company on Facebook. It allows you to create a business page and begin posting content on it while also engaging with users and building up your audience on the site. This business page, like a personal page, allows you to use Facebook Messenger for your company and provide any basic contact info that may be needed by your audience.
Setting up the page requires just a few minutes and has you answer some standard questions about your business in order for Facebook to categorize your page and help you reach a target group of users. Adding a profile and cover photo to your page is integral to creating a brand that feels approachable and legitimate. First impressions are vital for building trust with a business, so choose your profile picture and cover image wisely.
Other tools include publishing and advertising tools that allow you to create ads right on the platform and use filters by location, age, gender, habits, and more to specify your target audience. If you're new to Facebook advertising, it may just take a bit of time and practice to get used to some of these tools that are available to you.
Types of advertisement formats
Before you jump right into posting all kinds of real estate ads, you will want to think about what type of ad format works best for your brand, your audience, and your goals. Real estate ads should strive to use some sort of visual in everything they post, so ads with the options for pictures and videos are your best friend.
Creating ads can seem overwhelming, which is why using Facebook's tools is highly recommended. Here are some ad formats that are available to build with right on Facebook.
Carousel ads
Carousel ads act like a real carousel. This type of ad format involves a collection of ads that users can scroll through. On Facebook, a business is able to add up to 10 different images with captions and individual links to their carousel roster. For a real estate agent, this can be especially handy when showcasing multiple properties that are currently up for sale, each with its own links and ad copy that could share the home's features and available open houses.
Photo or video content
One of the most basic formats for advertising is sharing a simple image or video. It's the foundation of the social media platform.
For real estate Facebook ad content, showcasing the properties you have for sale with a house tour video or strong images can encourage users to click through on the links and be directed to your landing pages.
However, using effective and engaging images and video is just one aspect of these ads. The other aspect is the caption – or ad copy.
Collection
Another ad format that is very common on Facebook is the collection ad. According to Facebook for business, "Collection is an ad format that lets people move from discovery to purchase in a smooth and immersive way." When a user sees a product or service advertised in a collection format and they click on it, they will be taken to another page that allows potential leads to complete a purchase without leaving Facebook or Instagram.
This feature enables and encourages users to complete transactions which can be useful when generating leads for your business. Real estate leads are a bit different as users cannot complete a purchase of a home on a website.
However, collection ads can generate new leads by having users contact you, sign up for a newsletter, get a free estimate, or be re-directed to your website's landing page.
Tips and tricks
When it comes to real estate Facebook pages, it may take a bit of trial and error or practice to get the hang of it. Like all forms of marketing, there are going to be strategies that work to reach your goals and strategies that don't. Here are a few other tips and tricks that can help make the most of your Facebook business page.
Know and target your audience
Advertising works best when you are able to reach the intended audience. For example, reaching a group of young people won't involve the same strategies as empty nesters. The same principle applies to real estate advertising: if you are hoping to target a first-time homebuyer, you won't focus on your previous client list and vice versa.
Using lookalike audiences or buyer personas can help determine what kind of buyer you are targeting and how to target them effectively.
Use Facebook tools
Targeting your ideal audience is fairly simple on Facebook as you can toggle different locations, age ranges, homeownership statuses, income levels, and demographics right through the business tools. Making the most of these behavioral targeting options on your Facebook page can make reaching your audience that much easier.
Use testimonials and reviews to build trust
Finding a real estate agent can be an important step for many people. Clients want to find someone they can trust to find the best options on the market that suit their needs. If you have plenty of happy customers, ask them to leave reviews or share testimonials with you so that you can share them on your Facebook page.
When you build trust with potential customers, you can generate new leads and help build your client list.
Post consistently
In order to build a following and help grow your client list, it's important to post consistently. This could mean uploading listings, open house information, client appreciation events, video showings, team photos, and more. This doesn't necessarily mean that you should be posting ads consistently, but just that you should have a steady flow of content on your real estate Facebook page.
Measuring success
One of the most important steps in a strong advertising plan is measuring and monitoring the success of your ads. This can be done through monitoring your real estate Facebook insights and ad spend. There are plenty of different tools and measuring options that Facebook offers for businesses.
Another metric that is important for a real estate page is the period of time in which you reply to messages. This metric can hurt your page if is not high. Setting up automated responses can help with this and can boost your page on Facebook.
Working with a marketing agency
Real estate professionals are busy people with lots on their plates. If you don't have the time or capacity to create and run Facebook ads or other marketing components, it's highly recommended that you work with a digital advertising agency that can help you with these tasks.
Merged Real Estate Marketing
If you're looking for a real estate marketing agency that can help you with your Facebook ads, you don't need to look any further than Merged Real Estate Marketing. Merged Media is an agency based out of Guelph, Ontario that specializes in digital marketing. Their team of professionals has experience in services like web design, web hosting, photography/videography, social media marketing, PPC, and search engine optimization.
Get started with Merged Media today to reach all of your real estate marketing goals!