4 Social Advertising Tips for Real Estate Agents.

For Real Estate Agents and Agencies, advertising via social media channels has gone from a luxury to a necessity. Of course, there are obvious advantages, like the fact that most of your potential buyers for a property will be on Facebook during their search for the perfect home.

However, precision and competence are required to ensure that your ads are driving the results that you, as an agent or agency, require.

Facebook Advertising is your perfect opportunity to reach them, drive awareness and interest and ultimately reach your clients goals. You may also find that advertising on Linkedin (whilst no where near as powerful as the Facebook Ad Platform), Instagram (which can be done via the Facebook Ad Platform) or even Twitter (potentially more beneficial for those in the USA as opposed to Australia) can also provide substantial ROI depending on your goals.

If you are new to the social media advertising space, we already have a really handy article on Facebook advertising here. It will break down the steps required to put an ad together.

For those of you who are looking to enhance the return you’re getting on social media advertising, check out these 5 Social Media Advertising Tips.

#1: Utilise the Facebook Ad Platform, not just the boosting option.

Facebook has a full platform for advertising at your disposal, which provides far greater customisation than simply boosting a post. It also allows you to create an ad based on your goals.

Below is an example of a stage of creating your ads which you will see. This is where you can choose your objective.

If you are running a brand ad for you as an agent or for your agency, then awareness is most likely the goal group that you’ll be looking at. If you are trying to encourage users to check out your property listing, then consideration is most likely your best option.

Conversion can be useful for a number of different campaigns, but requires for you to have your sales funnel appropriately measured, as well as have a clear action you want people to perform on the page you are sending them to. Make sure you have all of this set up before you consider whether this is the right option for your campaign.

#2 Use the audience targeting features

Whilst these features are the next step in your Facebook Advertising process, it is still very much overlooked by many agents or agency marketing teams. Or, the feature isn’t used to its full potential.

You’ll see in the screenshot below that there are a lot of targeting opportunities with the Facebook platform. Obviously, targeting people living in certain areas is a good place to start when looking at marketing a property or your services.

Detailed targeting is right at the bottom, and regularly overlooked. We’ve used the term ‘real estate’ as an example, but you can use whatever keywords you want. You can have one or 40 keywords if you so desire! As you can see, Facebook actually provides you with a fantastic array of related interests, and provides you with the total number of people you could reach with a specific interest. These are global stats however, not broken down by whatever location you have chosen. You will see how many people are interested on the right hand side, after you have selected an interest.

Think about what your audience is interested in – “owning a home”, “investment property”…you could even look-up people who are “married with children” if you thought it might help! Paint a more thorough picture of your audience and then start really breaking down how you could describe these features. Then, you can trial and error adding various targeting options, and see how this affects the reach and total audience on the right hand side.

Remember, the narrower the targeting, the more likely you are to reach the right people, even if the audience size is smaller.

#3 Experiment with Re-targeting

Re-targeting is a fantastic way to re-capture the attention of your audience and drive them back to your offering.

Let’s use the example of a property that you are trying to sell. You could drive traffic from a broader audience through to a page (on your website). You could then create a re-targeting campaign for everyone who actually clicked on the link and went to the site, with some more direct message.

For example:

“Sign up to hear about open inspection times”

“Get a call back for a private viewing”

“We have an open inspection on Saturday, are you coming?”

Your initial audience may have been 30,000 people of which 150 people clicked through. Your re-targeting ad will be to the 150 people, of which you may find 20-70 people respond or click through again. And so the journey continues.

Having this second touch point allows you to learn more about the intent and interest of your viewers, but also how relevant the ad was to the first 30,000 people.

Running re-targeting can warm up your leads before they even get to see the property, meaning that you could end up with more likely purchasers.

Image Source: WP Curve

#4 Get clever with your creative

Look, you don’t need to think of the next Superbowl ad to take this tip on board.

Whilst all social media platforms have different creative specs (image sizes, video max upload sizes etc), this shouldn’t deter you from experimenting with a few different image styles.

In the image below, we can see a clever set up put together by Ouwens Casserly Real Estate in South Australia.

The post very elegantly shows of the house, where to find more information and the agent in charge of the sale.

The fact that the post has creative cut-through is enough to take your hat off to them. When someone is looking for a place to buy, then have probably engrossed themselves in realestate.com.au, other property sites, and are sure to have their social media feeds on all channels full to the brim with property images and offerings. This really is a different take on the social media promotion for a property.

Can you think of some ways that your brand and personality can be projected on social media? Is it videos? Is it one image creative? Multi-image creative? Find out how your competitors operate, then determine the best format for cut through.

#4 Bonus Tip: Review and Refine

Your Ad Manager will be your best friend once your ad is approved. Here you will be able to see the progress of your ads and have the ability to refine. During and after each campaign, ensure that you are reviewing and refining for effectiveness. Sometimes only reviewing at the end is too late, and may leave you without the results you need.