Including one ad that delivers the motherlode of Facebook real estate leads

You know real estate. It’s what you do. You enjoy it, you’re good at it, and you make a decent living at it.

But, of course, you’d like to increase your annual GCI (what agent wouldn’t?), and you more than likely have been told that Facebook ads are the ticket to more leads.

Still, maybe you haven’t tried Facebook ads yet, and are a bit hesitant to invest money into something you’re not quite familiar with. Or perhaps you have placed an ad or two but didn’t get the results you were hoping for.

Put your worries aside . . . we’ve identified the best Facebook ads for real estate agents and how to use them.

If either scenario sounds like you, then you can rest easy because, by the time you finish reading this blog, you’ll know exactly which Facebook ads for REALTORS^® will give you the most bang for your buck and produce the most promising leads.

But first—why Facebook, and why Facebook ads in particular?

Why use Facebook for real estate leads?

There are a number of possible reasons why real estate agents favor Facebook and Facebook ads:

• It could be the platform’s popularity among social media users. With 94 billion active monthly users in the world, including nearly 260 million of them in North America, Facebook has more than enough potential leads to satisfy every agent in the US.
• It might be the natural result of Facebook’s popularity among agents. According to NAR’s 2021 Member Profile, 74% of its member-agents report using Facebook for professional use. That’s 18 and 30 points higher than LinkedIn and Instagram, respectively.
• You can’t overlook Facebook’s cost-effectiveness. Unlike traditional marketing strategies that could potentially cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, agents can spend less than $5 a day to reach a sizeable audience.

Placing Facebook ads is one of the most cost-effective marketing tactics favored by real estate agents.

• Perhaps it’s because it allows for targeted marketing. Speaking of audiences, in accordance with the Fair Housing Act, agents can use Facebook’s Special Housing Ad Category to target audience interests, locations within a 15-mile radius of a dropped pin, and modified Look-a-Like audiences. You can also create custom audiences where you provide Facebook with information about your current clients, and they work to put your ads in front of those people.
• Maybe it’s the potential of Facebook to increase brand awareness. With such a massive audience of users and its highly affordable costs, Facebook makes it easy for brands to be seen. The more visibility a brand gets, the more familiar and trusted it becomes.
• Its advertising results are measurable. With a Facebook Business Page (which you must set up before you can run an ad), agents can see critical metrics including impressions, clicks, and conversions. These types of data show users what’s working, what isn’t, and where they can make adjustments.

• Facebook is exceptional fohttps://remindermedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/FB-ads-intext-3.jpgr encouraging audience engagement. Every like, comment, and interaction with an ad is evidence of an audience’s engagement. The more they engage, the more connected they are. The more connected they are, the more likely they are to share ads and content. And more sharing can lead to more referrals.

However, as promising as all these features and benefits are, they only matter if you’re running the right types of real estate Facebook ads.

Fortunately, you don’t have to waste time, money, and effort trying to figure out what the ideal types are—we’ve already done the research to find the best Facebook ads for REALTORS^®.

Branding Ad

Let’s talk for a minute about name and brand recognition.

Successful agents understand that their brand needs to become synonymous with real estate in their community. When someone thinks of real estate, every great agent wants their name to be the one that pops to mind. For that to happen, a brand needs to be omnipresent—everywhere someone looks, they need to see that name.

Brands like Apple, Disney, Coke, Starbucks, and others ensure top of mind awareness by advertising widely and across different channels.

The way to make your brand widely recognizable is to place it on as many channels as you can because no single tactic is going to produce the degree of brand recognition I’m talking about.

No one print ad, no radio commercial, no postcard, flyer, park bench sign, or open house is going to establish you as a familiar and trusted agent.

But if you combine all those channels and include a Facebook branding ad to your marketing mix (at an incredibly affordable cost!), you’ll exponentially increase your exposure.

• Facebook ads reach a larger audience than traditional marketing.
• You can target Facebook ads to reach local leads and get in front of the community you serve.
• And you can design your ad to highlight your expertise whether it’s working with first-time homebuyers, seniors, FSBOs, or other niches.

If you constantly run branding ads, and you’re consistently reaching out using postcards, text messages, phone calls, newsletters, emails, and other tactics, then you’ll begin to establish mindshare among the people you are trying to reach, and you’ll start to occupy that coveted position we call top of mind.

What’s mindshare? You can think about it like this . . .

If I said “soda” or “pop,” it’s likely you thought Coke or Pepsi.

If I said, “electric car,” you probably thought Tesla or Elon Musk.

Tissue? Kleenex.

Bandage? Band-Aid.

That’s mindshare.

What to include in a branding ad

I’ve already mentioned including copy in your Facebook ads that identifies your expertise or niche, but you have other options that will not only advertise your brand but also deliver value to your audience.

Facebook ads for real estate agents that typically perform well are ads that include content your audience will value. Content that educates, entertains, and endears you to others is especially powerful because it encourages audiences to know, like, and trust you, and it’s content that can easily be incorporated into a branding ad.

Content delivers value when it educates, entertains, or endears you to your audience.

For example, you might consider creating a branding ad that includes:

• A link to an informative blog you’ve written
• An excerpt from a newspaper article of relevance to homebuyers or sellers
• A funny meme, inspirational quote, or an eye-catching image
• An infographic that simplifies a complicated idea, process, or set of numbers
• An announcement of your participation in or sponsorship of a community event

You can click here for more ideas that you can use to easily create an effective real estate Facebook ad.

Product ad

For ReminderMedia, our products are our magazines, digital products, postcards, and other real estate marketing materials that help real estate agents garner more referrals and repeat business. For retailers, their products are what’s on their shelves. For real estate agents, your product is houses. Consequently, real estate product ads are primarily open house ads and listing ads.

The wonderful thing about Facebook real estate ads is that they can be used to promote listings and open houses that will attract hot leads. Yes, you’ll get the occasional “just curious” click, but the majority will be from people who are actively looking for a home or the services of a real estate agent.

Another fantastic benefit of product ads is that they can be designed to capture prospects’ contact information with a form. And once you have that information, you can market to them indefinitely.

What to include in a product ad

Our president has a brother, Stephen, who is a real estate agent in Lynchburg, Virginia. His listing ads not only produced hot buyer leads but also hot seller leads. Here’s what happened . . .

For about $200 each, Stephen hired a videographer to shoot gorgeous, high-quality videos of his listings that he then used in his ads. As you might expect, interested buyers engaged with his ads and many of them reached out to him. But what no one expected was that his listing ads also attracted sellers who contacted him to produce the same type of ads for their properties.

A sale and a new client from each ridiculously low-cost ad—I’d say it was worth the investment.

In addition to video, you ought to consider product ads that offer Facebook users a list of area homes within a certain price range. In exchange for their contact information, you can send leads a list of homes under $300K, under $400K, or any other amount. Once you have their contact information, you can them create a drip campaign and nurture them.

Consider enticing new leads to connect with you by offering a list of homes in the local area that hit different price points.

It’s easy to pull these lists together:

• If you have a CRM that is connected to an internet data exchange (IDX), then all you need to do is set up a request to receive properties that meet your criteria. You can then send these to properties to your leads
• If you don’t have this access, then use your MLS to conduct a property search meeting your criteria and send those properties to your leads.

An open house ad is another type of Facebook ad targeting real estate buyers, who, in turn, will produce leads for agents.

If you’re an experienced agent, then you’re already very familiar with the details of an effective open house ad: share the details; focus on the location; sell the lifestyle, not the house; include beautiful images that grab attention; etc. But have you thought about the format choices you have?

I especially want to recommend that you consider using real estate carousel ads.

Instead of using a single image of a home’s exterior as the focal point of your ad, use a carousel ad of multiple images to show off a home’s many attractive qualities.

Real estate carousel ads are interactive and the longer someone stays engaged with the images, the more likely they are to be genuinely interested in the property.

A carousel might include a lovely flower garden, a stunning dining room, a renovated modern bathroom, a kitchen any chef would envy, and an inviting deck or patio. Someone who has viewed all your images is certainly more than a little curious—they’re interested.

Another option that has been increasingly popular since the pandemic is 3D home tours.

Using open house ads that feature a 3D tour is beneficial in two ways. First, potential buyers can view the tour and decide whether attending your open house is worth their time. If it is, then you’ve got a better-than-warm prospect. If it’s not, then you’ve eliminated a poor lead. And, by eliminating poor leads, you save yourself time and effort.

To create your tour, consider using any of the following software providers (some are free):

• Pano2VR
• Metareal
• Klapty
• Orbix 360
• ThingLink
• Kuula
• Matterport
• 3D Vista
• Holobuilder
• Ricoh 360
• Virtual Tours Creator
• RoundMe

Lead magnet ad

A lead magnet is an item of value that you offer to leads in exchange for their contact information. Examples of good lead magnets for real estate agents include guides to selling or buying a home, a list of questions to ask before hiring an agent, and the 7 home improvements that produce the highest return on investment.

The number of ideas for lead magnets is limited only by your creativity.

The wonderful thing about lead magnets is once you receive someone’s contact information, you own that lead. Add your leads to your database, and you can drip on them until they ask you to stop.

If you are going to create a lead magnet ad (and I suggest you do!), you must make sure that your item of value is relevant, by which I mean useful, to your target audience. It also needs to be of good quality. We have several FREE, high-quality lead magnets you can download from our website and use as often as you wish.

Running a Facebook campaign for real estate

Putting together, managing, and monitoring a Facebook ad campaign for real estate does require some work, especially if you aren’t familiar with how to create an ad or Facebook’s interface and dashboard. But don’t worry—it’s not my style to leave readers flapping in the wind.

We have an excellent free webinar on our website you can view that will walk you through the entire ad creation process, including how to track your ads’ performance. (As I mentioned above, you’ll need to have a Facebook Business Page to run ads.) The webinar also provides additional details about what I’ve covered in this article.

But rather than dealing with the learning curve and taking on more responsibilities and even more time away from serving your clients, you may prefer to have our experienced team create and run your Facebook ads for you.

Start getting leads as soon as tomorrow

From our experience running Facebook ads and coaching our clients, we’ve discovered that the best ad for generating Facebook leads for REALTORS^® is a lead magnet ad, and we’ve been getting hard-to-believe results from running these types of ads for our clients.

Check out these numbers:

Remember Stephen, our president’s brother, the real estate agent?

We ran a lead magnet ad for him, and he got 15 transactions from Facebook with $3.6 million in sales that brought in $107,000 in commissions.

Numbers don’t lie. If you need leads and are willing to follow up with the leads these ads generate, then you can’t help but get more deals and more predictable business throughout the year.

You can hear all about our Facebook Lead Generation Service by watching this free webinar.

• You’ll see the ad we run.
• You’ll hear why this ad work.
• You’ll find out the 5 easy steps to start your campaign.
• You’ll be given the exact words to say when you make your follow-up calls.

We provide ongoing coaching, master classes, and technical support—this is Facebook lead generation done for you! You can start getting leads as soon as tomorrow, but you’ll need to click this link today.

A final word

Before I close out, there is a final point that needs to be made.

People who are not professional marketers—and that includes most real estate agents—often make a mistake that ends up wasting their money and crippling their efforts to get their brand noticed and bring in leads.

They aren’t consistent.

They do something one time—they buy one ad, send out one postcard, post one blog—whatever it is, and that’s it. Then they bemoan the fact that they didn’t get any leads out of it, disappointed that their ROI was a big, fat, goose egg.

It’s imperative that agents understand that marketing is never a one-and-done venture. It simply doesn’t work that way.

Whether you decide to manage a campaign yourself or let us do it for you, you will need to run your ads consistently and you will need to follow up on the leads you get. If you can’t commit to these two actions, then please don’t waste your money. Facebook ads are not for you.

On the other hand, if you can commit to investing an amount that you will easily make back many times over with one transaction, and calling your leads using your own script or the one we provide, then I encourage you to take action today.