When lead generating as a real estate agent, Facebook can be one of the lowest cost per lead platforms available to REALTORs®. When prospecting for buyer leads and seller leads, Facebook ads can be great, however, with all of the ad targeting and ad copy options, how do you select the best Facebook ad approach for your real estate business?
In this article, we are going to look at 2 simple Facebook advertising tricks that you can use to help your onlead lead conversion. There are a lot of moving parts to Facebook and social media ads in general, and much comes down to testing different ad types, but these 2 tips should lead to an improvement right away.
Facebook Ad Tip #1
When developing your Facebook ad as a REALTOR® there are a lot of marketing tools that will help your ad perform.
The first tip is to use A/B testing with all your Facebook ads. A/B testing is one of the most powerful and easy tools to use in your real estate ads. An A/B test is basically testing an ad for by changing one variable. For example, you may run an ad with two different ad copies, two target audiences, or two optimization strategies.
There are multiple reasons for running A/B tests but let’s look at the two main advantages
1) Stop Guessing – Have you ever ran a Facebook ad that you thought was perfect only to have it fall flat on its face? I know I sure have. The reason for this is no matter how experienced you are with advertising and marketing, you still don’t know with full certainty how the consumer will respond. You may hit the jackpot once or twice, but why guess? Facebook gives you the ability to make test your ads.
2) Facebook Likes It – Facebook does not want a ton of ads on their platform that your audience doesn’t engage with. Poor ads may cause the consumer to remove these types of ads from their news feed. Also, poor ads lead to poor results meaning do-it-yourself marketers are going to take their money elsewhere to find better results. When testing ads, you are in Facebook’s good books. You are letting the consumer decide what they like best.
Running A/B test for real estate ads does not need to end a just using the A/B test option when you are launching a Facebook ad. Another recommended strategy is to run each of your ads with more than one creatives.
For most ad objectives and single photo/graphic options, you can upload up to 6 different creatives for you ad set.
By doing this, you are testing for different images as well.
Once you have finished you’re A/B test, you can confidently launch the ad with the best result.
Facebook Ad Tip #2
When you are scrolling through Facebook, Instagram and other social media networks, how many posts cause you to stop and seek more information? Chances are, there are few posts that give you pause. The social networks are designed to appeal to our need for instant gratification. That is why we refresh our feed frequently, and why on social networks, you can basically keep scrolling down forever – there is always another post.
As a Facebook marketer in real estate, you need to strive to be one of those posts that stops people in their tracks. There are various tricks to improve your chances of stopping the consumer from scrolling: bright images, high contrast, niche targeting, etc, but there is one quick tip that you an use in any ad and you will likely see an improved click through rate (percentage of users that click on your ad).
That tip is using emoticons in your Facebook ad campaigns. Very simple and easy to implement. Adespresso quoted a “[a] headline with emoji resulted in 241% higher click-through rate.”
Here is the ad test.
In our testing, we have seen the cost per lead get cut in half when using emoticons effectively.
The trick is using emoticons well. If you use to many, the ad becomes hard to read and your message may be lost. If you don’t use any, your ad may be missed when the consumer is scrolling through. Read Adespresso’s post for more info.
Here are a few examples that have worked for us
Current Ad Copy & Paste
💥JUST LISTED - BEST PRICED HOMES💥
📍Evanston, Sage Hill, Nolan Hill, Kincora, Sherwood📍
➡️✅$450,000 AND BELOW✅⬅️
Download a list of all the single-family homes priced under $450,000 in NW Calgary.
Search Now ⬇️⬇️
————
✅Instant Home Value Reports
🏡Renfrew, Bridgeland, Crescent Heights
💻One-Click [FREE]
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How to insert emoticons
Windows: Windows Key + Period
Apple: Command + Control + Spacebar
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Conclusion
There are a lot of versions of an ad that you can use when running using Facebook marketing. Learning these concepts can drastically improve your ad performance, however, if you are just looking for a couple quick tips to help your ads perform better, be sure to run A/B tests and multiple images for all your ads. Also, use emoticons as a quick and easy way to cause people scrolling to stop and consider your message.
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Rev Real Estate School podcast with quick tips and actionable advice to help you sell more real estate in today's world. And now your host Michael Montgomery.
[00:00:11] Hello and welcome back to Rev Real Estate School. My name is Michael Montgomery. Do you currently run Facebook ads but just can't seem to get the leads that you were hoping for? If so this episode is for you.
[00:00:26] Today we are going to learn two strategies very simple strategies that is that will help increase the number of leads you receive through Facebook and we'll drive down that cost of lead like you would not believe on a cost per lead basis.
[00:00:44] Facebook is pretty tough to compete with. There is a pretty low cost of lead on Facebook when you are comparing it to say Google ads and other advertising campaigns that you may run the Facebook leads that come in are usually pretty inexpensive. Now the thing about Facebook leads is they're usually a little bit more in the interest stage than they are more into the buying stage. Reason being is Facebook ads people go to Facebook to see what their family and friends are up to and to browse Facebook. They don't necessarily go with the intention of looking for homes the ads that you're placing in front of them are more so just there and they're enticing enough for them to click on. Instead when you're getting a when you're doing Google pay per click you are having somebody type something in like homes for sale in X community and then your ad comes up so they have a little bit more commercial intent or buying intent when they are going through Google paper click.
[00:01:44] Now that doesn't necessarily mean the pay per click is better because pay per clic will usually be a higher cost per lead. Facebook is going to be a lower cost per lead and if you were running a long term business focused on relationships. Facebook can be key because you're bringing in leads that are early on in the process and you can start nurturing them and providing them with value. So if you are running Facebook ads here are a couple of great tips that you may not be using.
[00:02:14] First thing that you should be doing on absolutely every ad that you run is running A/B tests so you can run these tests where you're comparing between whether it be two different two different ad graphics or copy or target buyer or target seller target location.
[00:02:35] A/B testing is directly built into the ads platform and it will highly highly increase the number of leads that you will get. Facebook wants you to run A/B tests because they want your ads to be well suited for the audience. They don't want to push out a bunch of ads that nobody wants to see. So if they see that you're testing ads and you are trying a few different modifications of the ad chances are it will be shown to more people.
[00:03:03] The thing about A/B tests and the reason why a lot of people just brush over them is because they look at them they say well you know what. I guess I could change the graphic to this ad but I think this graphic is better. Well let me tell you once you run a few A/B tests on your Facebook ads you will realize that you may not know what sort of ad copy and what sort of target buyer will be clicking on your ad every time that you start an ad makes sure that you start with an A/B test for a period of time.
[00:03:33] Again Facebook makes it super easy. You just check off that box and then you put in your two different styles of how you want to test and go with it from there.
[00:03:44] Next a little trick that is working very well right now when you are running a Facebook ad like we said at the start. Oftentimes people are on Facebook not to go look for ads not to go look for homes your ad has to be enticing enough for them to click on.
[00:03:59] So we need to be thinking about click through rate and how we can get people to click on our AD. It has to be enticing enough for them to stop scrolling and click on the ad. Now there's a lot of information out there around writing good Facebook ad copy and choosing a show stopping picture is typically what we like to go with and testing that with A/B tests.
[00:04:21] Shat we're finding works very very well are emoticons right now. So simply throwing a few emoticons into your ad copy is increasing the number of leads we get dramatically and decreasing the cost per lead down to less than one dollar per lead just by doing that small little tweak and running A/B tests with emoticons.
[00:04:43] It is amazing the difference that we see now for this. You may want to click on the show notes and have a quick look. I have my ad copy and two ads that are working extremely well for us right now that you can just copy and paste and run with. They are working extremely well because they've been a B tested like crazy and both have emoticons directly in it.
[00:05:05] So there are your two tips. Make sure that you are A/B testing everything you should never just start add on Facebook without running a variation of that ad and play around with emoticons you want to keep those emoticons on the professional side because we know that there's all sorts of emoticons out there pooper emojis and all sorts other things like that. So you want to be cautious what you do but they can cause people to stop in their tracks as they're scrolling through Facebook. Just choose the right ones.
[00:05:33] Thanks very much for listening to this. Head over the show notes if you do want to grab our Facebook ad copy and we will catch you in the next lesson.
[00:05:41] This episode of Rev Real Estate School has come to a close. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you back here for the next lesson.
Follow Up Reading:
SEO for Real Estate Agents
9 Ways to Get a Listing as a New Real Estate Agent
Should you Start a Podcast as a REALTOR®
Question: Do you use Facebook ads in your real estate business? Let me know in the comments below!
-Michael Montgomery
