A Detailed Guide to Facebook Ad Targeting for Real Estate Marketing

Facebook is the perfect platform for real estate marketing. Since you can target potential buyers based on a specific location, demographic, and interest, you can target only the best prospects for your project. Finding your perfect-fit audience on Facebook is more accessible than on any other platform. In this blog, you will learn about Facebook ads and how they help in real estate marketing.

What are Facebook Ads?

Facebook is a social media platform with over 2.8 billion active users, making it one of the largest and most influential digital advertising channels worldwide. Facebook Ads is the advertising platform of Facebook, which helps businesses of all sizes to reach their target audience through targeted advertising campaigns.

In simple terms, Facebook Ads are paid advertisements displayed on Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram and Messenger. You can create different types of ads, including images, videos, carousels, slideshows, and more. These ads can then be displayed to specific audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and other criteria.

Facebook Ads work on a bidding system, where advertisers compete against each other to display their ads to their target audience. Advertisers can set budgets, bid for ad placements, and choose various targeting options to optimize the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Facebook ads offer several benefits, including access to a mass audience, highly targeted advertising options, and relatively low costs compared to other advertising channels. Facebook Ads also provide detailed performance metrics and analytics, allowing advertisers to measure the success of their campaigns and make data-driven decisions to improve ad performance.

In conclusion, Facebook Ads are a potent tool for businesses to reach their target audience and achieve their advertising goals. Whether you want to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, generate leads, or boost sales, Facebook Ads can help you achieve your objectives and grow your business online.

How do Facebook ads help real estate businesses?

Facebook ads are a powerful tool to promote a real estate business. Facebook is one of the world's most popular social media platforms, making it an ideal place for real estate businesses to reach potential clients. We will explore how Facebook ads can help real estate businesses grow and succeed.

1. Targeted Advertising:

   As mentioned earlier, Facebook allows businesses to target specific demographics. This feature helps real estate businesses tailor their ads to reach potential clients interested in their services.

2. Increased Visibility:

   Facebook ads enable real estate businesses to increase their visibility to potential clients. Facebook's algorithm ensures that ads are shown to users who are most likely to be interested in the advertised service, hence, more lead generation to more clicks and conversions.

3. Lead Generation:

   Facebook ads generate leads for real estate businesses. By including a CTA (Call-to-Action), such as "Contact us for more information, "book a site visit," companies can encourage potential clients to contact them and learn more about services.

4. Cost-Effective:

   Facebook ads are the most cost-effective way for real estate businesses to reach potential clients. Compared to traditional advertising methods, e.g., television or print ads, Facebook ads are often much less expensive and can be targeted more precisely.

5. Retargeting:

   This is the best feature of Facebook ads. It allows businesses to retarget users who have interacted with the ads or website in the past. If a user clicks on a real estate business's ad but doesn't convert, the company can retarget that user with a new ad to encourage them to take action.

In conclusion, Facebook ads can be a valuable tool for real estate businesses looking to increase their visibility, generate leads, and grow their business. By leveraging the platform's targeted advertising capabilities, companies can reach potential clients who are most likely to be interested in their services while also enjoying the cost-effectiveness and retargeting capabilities that Facebook provides.

Leveraging Facebook's Targeting Capabilities:

The most significant advantage of using Facebook ads is detailed targeting. And it's not just limited to one ad - any marketing campaign can contain several ad sets with multiple ads in each ad set, each ad set targeted to a different group of audiences. For example, you can show one ad to NRIs and another to resident Indians while advertising your property. The content for each would, of course, differ.

It's also a good practice to drill down to the details with selection by area, age, interests, job titles, or other demographic information. An example in Smart Home promotions in a particular location would be setting a campaign to target an audience only when they fall in between the age bracket of 30 – 55, display specific interests related to real estate buying along with an affinity towards technology and have a job title suggesting the financial ability to make the purchase.

You can narrow the reach of your ad from 300 million Facebook users to under 30,000, thus creating more efficient use of your budget and reaching those most likely to become your customer in the future.

Pro Tip: Plan Your Ad for Each Goal:

Before we explore the ad layout details, it's essential to have a plan in place. First, clearly define the goal of each campaign, who your target audience is, and what the ad should convey within the space constraints. Select a campaign type per your business goal, Awareness, Consideration, or Conversion. Like all advertising, having a catchy headline is a must. Augment that with a relevant image, and you are good to go. Once you have decided on an actionable plan, setting up an ad campaign takes minutes.

Guide: Facebook Ad Creation & Targeting

1. Creating the Ad - Headline, Text, and Image:

   Even though we create an ad as one of the last steps while you set up a campaign, it's best practice to have all the collaterals ready beforehand. The look and feel of the ad are equally important when it comes to real estate marketing. One of the best ways to know how the ad will look before you start with the campaign setup is to use Facebook's 'Creative Hub' tool. Create a Mock-up using 'Creative Hub.' Specify your ad headline or title text, text for the body, and finally, upload an image. It's an easy process.

   Regarding real estate marketing, grabbing the user's attention with a strong image is equally important. Make sure you use a creative that is not cluttered, with minimal text & capture the essence of your property by focusing on the USPs.

2. Redirection URL:

   After clicking on your ad, the users will be redirected to the specified landing page; these landing pages can be your website home page, blog, etc. If you're targeting different audiences, you should create landing pages for each. It's usually a better approach than redirecting everyone to your home page.

3. Ad Headline:

   Spend time on a headline as it most probably be the first thing that will be read in your ad. It's advisable to have two or three versions to test them for the best-performing one. While an eye-catching image catches their attention, the ad headline invokes their interest, and the text makes them want to click.

4. Body Text:

   Here, you need to make a sales pitch that gets readers to click. The body text should convey enough information to retain the readers' interest while not divulging too much so that the ad doesn't demand clicks. Use your knowledge of other ads that have worked for you and keep experimenting to improve your metrics.

How to take advantage of Facebook's ad targeting for real estate marketing?

1. Facebook Ad Targeting Process:

   While several info fields will help you precisely target users, mentioned below are a few crucial targeting points to be considered for real estate marketing.

2. User Location:

   Although many real estate professionals will tell you that you should keep the ad location set to as broad an audience as possible, targeting niche markets your buyers are concentrated in works wonders. By narrowing this field, a bit, you can reach out to the bulk of your audience who might be interested in your property. When you set a more comprehensive location range, you risk showing your ad to audiences with a slim chance of being converted into your customer. So, getting much more focused on your target location is beneficial.

   For example, why show your ad to someone a thousand miles away when you can focus on the area near your property? The exception would be a vacation or an investment home market, where your end customers live elsewhere.

3. Age & Sex:

   You can rule out anyone 27 or younger as the starting age. Apart from that, this area will depend on your target market and your project offerings. The gender or sex of your audience could be quite valuable. Depending on the location of your project, like in the city or away from it, the sex of home buyers becomes significant. For a 2 BHK home in the town, your target would mostly be males looking to move in with their families. On the other hand, for studio apartments in a metropolitan area, bachelors can include both males and females. If your targeting is gender specific, have the correct headline and body text to appeal to that particular group.

4. Interest:

   Interest can be a significant factor for targeting if it aligns with your goals. For example, if you run an ad for 2 BHK villas in Pune, target interest and affinities related to the same, i.e., 'Buying a home,' or people showing interest in 'Magic Bricks,' etc. This will help target the right audiences and narrow down your audience to relevant ones. If you are targeting investors, targeting interests related to "real estate investment" can sharpen your ad.

5. Education:

   Regarding this field, it is better to filter your audience by their education. Generally, the real estate market is wide open regarding educational targeting. An exception might be rental homes reserved by a university for a specific section of people like professors. Although cases like these are rare, you might have other reasons to specify an education level.

6. Job Title:

   Instead of education, you can target a person's job title instead. For example, if you run an ad for a luxury 4 BHK property in Pune, you only want to show your ads to people who can buy one. So, target people with job titles like CEO, CTO, CFO, or Businessmen.

7. Relationship & Languages:

   The relationship field becomes vital to target groups that your project caters to. If you have more extensive size inventories targeting families, make sense. Conversely, for studio apartments or 1 BHKs, single people like college students or young professionals would be ideal ad targets. However, relationship targeting is more beneficial for rental real estate marketing & not when it comes to selling real estate. If you want to target a predominantly vernacular audience, then this field will help you focus on prospects who speak the local language. Especially if you are experimenting with ads in your native language, you want to only show those ads to people who are comfortable with the same.

8. Other Features, such as Lookalike Audiences:

   Facebook keeps on adding new features every year to target audiences more effectively. Lookalike Audience is one such feature. It allows you to focus on your attributes and interests. It likes your existing targets, which have been successful, and creates a targeted campaign for other members with the same interests and behaviors. The result is a campaign targeted at new prospects, like your already successful campaign leads.

9. Facebook Ads Campaign and Pricing:

   Once you've set your target to reach only the best ad prospects, you can focus on your campaign and budget. You put the maximum you want daily and choose whether to run it on certain days or continuously.

   That's all about it for setting up a Facebook real estate ad campaign. But getting the leads is just a part of the job done. Ultimately, you would want to convert them to your customers. Losing out on any information may result in losing out on a great business opportunity or establishing a solid presence in the real estate industry. The buying cycle is unpredictable; therefore, having a reliable connection with the prospect always significantly drives revenue.

Also Read :

7 Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Developers

This is where a real estate CRM comes into play. Real estate CRM systems take care of such issues without significant effort and in a short period. Having an organized sales process can not only help to fill gaps but also help to focus on building a solid customer base.

A robust real estate CRM system will help manage and streamline your communications, maintain relationships, track lead behavior, generate reports to review efforts and automate tasks, allowing the management to focus on their core competency and closing deals.

Sell. Do is a real estate CRM tool. Sell. Do is the only sales and marketing platform you need for seamlessly integrating your sales and marketing division. The platform has been built especially for the real estate industry. It helps you dive deeper into advanced APIs like cost per quality lead, cost per site visit, and cost per closure to understand your marketing & sales better.