Facebook Ads: A Facebook Advertising Guide For Real Estate

Before we start with how can you drive more reach and leads through a Facebook campaign, there are some things you should bear in mind. When a customer buys a real estate property, they don’t simply buy a product. They buy trust! Because when they are looking to make perhaps the biggest purchase of their life, they will naturally seek trust, credibility & authenticity from your brand. So, you must make sure you have your website and SEO is done right.

Facebook advertising is the best and the easiest way to get more reach for your real estate project and generate leads. With a daily user base of 1.5 billion active users, it is one of the best platforms to reach prospective buyers. Having said that, it also means you are not alone in the race to draw buyers’ attention.

To get the best out of the platform, real estate marketers must take note of the factors that affect the costing of your Facebook advertising campaigns.

First is your goal. Facebook may charge your advertising campaigns differently based on the goals you would want to achieve. These goals include getting/achieving:

• Impressions on your post
• Post Reach
• Lead Generation
• More Conversion
• More Link Clicks

This makes it even more important to choose your goals carefully. For Real Estate projects, these goals may change depending on the phase of the project.

For instance, consider below set of scenarios and goals for each of them.

To excel at Facebook ad campaigns for real estate, you should understand these three core aspects. Each section shows important considerations one needs to take, followed by its effect on the results of your advertising campaign.

Now the second part. This is perhaps the most crucial consideration if you want maximum reach and quality leads:

• Target Group (TG): Target audience demographics that is most looked for by others generally are high priced. Hence, the generic audience must be avoided. Target the audience that is most relevant to your domain should provide better returns.

• Relevance score: depending on the level of engagement of your post, i.e. number of likes, shares & comments your post has received, Facebook gives a score to your posts. This signifies how relevant is your communication for the TG you’ve selected.

However, we've made it easier for real estate marketers to ace lead generation through Facebook ad campaigns.

1. Curate Right Communication & Create A Good Design

   Performance of your Facebook ad is highly dependent on the above-mentioned factors. And an ad with appealing post copy & design can considerably bring down your Cost Per Click (CPC) for Facebook ads.

    

   As mentioned earlier, real estate buying is not frequent. So, buyers are influenced by multiple factors. Here are the four points you should consider while making a Facebook ad for your real estate project.

   • Location Aspirations

     Example:

     The first point that buyers consider is the project location. Because urban lifestyle influences your buyers to put more emphasis on location than any other factor and probably even motivates them to push their budget constraints.

     So, you must clearly mention the location of your project in the ad if it is a USP. This will improve the engagement of the ad. And better engagement means better relevance score, which in turn means you spend less per impression earned or lead generated.

   • Budget Considerations

     Example:

     You may know that the average merchandise cost in real estate home purchase is around 45-50 lakhs. And this is no small amount. Therefore, the budget is another major consideration for homebuyers.

     If the location is not so strong a point to play around, the next big engaging factor is the price/budget. Again, this is more likely to boost your ad performance and fetch the right engagement level and bring down your CPCs.

   • Lifestyle Aspirations:

     Example:

     After location and budget come the aspiration to lead a better lifestyle. This is where your buyers give more preference to the lifestyle promise your brand has to offer.

     You might have noticed that the same project has ads on location as well as lifestyle. Now, this is the kind of strategy you need to target the audience with all possible routes of your communication. It will bring down your overall cost. How?

     Say, the location route could only achieve half the reach you targeted. To counter this, if the lifestyle route of your communication is well-appreciated that it gets twice the reach than expected, the overall cost will come down and you will get the desired reach and number of leads.

   • Design Consideration:

     Example:

     If luxury home buyers are your TG or just a part of your broader TG, you must showcase the design of your homes.

2. How To Set-Up A Facebook Ad And Select The Right TG

   To be able to manage your Facebook ad campaigns, you must have a Facebook Business Manager account in place. Here are some quick steps to create a campaign:

   • Log in to your Facebook ad manager account.
   • Click on “+” to quickly create your ad.
   • Define your buying type to “Auction” to run a paid ad campaign.

   Now there are 2 types of ads that work best for real estate campaigns: Facebook LeadGen and Facebook Newsfeed Ads. For LeadGen, the campaign objective is lead generation and for Newsfeed, the campaign objective is lead conversion.

   For best results, we suggest a combination of both. Because with Newsfeed, you redirect the TG to your website to for more information and with LeadGen, you ask your TG to fill information forms on their Facebook timeline itself.

   Here’s a step-by-step visual guide to create a Facebook ad campaign.

   • Select the ad type

   • Define the area of your TG

     This step is important as you need relevant leads and better qualification rate.

   • Select the interest group

     This is a very crucial step as the selection of an interest group will play very important in targeting the right Facebook users. An accurate judgment here will define your “Relevance Score”.

     Here, your experience adds value. However, we suggest targeting followers of property portals and followers of keywords like Property & Investment, Real Estate, Flats, Apartments etc. Additionally, Facebook also provides a suggestion once you select some interests.

   • Define Budgets

     Depending on your budget, you can choose from the Lowest Cost campaign or set an upper cap through the Target Cost campaign.

   • Choose Ad Placement

     For Real Estate projects, we have seen Facebook Newsfeed and Righ-hand column ads deliver better results.

   • Add Ad Image & Content

     Now add content for your ad with the image, post text, headline, etc. Also, in the case of LeadGen ads, ask intent related questions to optimize and better qualify your leads.

   • Preview & Publish

     Once you have published your ad, you can monitor your reach count on the Facebook Ad Manager dashboard.

     So now your campaign is up & running, but this is not the end. The goal is to get maximum leads at minimal cost. Unless you track your leads and understand the data to optimize the performance, your campaign is only half done.

3. Track your leads & Optimize your campaign

   Now, this is the analytical part of your Facebook ad campaign. The in-built Facebook dashboard is not enough to give you the idea of the actual business generated and how can you improve. You need a smart, intelligent and comprehensive idea about your campaign performance and the business value generated.

   Sell.Do, an exclusive real estate CRM, has default Facebook campaign manager integration along with AI-based lead scoring and KPI set-up features. It enables you to track your campaigns better through insightful data like Cost Per Site Visit, Cost Per Booking, etc.

   The real power of “MarTech” that enhances real estate digital marketing is when you get all insightful performance data of your Facebook campaign.

   An overview of your Facebook campaign with funnel stage analysis allows you to check with your campaign performance.

   A complete “Lead Pipeline Analysis” provides information on the velocity of your lead progression. With this, you can check with your sales performance at each stage in your lead’s journey, address the issue and increase conversion rate.

   Leads generated through Facebook usual needs to be serviced quicker and to the best of its potential. Data on meetings conducted by your sales team will provide a strong insight on their productivity and performance.

   Finally, while your campaign is live you must track campaign spends versus traffic generated. Having this data on a single dashboard will allow you to act with agility and re-strategize your campaigns if required.

Also Read :

Why Have Pre-sales Become Crucial for the Real Estate Industry

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