Real Estate Facebook Ads Tips that will skyrocket your Bookings

Learn how with the help of facebook ads you can increase bookings of your real estate projects.

1 June, 2020 / Cleardeals

As a real estate developer or an agent, you know what it means to advertise on a slim budget. You’re out there networking, generating referrals, doing traditional marketing, giving newspaper adverts, depending on portals and guerrilla marketing to stretch that budget further. You hustle to generate more real estate leads. But have you added real estate Facebook ads into the mix?

Real estate Facebook ads are a cost-effective and fast way to get more clients. But in order to get results, you need to know how to get the most out of your social media.

Why Facebook is the Best Platform for Real Estate

When you’re setting up real estate Facebook Ads, you can display ads on Facebook and Facebook’s partner websites like Instagram. Facebook and Instagram are leading the way in terms of daily active users.

70% of people log into Facebook every day. And Instagram has quickly overtaken other social media leaders like Twitter and Pinterest. It’s found its place as the #2 social media site for daily engagement.

• At least 37 percent of participants in India serious about buying homes fall in the age bracket of 35-45 years, followed by 25 percent in the 45-55 years bracket. Now, more young people are starting to buy property in the country.
•  Facebook has the largest users considering all age groups and hence it is the ideal platform to generate leads.
• The audience targeting which facebook allows is the best compared to other internet mediums.
•  ROI is more on Facebook ads compared to other digital platforms

But why specifically for real estate?

Real Estate is Visual

People fall in love with a specific home. Or they become enamored with the idea of home buying when they see great homes, happy families, pets running the yard, etc.

Facebook and Instagram are the places for inspiring visuals.

Real Estate is Very Personal & Emotional

You know this. It’s a big decision.

People want to work with someone they like and trust. Facebook gives you a platform to demonstrate that you’re a great person to work with. And it helps you demonstrate that others recognize this quality in you.

Real Estate is Local

In real estate, if you’re not targeting locally, you’re losing money. The Facebook Ad Manager allows a real estate professional to target people not only in a certain city or suburb.

Target people in certain neighborhoods where home values just went up and people want to sell. Target potential clients in over-populated areas where people are moving out of to have more space.

Real Estate is Data-Driven to the Core

You know a lot about who your ideal client is. You may enjoy working with new families. You might like helping a couple find a home where they can retire.

With real estate Facebook ads, take what you know about your perfect client. Build an ad around it. Continue to improve your ads and generate more real estate clients.

Now on to our 7 tips!

Some Working Tips for Killer Real Estate Facebook Ads

1. Target the Right Audience

You wouldn’t turn down a client who was serious about buying or selling. But when advertising or marketing, it’s essential that you target one type of person at a time. That’s the only way to connect on a deep level to earn a click on your ad.

What type of person you start targeting depends on several factors:

• You can target according to Buyers Age Group
• You can target Gender Based
• Depending upon the locality of your project determine the locality you want to target
• What traits these people had (education level, job preferences etc)
• Are they real estate investors?
• How are the markets changing? For example, 25% of first time home buyers are millennial according to the survey.

Narrow Your Target

The best target on Facebook is a narrow one. You don’t want 1 million random people to see your ad. You want 500-1,000 of the most perfect clients to see it. They click it. They become a client.

Really take some time to think about who these people are. Do they love going to the gym? Are they into theater? Are they Real Estate Investors ? Are they searching property online on real estate portals? Are they newly married ? have they recently moved ?

If you’re unsure at this point, try this:

1. Check your previous bookings and see they belong to which area locality.
2. Check the buyers profession of the previous bookings.
3. The languages they speak.
4. Their age group.
5. Review any information you collected on the clients
6. Start hashing out what they had in common
7. Write these things down

This is a great place to start.

Make It Local

If someone were moving from Surat to Ahmedabad, you’d certainly want to help them find the perfect home. But really, how often does this happen?

People do re-locate for business, retirement and other reasons. But it’s much more common that people are buying a home within a given city or even in a general area.

Be careful when targeting. Exclude people who are unlikely to be clients. That includes people in other cities.

Why would you exclude so many people? What’s it hurt if someone sees the ad and isn’t interested? The answer to that is relevance matters a lot on social media. Not being relevant will cost you a lot of money.

2. Build An Ad Around the Right Audience

We’ve now figured out who to target. It’s time to build an ad around that target. People only click ads that appear very relevant to them.

Connect on a Meaningful Level

Look back at who you’re targeting. Make a list of their challenges and goals. Consider which emotions you can tap into with that audience.

The language and images you might use for millennial who are buying their first home will be different from what you might say to someone approaching retirement. And these will be different from someone who has a growing family.

Don’t forget! You can use video too depending on the types of ads you use.

Use Some Psychology in Your Targeting

Just this year, Cleardeals team completed a very interesting Facebook ad study with a group of home buyers participants.

We split the participants into two groups. The participants knew they were in a study. But they weren’t told exactly what was being studied, or how.

We showed the control group a normal ad for a Real Estate Project of Shilaj In Ahmedabad. We showed the other group the same ad that hinted at how sophisticated they were, without outright saying it.

The “You’re so sophisticated” ad earned significantly more leads.

After interviewing the home buyers post study, we concluded something very interesting. Most home buyers knew that the ads they see in Facebook are targeted toward them. Those who clicked thought they were seeing the ad because they had done something that showed they had sophisticated taste.

They saw it as a personal compliment and clicked the ad.

For Home Buyers for this project, sophistication was perhaps the ultimate compliment. For others, a compliment might be recognizing:

• How hard-working they are
• That they deserve this
• How well they manage money
• What great decisions they make
• How well they care for their families

You don’t have to say it in words. The right image can send these messages.

Show that you share their values. You respect these qualities in your clients. Find a nice way to demonstrate it and earn a client through real estate Facebook ads.

3. Use a Captivating Graphic

We’ve already established that real estate is very visual. The highest performing ads convey a message through the image. Remember. You have about 2 seconds to get someone’s attention, maybe less. Then they scroll on by.

Captivating visuals make a target client stop and look a little closer.

Visuals can take many forms. Consider what would delight your target.

Don’t imitate what most real estate marketers are doing with their ads. You’ve probably seen one of these- a real estate agent/developer smiling widely with a house as the background and a bold call to action text. Do you want to be just another real estate agent/developer in your customers’ feed? Probably not.

So, it’s time to be creative with your ads! You can try showing a current house/project for sale in video form or show multiple properties that are up for sale using carousel ads.

Whatever the visual, make sure it aligns well with the audience and the message.

4. Make Copy Easy to Read

Copywriting isn’t like writing a 20th century novel. Long sentences, hard to pronounce words, and abstract concepts generally don’t make good copy. That’s especially true in real estate Facebook ads.

When writing Facebook ads for real estate, your top priority is to quickly, clearly convey a message. A 4th grader should be able to read it. They should be able to immediately understand it.

What are you offering? How will it help them? What do you want them to do next? That sums it up.

It’s tempting to use all of the space available in some Facebook ads that allow for more text. But less is always when it comes to copy.

Don’t try to explain anything. Write copy that elicits an immediate response.

Lead with value rather than describing services or promoting yourself.

5. Create a Clear, Compelling Call to Action

Your best real estate Facebook ads have a clear goal.

A person should almost instantly know exactly what you want them to do. It should be very easy to do so. There should never be any confusion like having more than one CTA. And don’t make it longer than it has to be.

Unbounce, a marketing research firm, found that 90% of people who read your ad headline also read your CTA.

Hubspot, a marketing software company, found that a CTA that seems personalized earns 42% more clicks. Personalized doesn’t necessarily mean you’re calling someone by name. If a CTA appears to speak directly to a person’s needs, values, etc, that’s personal — at least as personal as we can get on Facebook.

So remember who your target is and build your CTA for that person in real estate Facebook ads.

Reducing any clutter that detracts from the CTA can increase clicks by 234%.

6. Look At What Others Are Doing

It never pays to re-create the wheel. There are things that work. There are real estate Facebook ads that are effective in your area.

Visit competitor sites. See what their Facebook pages look like. If you see a real estate ad from a competitor, don’t smirk in disgust and scroll by. Study it. See what kind of engagement it’s receiving. Even click it to see what their landing page looks like.

7. Test Your Ads

You could be a natural at targeting the right audience with the right Facebook ads for real estate. But testing will always make it better. If you can get more new high value clients for less time and money, shouldn’t you?

Facebook has set up a system that encourages testing. You can run 2 different ads with two smaller budgets. See which one resonates more effectively with your audience.

Keep Relevance Score Up

Why do we care so much about ad relevance and targeting? Why does poor ad relevance cost you money? Here’s what you need to know.

1. People do accidentally click ads sometimes. They think it’s something else. Or their finger just lands on the ad by mistake. Showing the ad to people that are unlikely clients increases your loss to accidental clicks.
2. Facebook rewards relevant ads. Facebook wants people to the most relevant ads possible. It all part of a great social media experience. They reward relevant ads with better placement and lower costs as a way to say thank you for trying to be relevant to the people you target.
3. Relevance increases conversion rates. If your conversion rate is low, you’re losing money on real estate Facebook ads.

So how do you keep this relevance up? Pay attention to what the numbers are telling you. The average click through rate for Facebook ads for real estate is 1%. If you’re much higher than this, the ad is very relevant.

If you’re paying a lot more to acquire a real estate lead, then your Facebook campaigns need some work. But after having read this, you have the tools you need to get your costs in line.

Real Estate Facebook Ads

Creating real estate Facebook ads is the easy part. Optimizing them to get the most leads can be challenging. Follow these tips and you’re well on your way. Target narrowly. Geo-locate. Create a great landing page for each type of ad. Test everything to continually improve.

If you’re struggling to keep your ad costs low while generating viable leads, contact Cleardeals today and we will help you generate cost-effective real estate leads.

Disclaimer: The article contains data collected from various sources & the use of same is at readers discretion.