Multiple listing services (MLSs) have played a dominant role in connecting Realtors and their clients for years. But today, everything is changing as social media disrupts the real estate market.
According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), social media has become the best place for Realtors to generate high-quality prospects.
The 2019 Real Estate in a Digital Age report by NAR reveals that:
- 47% of Realtors consider social media the best lead generation source
- 32% of Realtors consider MLS websites the best lead generation source
- 29% of Realtors consider brokerage websites the best lead generation source
When it comes to the best social media source for lead generation, Realtors rank Facebook far beyond the competition.
In the same report, NAR reveals that:
- 97% of Realtors use Facebook
- 59% of Realtors use LinkedIn
- 39% of Realtors use Instagram
- 33% of Realtors use Twitter
In addition, Facebook’s global audience slowly but surely keeps growing.
According to the Facebook Q3 2020 Earnings Report, Facebook has nearly 2.8 billion monthly active users worldwide.
This means that Facebook ads for Realtors are no longer a whim but a necessity.
In this blog post, you learn the building blocks of successful real estate advertising on Facebook. You’ll also discover the best Facebook ad formats for Realtors based on campaigns by property companies.
Let’s begin!
The Building Blocks of Successful Facebook Ads for Realtors
To start a Facebook advertising campaign and run it like a professional, you should do four things:
Create a Facebook Business Manager Account
This is the first thing to do when getting started. A Facebook Business Manager account gives you access to numerous Facebook marketing tools and lets you create ads.
After you sign in to your Facebook Business Manager account, you’ll be able to use Facebook Ads Manager — a major tool for creating ads and ad campaigns, managing them, and analyzing their performance.
Know Your Marketing Objectives
One of the linchpins of successful Facebook advertising for Realtors is choosing the right ad campaign objective. This is the first thing you need to do when you start an ad campaign in Ads Manager.
Facebook offers Realtors lots of different marketing objectives, so you’ll be able not only to generate leads but complete any other goal.
Learn More about the Housing Special Ad Category
Facebook Special Ad Categories is a feature in Ads Manager developed to prevent discrimination against target audiences in spheres such as politics, credit, employment, and housing.
Keep in mind that after you choose an objective for your ad campaign in Ads Manager, you have to turn on the housing special ad category to proceed.
To do that, click the switch on the Special Ad Categories field.
Then pick the Housing option from the dropdown list.
Advance Your Targeting with Facebook Pixel Software
Want to see which actions leads take and how exactly they convert after they click on your ads? Then you should install a Facebook pixel — tracking code that allows you to track actions and see how leads convert along with allowing you to create:
- Dynamic Ads — These are ads generated automatically by Facebook based on data and content you previously uploaded. We’ll discuss this ad format below.
- Custom Audiences — This feature allows you to target leads and clients whose contact information you already have.
- Lookalike Audiences — This feature allows you to find leads who are similar to people in your custom audiences.
Remember that after you create a Facebook pixel, you also have to add Facebook pixel events in order to track your leads’ journeys step by step.
7 Best Ad Formats for Realtor Facebook Ads [Case Studies]
Launching ads on Facebook is a personal matter. When someone wants to know how to succeed with Facebook ads, one of the first things that comes to mind is figuring out how others do it.
And here’s the cool thing. Though paving the way for successful Facebook marketing has its own cost, analyzing the experience of other market players is entirely free.
Here are a few special Facebook ad ideas for Realtors that have been successfully used by different real estate companies using different types of ads:
Dynamic Ads for Real Estate — Auction.com
Dynamic ads is a great ad format that allows companies with large inventories to save time on creating ads. What’s even greater is that it’s so relevant to the real estate industry that Facebook created a real estate dynamic ad type for Realtors and other real estate professionals.
To start creating dynamic ads for your real estate business, you need to add Facebook pixel code to your website, create a catalog of your property listings and upload that catalog to Ads Manager, and create an ad template for your ad content when creating your ad campaign.
To encourage more people to visit and use their marketplace, Auction.com did just this.
From April 8 through 18, 2019, they launched a dynamic ad campaign that:
- increased the number of new account registrations 8.3 times
- increased the number of auction event registrations 9.7 times
- reduced the cost per auction event registration 4.8 times
It’s worth mentioning that Auction.com used automatic placements to let Facebook show the right properties to the right people.
Carousel Ads — McCarthy & Stone
The Carousel ad format has tremendous potential to create the best Realtor ads for Facebook ad campaigns. Thanks to the merry-go-round format, a Carousel ad can contain up to ten videos or images with descriptions and links.
Having driven awareness with Carousels and photo ads, the UK retirement community developer McCarthy & Stone used these formats to create dynamic real estate ads and generate leads by targeting a new audience that consisted of Facebook users and retargeting people from custom audiences who had already visited their website.
As a result of the ad campaign, which lasted from July through November 2019, McCarthy & Stone:
- boosted the number of sales leads 4.3 times compared to the previous year
- halved the cost per lead when targeting new leads on Facebook
- halved the cost per lead when retargeting custom audiences
Relying on their previous experience, the UK retirement community already knew which content their audiences liked. Along with that, they knew who they needed to target.
To recap, the right content attracts the right audiences. And the right audiences cost less.
Lead Ads — Commissions Inc.
Facebook Lead ads allow Realtors to collect personal information of leads right on Facebook without driving them elsewhere.
Lead ads are premade forms that can contain prefilled fields for contact information, demographic data, and work information along with various types of custom questions, appointment scheduling, and store location features.
When it comes to Facebook lead ads for Realtors, Commissions Inc. offers a great example of using the appointment scheduling feature in forms sent to prospects.
Lead ads turned out to be the best Facebook ads for Realtors at Commissions Inc. In fact, one lead ad helped one agent sell a $200,000 house, which resulted in a:
- 5.8% lead-to-appointment ratio
- 25 times higher than average return on ad spend
Follow this link if you want to read the entire story about the lucky agent.
Messenger Ads — Clever Investor
If you’re a Realtor and Facebook ad ideas don’t come to mind, you can try to contact your target audience on Messenger. Messenger ads are divided into four types: Messenger Inbox ads, Messenger Stories ads, Messenger Sponsored ads, and Click to Messenger ads.
Seeking an alternative to landing page lead generation, Clever Investor decided to take advantage of Click to Messenger ads to attract people to their webinars.
After leads clicked on ads, they appeared in the Clever Investor Messenger chat where they were invited to register for a webinar. Leads who left the chat before completing registration received a reminder within 24 hours to complete registration. Leads who registered received email reminders.
This Messenger ad campaign was so effective for Clever Investor that it outperformed lead generation via their landing page. As a result, the real estate education company:
- increased the number of registered leads by 15%
- increased webinar attendance 2.5 times
- decreased the cost per conversion by 59%
Don’t be shy to remind people about yourself after you target them with your ads, as reminders can be a decisive factor in Facebook marketing.
Augmented Reality Ads — Dubai Properties
One of the greatest examples of effective Facebook ads for realtors was made by Dubai Properties, which used augmented reality ads to promote luxury residences during a three-month campaign. As a result of this campaign, the property development company:
- reached 2.2 million people with augmented reality ads
- converted 17% of web leads into qualified leads
- sold 50% of properties within the first two weeks of the campaign
The entire campaign consisted of three stages.
During the first stage, Dubai Properties created hype over their luxury residences using video ads for broad audiences.
At the second stage, the company targeted 75% of those broad audiences with AR ads.
At the third stage, people who engaged with AR ads saw lead ads and posts with lead forms on the Dubai Properties Facebook Page.
In the end, Dubai Properties contacted everyone who submitted the lead form.
Facebook Marketplace Ads — Rental Beast
Facebook Marketplace is an easy-to-use platform where people and businesses list products and services for sale. To find a product or service, buyers have to search.
Rental Beast used this to their advantage and uploaded listings of small property owners and landlords they represented directly to Facebook Marketplace. During 2019, the US rental listings company achieved the following results:
- More than 263,000 renter leads who found properties through Facebook Marketplace contacted Rental Beast agents.
- Rental Beast saw 6.7 incremental renter inquiries per property.
- Rental Beast generated 54% more leads per listing through Facebook Marketplace compared to other online listing services.
The most interesting thing is that Rental Beast didn’t use Facebook Marketplace ads and still gained unprecedented visibility for their clients’ properties.
Video Ads — Texas Wealth Network
Texas Wealth Network, a networking group that hosts free events for real estate investors, used Facebook lead ad forms to boost the number of registrations for their free event.
In order to increase the effectiveness of their lead form, Texas Wealth Network switched from photo ads to mobile-optimized video ads running on the Facebook Feed, Instagram Feed, and Stories.
Additionally, the networking group used video ads to retarget people from Lookalike audiences who had visited their website but didn’t register. At this stage, Texas Wealth Network used automatic placements and campaign budget optimization.
Texas Wealth Network’s mobile video ad campaign that ran between February 1 and 29, 2019, attracted more leads at a lower cost than the photo ad campaign the network launched during the same period the year before.
As a result of the video ad campaign, Texas Wealth Network:
- reduced the cost per lead by 11%
- increased the number of leads 1.4 times
- increased the number of leads in commercial product lines 2.2 times
For realtors, Facebook ad examples of campaigns like the one by Texas Wealth Network prove two things.
The first is that in the mobile era, video ads can have more impact on users than photo ads. The second is that video ads can be cheaper than photo ads.
And what if we told you that video ads can be even cheaper and, moreover, tremendously easy to produce?
Generate High-Quality Property Video Ads with AI
With Softcube, you can scale up the video ad production process for your property listings in a few clicks:
- Add a link to your listing page and let Softcube artificial intelligence crawl it to collect data necessary for finding the best footage for your ads — or upload your own footage.
- Create wide, square, and vertical video ads for any top advertising platform on the go with ready-made templates by using text, logos, and branding from your listing page as well as by adding different shapes, sounds, and transitions.
- Use amazing videos to find leads not only on Facebook but on Instagram, YouTube, and beyond!
Here’s an example of a video ad made in seconds by Softcube:
Don’t hesitate to test the Softcube AI platform for free, and good luck with your property advertising!
