The Importance of Real Estate Marketing
Marketing real estate is essential to drive more potential customers to the properties and create a bigger competition. With more competition, it will ensure that you are not getting underpaid for the houses and you can raise the asking price. Without appropriate marketing, you could see your property sold for less than it is worth or deserves.
Selling real estate is such a big business that advertising is essential to stop your business from sinking. However, the marketing needs to be conducted correctly or it may have the opposite effect and drive potential customers away.
There are various ways that individuals choose to market real estate. Some create websites especially for their houses, others make blogs. Email marketing is also common alongside partnering with businesses in the local area. Before digital marketing, realtors had to give out flyers and spread the word in the local community, now that this fairly new tool for marketing has come about, there is even more competition than ever.
However, one of the most effective marketing tools is using Facebook ads.
What Are Facebook Ads and How Do They Work?
Facebook ads appear on users News Feed. They can appear in six different formats where you can choose whether you present a photo, video, stories, slideshows or on Facebook messenger. You can set who sees the adverts, by setting the required audience. This works by selecting your audience based on where they live, their age and their interests as well as custom and lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences refers to those who share common interests with your current customers.
They are very effective due to the vast number of preferences you can set. Simply choosing to advertise to a particular age and audience can bring in a large number of customers. For example, if you are marketing for those buying their first house, you would be able to set preferences based on their age (perhaps in their 20s) and their location (where you are selling). This means that you can target people who will most likely be interested in your services and have a much bigger success rate than if you posted advertisements generally without any consideration for targeting specific groups.
Why are Facebook Ads So Great for Real Estate?
Facebook ads have great success when it comes to real estate. Buying a house is something that most people will want to investigate at some point and adverts can spark individuals’ inspirations and motivations to get on the house search. Furthermore, if your business is relatively small, Facebook ads give people the opportunity to market to far more people than they would elsewhere.
Facebook Ads are especially effective for businesses that use images. As the main attraction to real estate will be photographs of the properties, it is a great platform to do that. Furthermore, as real estate depends on customers who are local or looking to move to a particular area, the functions for geo-marketing can bring your properties straight to the ideal customers. In addition, customers most commonly search for real estate online. There will be some occasions where customers may look for properties in estate agent windows, however this is becoming increasingly less common. Due to this, a Facebook Ad is happily clicked on as they may have previously been searching on their phones or laptops anyway.
These are some of the best tips for advertising on Facebook, it is not as simple as handing over your details to Facebook and expecting them to bring you all the customers. Background knowledge in marketing is something you will need when choosing Facebook Ads if you want yours to come out on top and draw in the most customers.
Tips for Marketing Real Estate on Facebook Ads
Related post: 9 Real Estate Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business in 2020
Plan Your Objectives
Before jumping straight in and posting property all over the web, you need to establish your objectives. You need both brand awareness and reach considerations. You also need to consider whether your objectives will fit within your budget. Ask yourself what you need from advertising on Facebook such as the sorts of people you wish to attract. For example, you want to advertise your real estate to gain the most customers and increase your asking price. You may want to attract customers who are professionals who are likely to spend more on housing or to people who have families for larger houses.
Hire a Professional Photographer
When choosing which photos to use for your ads, you need them to be professional. If a potential customer comes across your post with dull, low quality or irrelevant photographs they are unlikely to click on your ad. The photos you use for real estate will be the biggest factor for making people click.
Furthermore, ensure that the photos are relevant to the target of people you have chosen. For example, you may be marketing real estate which is elegant, has beautiful designs and tailors more for female customers. In this instance, you should include photographs of the kinds of designs that appeal to them. If you are selling creative and unique houses, consider using some more creative photographs, for example snippets of detail and scenic shots rather than normal shots you may post on regular websites.
Obtain Some Marketing Skills
Marketing is a huge area and there are many skills you need to master before you can really market your real estate well. It would be ideal to take a course in marketing. This can teach you a huge variety of skills needed to get to know your target audience, how to research and how to manage business projects. This opportunity to study a course could also help you in other future areas of marketing and allow you to market real estate on different platforms efficiently. For example, a course in marketing could prepare you for future marketing campaigns and help you keep up to date with this fast-paced progressive area.
Create Headlines Which Are Clear and Call to Action
After you have set preferences to show your ads to particular people, such as what area they live in, perhaps create the ad text as something like ‘luxury homes near [location].’ If you were advertising for individuals who are searching for a specific kind of real estate you could write ‘bespoke apartments with great views, click here to explore’.
If you simply write in your Facebook ad that you are selling a variety of houses, it may not be so attractive as you are not specifically meeting peoples needs.
Using Testimonials and Reviews
It may be beneficial to include some testimonials in your headline or somewhere on the ad. Reviews can increase customers as well as boost the businesses credibility and trustworthiness.
Use Videos
Videos can show quick snippets of your real estate, perhaps in a variety of styles so that it can catch more customers eye. The videos could be slideshows of images or it could be short videos of a housing tour. Often, videos or moving images (perhaps 360 videos) can be more effective than using still images. Still images are easier to scroll past on Facebook, but more people tend to stop longer on moving Facebook ads.
Combine Stories with Feed Facebook Ads
It was found in a Facebook test that adding stories ads resulted in a 21% increase in attention. Stories are thought to be a particularly useful marketing tool for mobile advertisement and considering the majority of Facebook users are on mobiles, it would seem to be a smart choice. The added benefit of using story ads is that they can be placed in messenger as well as the feed. A lot of people use messenger more than they would the feed and again, this could increase the audience of your real estate.
Be Honest with Your Ads
When customers come across ads online, there is always a lack of trust in some way or another. As ads are paid for, people are unsure whether to follow through with their interest. Some businesses are not reputable, and people do not want to get bad deals or be scammed. However, there are ways around this lack of trust.
Firstly, be consistent with what you advertise and what the link leads to. A lot of ads are known as ‘clickbait’ and they click on one thing that they are genuinely interested in, only to discover the page leads to something entirely different. If a company or Facebook page is known for doing this, it creates that lack of trust. Ensure that your advertisement leads directly to the same property.
Secondly, ensure that what you have written on the Facebook ad, for example what your property will offer, is accurate. Going back on your ‘promises’ listed on an ad will not do well for trustworthiness, after all, real estate agents are said to be one of the least trusted professionals. Forbes wrote an article on this and you can read it here.
Buying property requires a great deal of trust between the seller and the purchaser, they are huge investments and therefore customers will be very cautious and hesitant to choose the right company or individual to go with.
Do Something Original
There are lots of realtors out there and a huge number of ads for their properties. Customers may become accustomed to the usual ads that pop up on their feed and therefore would not notice the majority of ads. This is most likely to happen when all the real estate ads look the same and they all blend in together with no differentiation. Therefore, research what the majority of your competition are doing, the kinds of photos they produce, what they are offering and their marketing techniques in general. Once you have done this you can figure out how to be different. Original posts always tend to stand out as customers would not have seen things like it before. Experiment with colours, phrases and personalities that you may wish to get across. Research how you could make your photos and videos unique. Marketing takes practice and It is sometimes the case that you have to experience what works and what doesn’t work. Further, marketing is constantly evolving, and new techniques are being thought of every single day. You must keep up with the emerging trends and always try to keep on top of the competition. Consistent research is therefore valuable and will serve you well. Outdated advertisements may push you back.
Link to Other Social Media Platforms
In order to gain even more attention to your real estate, you could link to other social media platforms. If you have a business where you sell multiple properties this would be particularly useful. Other social media platforms can allow you to gain a following, for example if you have an Instagram or twitter you will have solid followers and potentially gain more followers if you decide to advertise on there too. Instagram is also a good platform for real estate as it focuses primarily on images and there is a wealth of home inspiration accounts on there.
Having a presence across a number of platforms is also useful for your marketing strategy, it obtains more customers and creates more trustworthiness for the business. For example, some customers may not feel comfortable buying from realtors if they are not well known or have a presence across platforms which is valued by other people. Social media also allows your posts to be shared by customers to a wider range of potential customers.
Conclusion
This article has shown the importance of marketing real estate, it has also shown you the effective tool of Facebook Ads, especially for real estate where marketing focuses primarily on visuals. In addition, it has taught you 10 different tips to use Facebook Ads efficiently to keep within your budget and increase your consumer base. If you need help with Faceboook Ads take a look at our real estate marketing agency page.
