Creating High-Converting, Strategically Targeted Real Estate Ads
Why and how real estate agents should use ad targeting to narrow down their audience and increase their chances of getting leads
Ads are essential parts of online and offline marketing. Real estate used to rely heavily on ads but recent developments in the way we do business online have shifted the game towards inbound marketing. However, ads are still one of the main avenues for real estate agents to generate leads. Every year a lot of money is spent on ads. If you ask around, you will come across agents who have lost faith in ads because the ads they ran did not turn out to be successful. This failure has little to do with ads themselves and mainly happens due to the way ads are run. That’s we why have chosen targeted real estate ads for this article.
Agents are charged for the ads based on the number of times they are clicked on. Regardless of if those clicks end up as a lead or otherwise, agents are charged. The problem is that not all people who click on ads are interested in what you are offering. Neither the ads, nor the people who click on them are to blame. The true culprit is how the ads are set up. Many ads are designed to target the wrong audience, so no wonder that there are few leads from them.
What Are Targeted Real Estate Ads
When you run an ad online, you can reach almost everybody who searches for a specific keyword. However, not all those who see your ad are interested in your services. The idea is to reduce the number of people who are not interested in your services and maximize the number of those who are likely to click on the ad and later turn to a lead.
Platforms where you can run ads, like Facebook, provide you with many different criteria to narrow down your audience. These different criteria allow real estate agents to minimize the chance of their ad being seen by those who are not the perfect audience for it. We have seen ads from real estate agents from different cities and even if we wanted, we could not have used their service. This shows the importance of targeting ads.
Why Should Real Estate Agents Take Ad Targeting Seriously
Ads are not cheap. For every person who clicks on your ad you are charged. So, the price you pay for every leads depends on the number of leads out of the total number of people who clicked on your ad. Let’s say 100 people clicked on your ad and you spent $100 for the ad campaign. If you get 10 leads, you have spent $10 for every lead. If you get one lead, you have spent $100. You should aim at minimizing the final price you pay for every lead. Otherwise, you will end up an agent who claims ads do not work.
Targeting your audience the right way has a huge impact on the results. In most cases the way social media channels like Facebook and Instagram offer automatic ads is not enough. Lets say you promote your business on Instagram and decide to use ads and promote a post. When you go on to promote your post you have to first select a goal:
on the next step when you click the Automatic audience selection you will see something like this:
Why exactly would you want to target people like your followers? Your followers could be anyone, friends and family in a different city. That is why going with automatic ads is probably a bad idea.
Now lets choose the other way and create an audience. In this case you will see something like this:
Here you need to be very careful and create your target audience in the most accurate way.
Targeting your audience is not all there is to optimizing your campaign. The copy, CTA, visual, images, and videos, what you are offering, etc. will all have a direct impact on the outcome of your ads. We will discuss these factors in another article. For the sake of this article, we will go through the importance of targeting ads and how to.
Facebook Detailed Targeting
Facebook has made many changes to the way real estate agents target their audience. Here are a few (not all) of the targeting options you can use to narrow down the audience for your Facebook Ads.
Location
One of the first things you need to define when setting up ads is the location you are selling properties in. Pay attention, you do not want to get so precise that you limit the number of people who will get your ad. If you are using zip codes, it is a good idea to study the history of people moving to your farming area and target their zip codes.
Age Ranges
This might sound pretty simple, but it is worth mentioning the fact that there are people from different age ranges on the internet that can be the target of your ads. There is no doubt that 18-year-olds are very unlikely to be interested in the luxury mansions you are selling. Even if they are interested, they will not be able to afford them.
Income
This is another great criteria to target your ads and narrow down your audience. Based on the properties you sell in your farming area; you can set the income level of your audience. People who make below a certain number will not be a great target for your ads. On the other hand, people who make more money may not be interested in your middle-sized condo.
Lookalike Audiences
If you are not trying to find your first client you can upload a list of your past clients to Facebook and let the platform find people similar to those you have already helped. Depending on your service level and value proposition certain people respond better to your ads. This option helps you find more people who are likely to do business with you.
Relationship Status
Depending on your target audience, you can target people who are more likely to be looking for you. If you specialize in first-time home buyers, Engaged people are a good bet. Single people, divorced ones, etc. can all be the target of your ads. However, you need to have identified your target audience first to be able to use this option.
Targeted Real Estate Ads: Final Words
Whether you believe in them or not, ads work. Otherwise, they would have been gone for good a long time ago. The fact that many real estate agents are still using them goes to show you that, they are an effective avenue to generate leads. With so many agents competing in the same cities and neighborhoods you have to get your voice heard in the clutter. Social media are full of agents who claim to be the best in their farming area. Many are creating great content and their social media account.
In such a situation, even if you are great at creating content you need ads running parallel with your content marketing efforts. This will increase the number of leads you get. However, ads cost money. And if you do not know what you are doing, you will pay for clicks that led to nothing.
We believe that as a real estate agent, you need to have studied your target audience. That you should know them like the back of your hand. Then you can target these people who are more likely to do business with you. When they see you are ad, they should say: “Oh, that’s exactly what I need”. Failure to optimize your ad to the best possible form will result in a waste of money.
Roomvu Social Media Advertising Service
We know that many real estate agent do not have the time to sit down and play around with ads managers to set up the perfect ad. We know you are busy. Therefore, besides the many services we provide agents with, including the creation of content and its publication across different social media platforms, we offer a service where we take care of adverting on social media for agents.
All you need to do is to connect your social media account to your dashboard on roomvu.com and we will take care of your targeted real estate ads. You just take care of the leads. Join today and level up your real estate social media game now!
