Talk to kids these days and they say Facebook is soooo old fashioned. Hearing that, you’d think that people were leaving Facebook in droves. Yet when you look up some statistics on Facebook users, you find stats like these:
With more than 1.3 billion users spending 640 million minutes on Facebook each month, do you think you might be able to find a prospective buyer? Maybe a motivated seller?
The question is, how do you reach them? If you think they will just search out your personal Facebook page, you probably don’t have much experience with marketing.
You need to reach out to them instead.
Find All Kinds of Leads with Facebook Ads
Facebook makes most of it money from ads that appear on the side of your personal page. Advertisers make lots of money targeting people who fall into the demographic that might be interested in their product.
So why not put an ad out for people in your target area? Maybe people who are getting divorced and searching for dirt on their significant other on Facebook? Or a probate case where relatives are putting information about their departed loved one on Facebook?
Maybe you have homes to sell and want to offer it to potential buyers in a certain area? Facebook can really help you to target your ads to a specific demographic that would be interested in your house.
We want to show you how to create ads that bring you a whole lot of seller leads for about the same price as a direct mail campaign.
The beautiful thing is that you don’t pay for the lead unless your ad is clicked on. That’s a lot different than direct mail where you pay for the letter whether your prospect opens the mail or throws it away.
How to Create a Lead-Generating Facebook Ad Quickly and Easily
In order to create ads on Facebook, you have to first have a Facebook page. To sign up, just go to the main Facebook log-in site. If you are already signed up, then just sign in.
On your Facebook page, you will see a drop down menu on the top right of your page similar to the one here. Once you see the dropdown, just select ‘Create Ads,’ which will take you to their ad page.
From the ad page, you will find it very simple to fill in all the blanks to create your ad. The first choice you must make is to determine the objective of your campaign. Most investors will choose ‘Send people to your website.’
Your website then can just be a simple landing page to capture the leads name and email address. Maybe a phone number, too? (BTW – You can create landing pages very quickly and easily on a site like Wix.)
Fill out your landing page (including all the ‘http’ stuff) and scroll down the page. You will see lots of options to create your ad.
The first set of questions will ask what kind of demographics you want to target. Motivated sellers and potential retail buyers come from all ages and all walks of life. So you want to keep these selections pretty broad. For instance you will want:
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A wide age range of house buying age – say, 20-60
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Both genders
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Probably English-speaking (and maybe Spanish depending on what part of the country)
The only narrow criteria in this section would be your area. Unless you have some nationwide house buying campaign going (hedge funds anyone?), you will want to target your specific farm area. You can also select 10, 25 or 50 miles outside your farm area.
For interests and behaviors, you want to leave this pretty broad. By just selecting something like ‘real estate,’ you will probably be targeting Realtors or mortgage brokers – not a huge pool of motivated sellers or potential buyers.
Next comes your budget. You can select a daily rate to spend or a ‘lifetime’ budget. Lifetime budgets mean the ad will be cancelled once you reach your spending limit.
If you select the ‘Advanced’ tab, you have three selections.
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Optimize for Impressions – Will set your bid per thousand impressions – if you want to have ‘brand awareness’ and have people just see your ad. Um, no thanks.
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Optimize for Clicks – You will be charged automatically every time someone clicks on your ad. You can have Facebook run an algorithm to automatically set your bid to get you the most clicks or set a max bid manually.
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Optimize for Website Clicks – If you’re going to put links in your ads, then you will want to select this one instead of having them just click on the ad.
If you put a manual max bid, it definitely does not mean you will pay that amount. By putting a higher bid in – say, $5 or $10 a click – you will find your ads get more priority, but you may only pay $1 or less per click depending on your competition.
At the bottom of the page is where you put the actual ad. Since people will only look at the ad quickly, make sure you make everything very short and to the point:
“We Buy Houses – Cash” comes to mind. Make sure your website backs up your claim when they click on it. Otherwise you are just throwing money away.
Plus like all good advertisers will tell you: Test. Test. Test.
Different headlines. Different photos. Different body text. See what works and what doesn’t.
More and more buyers and sellers of real estate are going online, and social media still rules the internet for bringing people together. Facebook still seems to be one of the most popular forms of social media. Using these two facts, it really makes sense to investigate creating a social media campaign to help you find leads.
Holla at Us
Got a Facebook or tech tip? Share it with us in the comments section below.
Investigate Social Media – Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or any of the other social media platforms out there, the more you use them, the more leads you get.
Test Your Advertising – Even the best marketers don’t know which ads will work the best until they are put out in public. Try different combinations of ads to see what’s most effective.
Consider a Website – All the social media ads in the world will be ineffective if an interested buyer or seller doesn’t know how to contact you. Give them all the details they need on a landing page or website.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.