Real Estate, Updates, News & Tips

From targeting to nurturing, the best ways to reach homebuyers Key Takeaways

• Build a homebuyer persona, identify buyer triggers, target, and provide enough information to satisfy window shoppers but withhold enough that serious buyers will give their contact information to know more.

Do you want to generate leads right on Facebook or Instagram without having to direct traffic to a landing page? Piece of cake, just use Facebook Lead Ads.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago. The short explanation is that Facebook Lead Ads are generally better at generating leads on mobile devices than landing pages. I got a lot of questions about that blog post, so I wanted to write this follow-up to answer some of them. I also want to show you how you can use Facebook Lead Ads to generate buyer leads for new listings.

New listing Facebook Lead Ad campaigns

The goal of “new listing” campaigns is to offer interested buyers information about a home they haven’t seen yet in exchange for their contact information. These campaigns work like this:

1. Target prospective buyers in your market with a Facebook Lead Ad that gives a limited amount of information about a new listing (just enough to pique the interest of serious buyers).
2. Offer more information in exchange for a lead’s contact info.
3. Truly interested prospective buyers submit their info and are redirected to the full listing.

What is the quality of the leads like?

I saw a funny comment on Facebook from an agent a little while back about lead quality. He said a lead isn’t worth anything unless they have actual intent to buy or sell a home in a reasonable time frame. I think his comment was something like, “I could hold up a phone book and yell ‘Hey everyone, look at me! I just got 5,000 new leads!’ But that wouldn’t do much for my business.”   All joking aside, the quality of any leads you generate with your advertising is dependent on your targeting. If you do a good job of targeting people who are likely to be prospective homebuyers or sellers, the quality of the leads you generate will be better. Which brings me to the second question.

What targeting works best for homebuyers or sellers?

Good targeting on Facebook has three tiers. First, you need to build a homebuyer or seller persona. For a campaign that’s promoting a new listing, for example, you need to figure out what the demographics of interested buyers would be for a particular home (income, age, etc.) along with where they live. Secondly, you need to identify “triggers” that suggest someone is likely to be in the market for a home (or at least in the early stages of the house hunting process). A “trigger” can be something like:

• Is someone a newlywed?
• Is he or she an expectant parent?
• Is he or she visiting Zillow?
• Is he or she likely to move?

Finally, you need to exclude people who would absolutely not be interested in your new listing. This includes things like: recent homebuyers, recent mortgage borrowers, recent movers, and — most importantly — other real estate professionals. When you set up your targeting correctly for a “new listing” campaign, you effectively have two filters that weed out low-quality leads. The first filter is your targeting, which will only include people who are likely to be prospective homebuyers while excluding those who probably aren’t. The second filter is your Facebook Lead Ad, which gives away enough information about a listing to satisfy “window shoppers,” but withholds the information that serious buyers want in exchange for their contact information.

What daily budget do you recommend for Lead Ads?

You can go as low as $5 per day, but a larger daily budget usually means more leads at a lower cost-per-lead. We start our clients’ campaigns out at $25 per day.

What placements do you recommend for Lead Ads?

I recommend Facebook and Instagram News Feeds on both desktop and mobile. I would not recommend other placements, but you should always test for your market. Instagram works very well as a placement for Facebook Lead Ads — particularly for the 25- to 35 year-old demographic.

What’s the best way to follow up with these leads?

Text or call the lead immediately after you receive the notification. A Harvard Business Review study found that sales agents who follow up within an hour of receiving the notification are seven times more likely to qualify a lead, which it defined as “having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker.” The text in your ad should also let leads know that they should expect you to reach out so that they aren’t caught off guard when they receive a text or a call. Even if a lead is still in the early stages of the homebuying process, a process that takes about 4.2 months according to Zillow, you should still add him or her to your CRM. Then continue to give the lead info about new listings and nurture him or her into becoming a client. Source: inman.com