Step by step guide to Facebook ads for real estate.

Facebook ads can be really hard to navigate

Optimize for this, use this style picture, target only these people.

The list never ends! How do you even start?

I decided to do an actionable step by step guide for realtors on how to build facebook ads for real estate.

I will share information with you that I have learned through experience and from Noah Kagan. Noah has spent over $2,000,000 buying Facebook ads and was the 30th person hired by Facebook.

While at Facebook he helped build their ad system. He now runs appsumo.com and produces amazing marketing content.

There are a lot of advanced settings for Facebook ads but this post will focus on the basics. Arguably one of the greatest professional football coach of all time, Vince Lombardi, would start every season off by explaining to his players what a football was. Most of these men had played football for 15+ years.

There is power in the basics!

A few things to consider about online advertising:

Be patient. Getting your online advertising to be profitable can take a day, or 6 months.

Not every advertising space will work for your business. Noah Kagan spent $100,000+ on Google advertising and only made back $25,000. If you passed 4th grade math, you know thats not good

When you find a space that’s profitable, spend as much as you can! At one point I started advertising on a blog. I was paying to be featured or referenced in the body of an article. I was paying for about 2 articles a month to feature me and was generating a lot of leads. I didn’t want to overdo it. I read about really zeroing in on what advertising is working so I decided to double my blog features. I took them to a weekly basis. You know what? The conversion rate for my leads stayed the same. There is soooo much static online so its okay to advertise aggressively.

Advertising decays. Over time you need to refresh your ads that are working. Trends change and people adjust.

Leads are all that matter. Ignore people who claim they get really high traffic or large amounts of click (CTR Click-through-rate). If you are spending but not generating leads, stop.

Look for free marketing opportunities first. You really shouldn’t spend a lot on ads until you have dried out all other marketing opportunities. In my upcoming webinar The Real Estate Facebook Advertising System. Generate Your Own Leads! I am going to show you a free tool you can use to generate leads from any online content.

Now here is the step by step guide on how to spend your first $100 on Facebook for realtors.

First: You need a Facebook fan page to place ads in the newsfeed. Create one here, it’s free and takes a few minutes.

Step 1: Create your Facebook Ad Campaign

Step 2: Choose send people to your website. In the future you can do website conversion but don’t try that right off the bat. Remember we are keeping this as basic as possible for your first $100.

Step 3: Create your ad set

a) When choosing your target audience you need to think about what the goal of the page your ad is pointing to is. Are you offering a home buyers guide or a sellers guide? Are you promoting a listing?

b) Small audience size is what you are looking for when starting out. Try to get your audience to 1500 or below. 1000 is pretty ideal to start off.

c) Location will be your biggest friend. Try to narrow down to a specific city or if you’re in a metropolitan close bordering cities.

d) Always click on the “More Demographics” In here you can narrow down financial information such as income. This helps you show your ad to individuals in the market you are focused on. You can also narrow down based off of home ownership status. You can use this to show your ad only to people currently renting. You can also narrow down based on relationship status. This allows you to target people who are engaged persay.

e) The most important modifier is actually located under your “Behaviors” In behaviors scroll down to “Residential profiles”, inside residential profiles select “Likely to move”. These are people that Facebook has determined, from all their data across the web, that are likely to move in the next 6 months. This should be on all your audiences!

Here is a sample audience I made. My ad is offering a free first time home buyers guide.

Step 4: Set your budget

Start small. If you’re only running one ad, set your daily budget at $3.33 (this will insure you don’t spend more than $100 a month).

optimize for Clicks to Website and let Facebook optimize the pricing. We are keeping it very basic. If you ever become a Facebook pro you may save some money setting your own price but even experience professionals lose money sometimes setting their own price.

Step 5: Create your ad.

a) connect your Facebook fan page.

b) Try to keep images simple, ideally of the property or yourself. Stay away from boring pictures.

Look at this boring advertisement… lame! Cool idea though

c) Try to write naturally in your ad. Don’t make it sound too much like an advertisement.

Imagine how you normally speak or write/post on Facebook vs something that seems like a paid ad.

Here is the back end of setting it up:

1- Connect to a fan page

2- Headline: Give something away or use the address of the property.

3- Text: Some sort of social proof explaining why the reader should care

4- Call to action: Choose “Learn More”

5- News Feed Link Description: Give a call to action for them to get something more

6- Remove the right column ad and Partner Mobile Apps (if the page you are sending them to is not optimized for mobile remove Mobile News Feed as well.)

Here are a couple templates, feel free to copy:

Highlights for creating your newsfeed ad:

• Include a bit.ly link in your text to get extra clicks
• Use the button “Learn More,” study shows it converts better than the other ones and versus having nothing.
• Do not include a right side  or mobile partner advertisement.

I can’t stress how important it is to direct your ads at Landing pages. If you are not sending this traffic to a landing page then you should only be running ads that promote a blog post that has a way for the ready to give you their email address.

If you don’t know how to make landing pages or don’t want to create free downloads (lead magnets) to give away look into my landing page service.

Step 6: Do not buy likes. It’s dumb when people brag about how many likes their fan page has. You have no control over the communication with your potential customer via a fanpage. Facebook controls it! Would you like to only talk to your spouse through another person. I can’t believe you would.

When you do Facebook posts, etc, you have almost no say on how many people it will reach and the algorithm is always changing. It makes sense to create a free fan page and promote it but do not spend money doing it in the beginning. Spend money collecting email addresses so that you can dictate the communication.

Step 7: Track your results. I can’t stress enough how important this is. Track how many leads you are getting from the landing pages you run your ads to. You should know how much you have spent on ads for that page and how many leads it has generated. With this information it should be easy for you to figure out how much each lead is costing you.

I wish you the best advertising! Leave a comment on Opesta and share your questions or experience with Facebook ads. If you want to see a walk through make sure you’re on my upcoming webinar The Real Estate Facebook Advertising System. Generate Your Own Leads!