To stay operational as a real estate business you need be able to sell. But before you can actually close a deal you need to be able to get a clients.
But where and how can you get these leads?
Of course you can get referrals from family and friends. But there will be a point where you need to get leads that lie outside of your personal circle.
Fortunately we live in a time where Facebook exists.
Did you know that it is the the number one social media in the world? After all, it has a worldwide active users of 2.6 billion.
Apart from its networking functionality, you can also run ads for your business to get leads. At LeadHornet.com we have seen that it is an effective medium when advertising a house for sale. Having the ability to target
We have created a quick tutorial on getting started on setting up a lead ad with facebook.
What we need:
- Facebook account
- Facebook Page (you can only run Ads on a Facebook Page i.e. business page)
- Make sure you have no Adblockers installed or have at least disabled during the use of Facebook Ads Manager.
Once you have signed into your Facebook account. Go to facebook.com/adsmanager, and you will see the interface like below.
CREATING A FACEBOOK LEADS ADS CAMPAIGN
Click on the green ‘Create’ button to create a new advertising campaign.
You will then be prompted to choose what your objective is for creating an ad. In this case we want to go ahead and choose ‘Lead generation’, located under the ‘Consideration’ column.
You will also be prompted to create a ‘Campaign Name’. We can leave the other two options to ‘OFF’ and then click on ‘Set Up Ad Account’.
As you get more advanced you should definitely look into these options.
AD ACCOUNT
Next fill in your information below and hit ‘Continue’.
FACEBOOK LEAD ADS SET:
Before you can continue, you must ‘View Term’s and accept Facebook’s Lead Generation Terms of Service.
DEFINE YOUR AUDIENCE:
Create a custom audience. This rich feature allows you to tell Facebook what is the profile of your ideal client.
It allows you to specify who your ads should be shown to. By location, age, gender, interests and languages – this is incredibly powerful!
Let’s say your real estate niche is getting clients that are looking for vacation homes.
Well you may want to target retired people. This means you would want to set your audience age between 55-65+.
For the location you can set the cities which you service.
Notice how there is an Audience Size gauge on the right. As you become more specific with your audience profile your potential audience size decreases.
You can further get a better idea on who you should target by using Facebook Audience Insight tool. What’s great about it is that it is absolutely free!
PLACING YOUR ADS
Next you want to configure where you want your Ads to appear. We can leave it to Automatic Placements as recommended.
Allowing Facebook’s powerful algorithm to choose for you.
But you also have the flexibility to pick and choose where you want your ads to be displayed.
The last part under the Ad Set category is setting up your Budget & Schedule.
As you change your daily budget you can get an immediate feedback of how many leads you can get.
An important option to consider at this point is if you want to run the ad set continuously once you confirm everything. Or you can schedule a window when you want to start and end your ad.
For reassurance, you can stop an start and stop an ad anytime you want.
AD FORMAT
You can choose to have ads in the form of a carousel with a mix of videos and images. You can have a maximum of 10 cards within a carousel. However, if you opt for a carousel it is best to limit your cards to 3 or 4. Too much can bore the viewer and move away from your ad.
There are many tools out there where you can create images/videos. One notable software out there which you can try out for free is Canva. With it you can quickly and easily create amazing Facebook Ads.
Once you have uploaded the Ad image you want to show. What’s great is you can see what your Ad will look like in the right side, as you fill in the various information in the left.
Setting the ‘Call to Action’ to ‘Learn More’ is generally the best fit for creating Lead Ads.
You can read up more about making your Ad more engaging here.
After creating the Ad, we need to create the lead form. This is where they submit their lead information. As we see the ‘Intro’ is turned on by default. I would turn it off, so potential leads have to do one less click in giving their information. Read here to know more about form type options.
Through the other options you can further customize what information you would want from a lead. By default the lead form asks for email and full name. But you can change these parameters to your liking.
Once you have completed the form there is a ‘Finished’ button in the top right.
Once everything is completed click on the ‘Confirm’ button on the bottom right of the page. You will then be prompted to enter your payment method. Recall that you can stop running an ad anytime and you are not making any commitment in your daily ad budget.
ACCESSING YOUR LEADS
Your lead ads are now up and running. But where do you get access to your leads?
Simply go to the Facebook Page which is linked with your FB Lead Ads. On the right of the page click on ‘Publishing Tools’. This will show you more options on the left column of the page. From the new column click on ‘Forms Library’.
You will then be shown a download button to get your lead information. Or you can connect your Facebook leads to a CRM. At the time of this writing, if you don’t have a CRM, you will always need to download your leads manually. This will be in a CSV format.
CONCLUSION
As we can see, Facebook Ads Manager is very powerful in targeting specific demographics. Furthermore, it’s also one of the cheapest ways of getting leads. However, running effective ads involves a learning curve. That is why people would rather opt for lead generation services.
Many claim that Facebook Ads does not work, but when used correctly, it can definitely help boost your business. Contact LeadHornet on how it can help you obtain real estate leads.
