How Data Mining Makes Facebook the Most Cost Effective Advertising Channel

Facebook is a treasure chest when it comes to identifying potential sellers and buyers to advertise to.

Facebook will help you figure out a person's location, age, marital status, company, position, salary and, believe it or not, even if they are likely to move. How do they do this? It's easy: data mining.

Since the birth of social media, we've all become accustomed to over-sharing just about everything online. While Facebook doesn't necessarily care about the photo you posted of your amazing steak at Delmonico, they certainly are listening and cataloging everything else you are writing about.

For instance, what about that new work promotion a friend posted about? What about the ultrasound that shows "It's a girl"? What about that job position your cousin just got and was so excited to tell everyone about? Yup. They are tracking all of that.

So if you have access to a platform that is cataloging the life events of every single prospect you have in your marketplace, and pointing you directly to others that fit into the category of your "perfect client," why are you still refusing to advertise on Facebook?

Frankly, given the cost of even hiring a marketing firm to run your ad campaigns versus other traditional forms of real estate marketing out there, I find it almost impossible to figure out why EVERY agent or broker doesn't have some sort of advertising strategy on the Facebook platform.

If we can agree that the prospect of getting way more for way less is a compelling argument, let's examine two fantastic reasons that Facebook should be a part of your marketing campaign strategy.

1. It's All About that Data

As I mentioned, Facebook allows advertisers to pinpoint their "ideal prospective clients" and market directly to them, making your ads the most effectively targeted ads ever created.

This is a very simple example above. But, as you can see, we've selected location, age and income as potential choices to define our list. As I noted previously, the possibilities are truly endless. Facebook catalogs EVERYTHING. There is a target group out there for your campaign.

2) This Marketing Vehicle Is SUPER Affordable

One of my favorite things about this platform is that the platform itself is so affordable. When you combine that with the overwhelming performance that ads achieve, this makes it unbeatable. For instance, we were able to show one real estate team how to get roughly 10 times the number of leads from Facebook campaigns compared to their rather out-of-date monthly newsletter.

Even though their monthly newsletter went out to roughly 25,000 people per month, they were getting nearly zero response (I think they were averaging about 10-15 responses per mailing when we first met with them). When we started advertising on Facebook to the same geographic location, we were able to literally get a 10x increased response rate increase for them.

Suddenly, spending $20,000 per month on a print marketing campaign doesn't make as much sense as spending $1200 or so per month on a targeted ad campaign to the same group, does it?

How did we do this? We are good at what we do. We were able to pinpoint the EXACT right people to attract with their ads that would yield them the highest response rates. Aside from that, though, the engine is just affordable if you do it right.

Look at the above "just sold" ad we ran for one of our clients. For $29.51, we were able to get 2,338 people to see the ad, and, of that, 103 people to click through to the landing page. Of those that click on the ad itself, on any given ad, we generate a 40-60% rate of people filling out the capture form and becoming a qualified lead.

So for $29.51, we return to you 40-60 qualified leads. Those numbers definitely don't suck.

Facebook makes it easy to get qualified leads that can help you build your real estate practice.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.