3 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Real Estate Ads (and Increase Results)

Any marketing platform requires some "time in the saddle" and getting used to in order to squeeze out the maximum results. Because your job is selling real estate, and not becoming a "Master of Everything Marketing," it stands to reason that you might feel that Facebook is either a poor source of quality leads, or perhaps a total waste of time altogether.

These are conversations we have with clients and prospective clients that are seeking help with Facebook advertising all the time. The reality of the situation is that in just about every case we come across, it isn't the Facebook advertising platform that is falling short of expectations. It's not utilizing the platform properly that is causing these agents to see results that are less than what they are looking for.

With that in mind, today I wanted to share with you three common things we find Realtors® are not doing correctly with their Facebook ad campaigns—and how to fix them:

1. Make Sure You Are Targeting the Right Group

This one is an obvious one, correct? One might think so, in the beginning—but what we've found is that all too often, Realtors® are incorrectly targeting their core demographic. Here are some basic things we see go wrong:

• They are running an ad to get seller leads, but forget to specify that they want only to target people that own homes
• They are too narrow in their scope of who they want to market to, making it nearly impossible for them to get a decent enough group of prospects on their sites, and convert leads to clients
• They think that it is better to go after everyone instead of picking a demographic, thus watering down the effect their ad will have on people that see it.

Or my personal favorite one:

If you look at the image above, you can see a test group for homeowners in Palo Alto, CA that I set up. What we see so often when agents set up their demographic target is that they mess up and forget to mark "People Who Live In This Location," when they set up the group and instead target "Everyone In This Location," which is the default choice.

The problem with this is because people travel throughout their day from place to place, and virtually everyone has Facebook on their phone, if someone from San Francisco goes to Palo Alto one day and you are targeting everyone, and not only people that live there, you are going to spend money serving up ads to people that won't work with you because they live out of the area.

All the above examples make it so you are not maximizing the number of people your ad will target, and not honing the ads to only be shown specifically to those that you deem "Your Ideal Client." The net result is you wasting your hard earned dollars.

2. Make Sure Your Ads Look Professional AND Visually Appealing

According to a study done by Silverpop, you have exactly eight seconds to grab somebody's attention with your Facebook Ad. That is roughly the attention span a goldfish has. So it's safe to say that, these days, our attention is literally everywhere, which means it's actually nowhere.

In order to grab people, you need to make sure that your ad is compelling and gets a visitor to engage with it. The easiest way to quickly engage with humans is through visual graphics. It's been scientifically proven that we respond quicker to graphics than the written word. Because of this, the image you use (and the headline you use to go with that image) is more important than practically anything in that ad.

If you take a look at the ad, you can see the ad is visually appealing for a few reasons. It has a happy, attractive couple in it. People are naturally drawn to happiness. The headline under the photo ties in nicely with the couple in the photo, holding their tablet and presumably getting their home value. The image and the headline lead the visitor to start thinking of this ad in a "me too" scenario. After all, they own a home. If this couple's home value has gone up, certainly the visitor's home value must have gone up as well.

That is all you need to get them to click on the ad and engage with you.

3. Your Landing Page Technically Isn't Part of Your Ad, BUT It Is EVERYTHING!

The last thing that people constantly discount is the importance of a solid landing page. I've written articles in the past about the anatomy of the perfect landing page, but I cannot emphasize how vitally important this is.

The above page nicely illustrates a good landing page. The text is easy to read, the form is not too small and the fields aren't spaced out too far, and it clearly says what they are being offered for giving their information to this agent.

The only thing I suggest to improve this page would be to take off the home address field. Remember, you are dealing with people that have the attention span of a goldfish. You have to make things as simple as possible, or else you are not going to get the lead.

I hope you have found these tips helpful. We realize you are spending your hard earned money on Facebook Ads to build your business, so we want to try and help you as much as possible to ensure you get the leads you so richly deserve.

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