22 May 2021
Are referrals, word of mouth, glossy postcards, and flyers not getting the response you want? All those old-school methods certainly have their place and time and have the chance to bring in some leads. But, what if we kicked those to the curb for a bit and focused on Facebook ads for real estate leads? Yeah, that’s right. Facebook ads + real estate agencies = a match made in heaven.
And, here’s why:
Facebook is personal. Real estate is personal. You’re much more likely to like a post, Page, ad, etc. if your friends have. Likewise, chances are, a house is a person’s largest financial investment ever. Thus, people prefer to work with those they trust based on recommendations from their inner circle.
Facebook is visual. Real estate is visual. People are instantly attracted to photos that infiltrate Facebook News Feeds. Likewise, real estate centers on attractive, high-quality images in order to draw people into a property.
Facebook is emotional. Real estate is emotional. Users share content based on things happening in their life—from graduations to engagements, weddings, first-time home purchases, pregnancy announcements, births, anniversaries, retirements, and so on. Likewise, people become emotionally attached to places and new things, like their homes. Why else do people post a picture in front of their new home and plaster it across social media?!
You see, once you plug into Facebook’s targeting capabilities to reach your client’s ideal home buying audience, you’ll find your ads to be an absolute gold mine for their real estate agency. But, in order to blow leads through the roof, you need to create a winning Facebook ads for real estate leads funnel—with all the bells and whistles: a compelling offer, an attractive visual, enticing copy, appropriate targeting, and more.
Sound daunting? No worries. That’s what we’re here for. We’ve developed a ready-made funnel that’ll help you earn new real estate clients this week—all by using Facebook ads. You ready to get your hands on it? Let’s dig in…
A Jaw-Dropping Offer (JDO) to Drive Realtor Lead Generation
The very first (and arguably, the most important) component of creating an ad with “good bones” is a jaw-dropping offer (or JDO as you’ll see around here). It’s the key to getting your ideal Facebook user to stop in their scrolling tracks and click on what it is you’re selling them. But, this can’t be just any offer you craft on a whim. There are actually two essential must-haves for a seriously jaw-dropping offer:
A narrowly targeted, irresistible sales offer that compels your people.
A product or service of perceived high value to offer for free (or at little cost).
So, let’s start with the first essential must-have. It’s important you determine who it is you’re wanting to target with your offer. And, this is tough because, with a real estate agency, there are so many different audiences you can appeal to—first-time homebuyers, military personnel with a spouse, investors, and so on. Instead of focusing on multiple audiences, however, it’s important to target only one audience at a time and build an offer that’s exclusive to them. In this case, we’ll focus on both men and women—specifically those between the ages of 25 and 50 who are either renters, looking to move, or investors.
The reason for including investors in the mix—real estate investors and independent investors—is, oftentimes, people invest in property to flip homes to rent out or sell. Now that we’ve defined who to target, let’s move onto the second essential must-have: the offering. The most compelling and feasible thing you can offer to this type of clientele is a free affordable homes guide. It’s a list of homes selling for under $100,000—inexpensive homes perfect for a first-time home buyer or someone looking to buy a property of good value to flip. And, you can actually spin this guide a couple of ways: either focus on the cheapest homes in your area or those that are the best value for the price (selling well below their appraisal value). For this specific ad, we focused on the cheapest homes to buy in our town. Make sense? Awesome. Moving on…
The Facebook Ads for Real Estate Leads Funnel You Need to Fix Up Your Lead Generation Efforts
Ready to sell your offer to your people? All you need is a simple four-part Facebook ads for real estate leads funnel, which includes:
A well-targeted Facebook ad
A landing page (aka opt-in page)
A thank you page
And, a follow-up email sequence and text message
Think of it as a listing process of sorts. You wouldn’t ever activate a home listing before having a client complete the necessary paperwork and taking photos of the property, would you? DIdn’t think so. Therefore, you shouldn’t do the same to your funnel. To help you avoid doing just that, let’s walk through each of the four parts to fix up your lead generation efforts ASAP.
1. The Facebook Ad
This is how you’ll circulate that JDO we discussed earlier so your audience can grab hold of what it is you’re offering up. And, no, it doesn’t need to be some sparkling ad that takes forever to build. Reason being, your primary goal is pretty straightforward: just get those clicks = LEADS. And, the most effective ad type to do just that is Consideration, with the ideal objective being Traffic. That means you’re focused on sending people to a spot on or off of Facebook for the ultimate lead generation.
Are you following? Good. Pretty easy, huh? So, we’ve already knocked out the ad objective, and next, we’ll focus on targeting. This is where the segment we discussed earlier (men and women, between the ages of 25 and 50, who are either renters, looking to move, or investors) comes into the picture. To begin charming leads in your neighborhood with your free affordable homes guide, you’ll want to use the following targeting options:
Your city +10 miles (in this case, we used our local town. But, you’ll need to determine the radius based on where you live.)
Men & women ages 25-50
Independent investors (behaviors)
Real estate investments (behaviors)
Renters (demographics)
While there are many more targeting options you can use, focus on getting a steady flow of leads walking through the door using the five targeting options shared above. All before you add any more to the mix. Next, after setting up your ad targeting, it’s time to get creative! Again, as I mentioned before, there’s no need to break your back turning this into some grand campaign. All it needs to be able to do is get your people to love what you’re virtually handing them. Thus, moving them to the next step of the Facebook ads for real estate leads funnel—providing their contact information to opt-in to your email list and receive the freebie guide (aka JDO). Once they do that, you’ll be able to reach back out to them and offer your real estate services to help with any stage of the ownership process they might be in.
Okay, let’s break down the components of the money-making ad example above. That way, you can have something to mimic, ensuring you build a winning Facebook campaign that brings home some leads.
The Ad Headline—gets right to the point. States the content freebie clearly and the brand name offering it up.
The Main Ad Copy—throws in some scarcity and exclusivity to prompt the target to click on the ad and check out the offer.
The Ad Image—it’s a modest, cozy house that looks affordable. Now, what you want to do is use an image of a home in your area instead of a stock image (if you have a professional photo, of course). Doing so will help your audience make a genuine connection with your ad.
The Ad Description—again, states the offer clearly with a bit more information to get the target to act (“Get a copy…before they go to our website”).
The URL—is easy to read and is a custom domain. That’s important as you want to be sure to avoid extension URLs (ex. .clickfunnels). They’ll cost your ad more in the long run because they’re ranked poorly Web of Trust.
The Call-to-Action Button—by choosing Learn More, you’re preparing the audience to receive the information they’ve been looking for when it comes to home buying.
Once your audience clicks the Learn More button, they’ll be redirected to an opt-in page that’s exclusively designed to get their name, email, and cell phone number, in exchange for the offer.
2. The Landing Page (Opt-In)
You’ll hear this time and time again from us: it’s not enough to send your leads to a standard sign-up form on your website. Why? Well, for starters, you won’t be able to successfully track ROI from your Facebook ads. We want to make this as easy as possible for you! Plus, it’d definitely be confusing for your audience to land on a page that, chances are, looks almost nothing like the ad.
To help you get started, posted above is a landing page opt-in example, which you can replicate to capture leads with ease. Looks nice, huh? But, looks aren’t the only thing this page has going for it. Let’s walk through the page’s components so you can quickly understand why this page works so well for your Facebook ads for real estate leads funnel:
The background image and page text are consistent with the ad that led your target there. The high-quality photo is the same image used in the ad. And, the page copy mimics the offer.
The target is being asked to provide only essential information—name, email address, and phone number. There’s no need to go all 20 Questions on them. If you did that, you’d overwhelm the reader and cause them to click away from the page. All before they fill out the form and claim the content freebie.
And, there’s scarcity. This is vital to getting people to opt-in quickly. In this example, it’s that the list changes daily. The whole reason why the audience is trying to get on this list is so they can get the newest, most updated one before anyone else sees it on the agency’s website.
We’ve used this opt-in page layout across various industries and have found it works like magic every time.
3. The Thank You Page
After the prospective homebuyer enters their information on the landing page and clicks the “Show Me My New Home Now!” button, they’re added to your email list and redirected to a Thank You page. Right away, you’ll notice this page isn’t much different from the opt-in page we just discussed.
The page kicks off with an explanation that an email is coming their way soon with a copy of the Affordable Homes Guide—encouraging them to call the office and state the code (“SEMODEALS”) to schedule a home tour. And, the phone number on this page isn’t just any standard number. It’s actually a tracking number that forwards calls to the office to track the effectiveness of the campaign. You can quickly set this number up at CallRail.com.
And, at the end of the page, we toss in a bonus stack with some added scarcity. It’s an additional freebie or special offer added to the original offer. In this case, it’s a free Neighborhood Deals Book. But, it’s only given to the prospective homebuyer if, and only if, they contact the office to schedule a home tour within the next 48 hours.
See how easy this Facebook ads for real estate leads funnel is to set up? Especially when the details are all laid out for you. And, that brings us to the last part of our cream of the crop funnel! It’s what we consider to be the prime part of the process—the follow-up, helping close those leads who’ve already opted-in to your offer.
4. The Follow-Up
We may start to sound like a broken record when you read this next sentence. But, if take the time to follow-up with those who’ve opted-in to receive your offer, you’ll see your business blow through the roof. It’s true! Following up on your leads from your Facebook ads for real estate leads funnel helps demolish any walls that stand between your prospective client actually working with your agency. So, to get started with your follow-up method, you’ll first need to send a series of two emails, as well as an SMS text message. Hesitant about using SMS messages? Trust us, it’s not difficult. And, you should 100% consider adding it into the process. It puts the tracking number into your prospective homebuyer’s hands, encouraging them to call right away. No hesitations. As for the series of emails, the first one should be sent out right away. And, it needs to summarize the same information the lead read on the Thank You page. Then, the second email should be sent out two days later, telling them what they’ll receive if they call to schedule a home tour right away. Remember? It’s a free Neighborhood Deals Book. There’s that added scarcity element again! Now, are you wondering how to get these messages signed, sealed, and delivered to your audience? SendGrid is your dependable sidekick (or any other autoresponder tool you prefer), helping you get your follow-up process up and moving. Well, that about wraps things up for our Facebook ads for real estate leads funnel walk-through today. So, how are you feeling now that we’ve given you a behind-the-scenes look at using Facebook ads for your realtor client’s lead generation efforts? I’m sure you’re ready to put all this info to work.
Get to Flipping those Leads in Your Favor!
It’s time to think outside the box when it comes to real estate agency marketing tactics. And, building a Facebook ad campaign (and following up with your prospects!) offers the perfect opportunity to flip leads in your favor—helping you beat out your competition. If you loved getting your hands on the information shared here today, and are ready to stay ahead of the Facebook advertising game or simply want us to create the Facebook ads for real estate leads for you, CLICK HERE TO CONTACT US. We’d love to help you find new clients! Have questions on these Facebook ads for real estate leads funnel? We’ve got answers. Just drop us a message below, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. And, be sure to share your results with us once you put this funnel out on the market!