Buying a home is a high-value purchase, and buyers tend to take more time to compare properties online before visiting and zeroing in on the right one. At this stage, your competitors will try their best to grab the attention of your buyer. From making incessant calls to book a site visit to sending endless emails and SMSes, they will try every trick in the book to entice the buyer.

You might also be tempted to try all these tactics to vie for the buyer’s attention. But, hold on! There is a smarter way of reaching your customer where they are. And surprise! It is cost-effective and a time saver too!

Facebook - A Smart and Cost-Effective Way of Reaching the Buyers

Who knew that Facebook, a platform that started as a social networking website would soon become a hotbed for businesses to promote themselves and engage with the users.

With over 2.23 billion active users, Facebook is marketer’s new best friend.

There is so much that it offers in terms of reaching the buyers where they are, that it is impossible not to consider it as a part of marketing strategy. Let us look at a few features that make it a unique marketing platform.

The cheapest form of advertising: 

With just $5, you can reach up to 1,000 people. Compare it with a full-page advertisement in a daily newspaper or a hoarding; you will realize that it is undoubtedly the cheapest form of advertising. It is cheaper as compared to LinkedIn’s sponsored ads and Twitter’s promoted tweets or Google Search Ads too.

Lowers your cost per acquisition:

Facebook advertising when done right can reduce your cost per acquisition to as low as $0.40. Don’t believe us? Check the image below.

                                                                              Source: Lyfe Marketing

Offers laser-sharp targeting option:

Facebook empowers marketers to segment and target users by their age, behavior, interests, and location. You can also set campaign objective, i.e. whether you want to create awareness, generate leads, drive traffic to the website, etc. and set a budget for it. Facebook will then target the users according to the parameters set by you.

Provides immediate, measurable results:

Facebook provides measurable outcomes such as the number of impressions, likes, and conversions that you have received for a campaign. It also gives you detailed statistics on how a particular post performed, so you get an idea of what works and what does not!

Increases engagement and traffic to the website

Of course, SEO and Google AdWords can get you traffic to the website. But, Facebook also plays a crucial role in boosting website traffic. The unique feature of Facebook is it also offers you an option to do remarketing. So, you can advertise to the recent visitors of your website and re-engage with them. So, even if they had forgotten to engage with you the first time, they might re-engage with your brand when they see your ad again.

How Can Real Estate Companies Use Facebook Ads to Generate Leads

When we first told our client VBHC, a leading real estate company with a pan-India presence, about generating leads through Facebook ads, they were understandably reluctant about it. Facebook Advertising, though used by most digital marketing agencies, is still a new concept.

However, we managed to convince the client to give it a try. The result? We were able to generate 200 qualified leads for them in the first month. In the second month, we increased the budget and saw a spike in leads by 300%. The minimum Cost Per Lead (CPL) was as low as Rs 40 ($0.54).

The client was happy because the entire exercise helped in reducing the CPL and improving the quality of leads and traffic to the website.

Here are the three things that we did to generate qualified leads:

Location-based Targeting

As VBHC had projects in four Indian cities, we created four ads sets each targetting a particular location. So, instead of showing a generic ad to all home buyers in India, we used Facebook’s location-based targeting to display relevant ads to home buyers in a particular city.

For example, we ensured that a home buyer in Mumbai does not see a VBHC ad meant for Bengaluru buyers and vice-a-versa. We further narrowed down to target those who currently stay around the place of the property or who visited the place recently. By targetting the audience based on location, and by displaying a relevant ad, you can create a deeper engagement with the buyer.

Remarketing Ads

As we mentioned above, your buyer might not purchase a home immediately. They may like your property but would prefer to compare other properties near the vicinity before buying. To ensure that they don’t forget your property, you can use the remarketing option available on Facebook.

Remarketing ads will help you target those buyers who came to your website, expressed intent, and then disappeared suddenly. With Facebook advertising, you can track those users and display ads of your property along with additional information and CTA to re-engage with them.

Sometimes, your buyer might genuinely forget about your property thanks to the number of promotions they see online. Remarketing will serve as a reminder about the existence of your property and could lead them to book a site visit if they are genuinely interested.

Customized lead ads

So, your prospective buyer sees your Facebook ad and is keen on booking a site visit. What’s next? We live in a time where people do not want to manually fill a form or navigate to another window to express their interest.

If something interests them, they prefer to take action with a tap of the finger. This is exactly where Facebook advertising comes into the picture. Facebook gives you an option to create customized lead ads for your target buyers. So, when they see a lead ad of your property, all they have to do is click on the CTA.

The lead details will be sent to you directly, and you can then call them to take the discussion ahead. However, there is a glitch in this method. Not all leads are going to be genuine. For example, a person might accidentally click on the lead ad even if they were not interested in the property. This can waste your time and resources.

To address this problem, we created a customized form for VBHC wherein few details of the user was auto-populated and a few of them had to be entered manually by the user. This step helped us to generate genuine leads, which made the follow-up work simpler for VBHC.

Conclusion

There is no denial in the fact that Facebook advertising is effective and is less intrusive than other forms of advertising. However, Facebook advertising requires you to pump in some money in promotions.

Organic advertising is almost dead on Facebook, so paid ads are the only way to generate leads. Facebook advertising when done incorrectly can lead to loss of money and zero genuine leads. That’s why you need to collaborate with the right digital marketing agencies who understand how Facebook advertising works and saves your money.

Fractional CMO is one of the few digital marketing agencies that specialize in real estate digital marketing. We are also a HubSpot agency partner, so that helps us to leverage the amazing HubSpot tools and their inbound methodologies to improve your digital marketing strategy. As a firm believer of generating leads over vanity metrics, we talk and walk business!