Your 30-day Action Plan for Using Facebook for Real Estate Leads

If you are using Facebook for real estate lead generation, there are two ways you might be doing it:

One: you are wasting your money and more importantly, time with useless tricks such as boosting posts. There is so much noise on this biggest social media platform that nobody will ever pay attention to what you have to say if this is your strategy to generate leads.

Second: You are winning real estate leads every single day and landing new clients with the help of Facebook marketing.

If you fall in the second category, keep doing what you are doing; but if you have been stuck in the first one for quite a while, this blog post is for you.

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Be mentally prepared to create a real estate conversion funnel

This sounds like a very basic piece of advice, but believe it or not, it is more important than any other advice you will find here. You will need to be psychologically prepared for what it takes to create a conversion funnel.

Setting up a Facebook “Like Page” ad campaign is the easiest route to take because we, as humans, tend to draw instant pleasure from acceptance.

You might fall for the excitement of getting a few likes and shares for your latest blog post or property listing, but you need to stop taking the shortcut if it’s not yielding any results.

Let’s not talk about how to set up a Faceobok ad campaign and start generating leads right away. Nine times out of ten, this will fail. It takes lots of preparation and a solid strategy to get real estate leads from Facebook.

As I said, your first step should be to prepare a conversion funnel, because every ad you run should get you leads. It may take you a while to set up a conversion funnel, so let’s set a target of 30 days to get your fist lead with some actionable steps. The next lead will come your way a lot sooner because you’ll have a system to follow and be armed with necessary knowledge.

First Week: What’s your offer?

Why would people fall for your campaign and hand you their email address on a silver platter?

Well, you need to come up with an offer that they can’t resist.

Dedicate an entire week towards coming up with an irresistible offer.

In order to come up with an offer, you need to understand the pain points of your prospects, which are home buyers, home sellers and newbie investors in most cases.

The offer can be as small as:

• An ebook – for example, a guide on how buyers can save hundreds of dollars by following certain tips
• A free consultation offer

Or it could be as big as:

• A huge discount on your commission
• An offer to pay a third party service like escrow fee.

In order to determine your offer, you should study your competition. Find out what other realtors in your area or relators in others cities are offering to generate leads. You can tweak the offer to suit your situation. Or, take it to the next level by offering something more creative and better.

Whatever your offer is you need to be able to present it in a very convincing way.

Which is where comes the landing page part. The second week should be dedicated to landing page optimization.

Second Week: Landing page optimization

A very small number of real estate professionals use landing pages on their websites. And, it’s quite shocking, given the fact that landing pages can have a substantial impact on lead generation.

You need to create a landing page where your visitors’ will land after being driven to your website from Facebook.

You can either hire a designer/developer to create a landing page for you or create one on your own using tools like Instapage. While it will be very time consuming to hire a designer/developer and get them to understand your marketing objectives, you can create landing pages using these tools within minutes.

If you are using a landing page service like Instapage, make sure that you are selecting the right type of landing page design. It should be suitable for a real estate brand and more importantly, your offer.

After you have created a landing page, you now need to pay attention to the copy of your landing page.

You can turn your landing pages into a conversion machine simply by getting the copy right.

And the good news is – it’s not rocket science.

The copy for the landing page should get straight to the point and explain clearly in minimum words what your offer is. An attention-grabbing, benefit-packed headline is all you need to get visitors sign up for your offer.

As per the Instapage creators:

A prospect should always be able to look at your headline and figure out why she should buy your product or use your service. It sounds simple, but you’d be amazed at how many landing pages don’t include an attention-grabbing, benefit-packed headline.

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Don’t create just one landing page, but many in order to split test which landing pages are resulting in maximum conversions.

Coming up with an offer and creating multiple landing pages will take at least two weeks, if not more. But if you manage to get this right, half the battle is already won.

Third Week: Set up your campaign

This week’s task may sounds like you can accomplice it within minutes; but before you start an advert, you need to familiarize yourself with the basic concepts of Facebook advertising.

There are three things you need to know:

• What ‘interests’ you should target to get your ad in front of your prospects only. It includes behavior, your target audience’s income, age group etc. For example, if your target audience is millennials, it doesn’t make sense to select an age range of 18-65 years.
• Power Editor to split test your adverts. For example, you should be able to know what happens if you change the age range or interest. Are these changes leading to a higher conversion rate?

• Facebook Pixels to know how your ads are performing with regard to the conversion rate on your website.
• And, Custom Audience to re-target people who visited your site, but didn’t convert the first time. Studies show a person needs to see an ad seven times before the message of the ad will even begin to sink in.

Your choice of ‘interests’ might change for different adverts depending on the offer. For example, if your offer is to pay mortgage processing fee on behalf of the buyer, it means you need to people who are at the final stage of the home buying decision. But if a home buying guide is your offer, you can’t be sure at what stage of the buying decision they are at. They may be just thinking about buying a home and curious about the challenges that lay ahead.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that you need to create multiple advert sets with different images, texts, and landing pages before you start a real estate lead generation campaign on Facebook.

Fourth Week: Test and test

It’s the most challenging part where you need to accept defeats (it can be very disheartening at time because you have already invested three weeks) and tweak your Facebook marketing strategy accordingly.

Find out which advert sets are converting the most and which aren’t.

Use the knowledge you gained about Power Editor, Facebook Pixels and Custom Audience to make changes to a campaign after a certain period of time and see how these changes have affected the conversion rate.

In conclusion

If you are putting money into Facebook marketing without these preparations, it means you are throwing it down the drain.

There is no denying the fact that all these preparations will take a while, but you will be guaranteed to succeed with Facebook marketing and get dozens and dozens of leads every month.