Everything rides on your choice of demographics and interests when you set up a Facebook ad for targeting new real estate leads. Your ad spend, conversion rate and cost-per-result (engagement, leads and clicks) will be determined by how good you are at Facebook interest and demographics targeting.
In this guide, I will explain the best interest and demographics options for real estate agents, brokers and real estate investors.
Different types of Facebook targeting
On Facebook, you can target prospects – who are property buyers, sellers and investors in your case – with different types of targeting options. Here are the four main options:
- You can target prospects based on their behavior
- You can target prospects based on their demographics
- You can target prospects based on geography
- You can target people based on their interests
All the three targeting options will work perfectly fine if you are trying to reach new people. It means that if you want to target people who don’t know about you or your real estate brand, you can use Facebook’s database of its users’ behavior, interests demographics and geography to reach the right kind of audience who are interested in – let’s say for example – buying or selling homes.
Targeting prospects by behavior
When it comes to targeting your prospects by behavior, I would strongly recommend that you set up your real estate Facebook ad for people who have shown interest in popular property listings websites such as Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com. You will be able to reach people who are already browsing property listings and using tools such as ‘Know Home Much Your Home Is Worth’ on these websites.
Targeting prospects by demographics
If you want to reach a wider range of people with no specific behavior patterns, then you can target them by their demographics.
Let’s say for example you are luxury agent who help clients buy and sell luxury homes.
You can target people based on their income. By this, you would avoid wasting money by showing your ads to people who are looking for affordable homes.
Some other demographics targeting options include:
- First time home buyers. There are related interests such as ‘first time home buyer grant’ that you can target.
- You can target recently married as well as recently divorced couples.
- You can target new parents. Many of these couples would want to upsize.
- You can also target people based on their language. For example, if you are a real estate agent in Houston where a lot of people speak Spanish, you can Specify Spanish as a targeting option.
Targeting people based on geography
This is one of the most popular targeting options for realtors and other real estate professionals. Since real estate is a local business, you can target people who:
- Live in a specific Zip code area,
- Live in a specific city and its surrounding area,
- Live in specific neighborhood (you can use the Pin Drop feature of Facebook to target neighborhoods, streets or any smaller area).
Targeting people based on their interests
You can target people based on their specific interests such as ‘mortgage’, ‘first time home buyer grant’, ‘credit score’ etc.
Think of all the steps a home buyer or seller goes through during a property transaction process. Now type in keywords related to these steps in the ‘interests’ field. This will help you to come up with more specific interests for Facebook ad targeting.
Bringing it all together
If you want to be more specific, you can use a combination of these targeting options.
For example, in the same Facebook ad you can target people:
- Who are interested in luxury homes
- Who live in a specific Zip Code area
- And have specific interests related to home buying or selling.
So these were some of the best Facebook interests and demographics that realtors can use for Facebook advertising. Keep in mind that if you are too specific about your interests and demographics. Your cost-per-result will increase substantially. Check out my recent article on how to lower your Facebook ad cost.
Let me know in comments if you have any questions.
