Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Social media is a major player when it comes to marketing your business online. Real estate agents can gain some major boosts to their business leads through social media marketing, and one of the best platforms for this type of marketing is Facebook thanks to its prodigious user base of more than 2.2 billion monthly active users.
Distilling that 2.2 billion-strong user base down to the demographic you're looking for in potential clients isn't easy, however. Luckily, using Facebook's robust targeted advertising tools can help narrow your focus to the right prospects for your real estate business. Here's some invaluable intel on how you can use this social media giant to grow your own realtor business.
Generating leads can be a challenge, as you typically need to direct prospects off of Facebook to a pre-constructed landing page and then convince those prospects to leave their information. Using Facebook to create lead ads for anyone looking to buy or sell a home, however, solves many of these problems and does so in a seamless manner that increases the chances that Facebook users will click through.
Facebook's ad tools use the platform itself to capture information, as it can pre-fill forms with user information based on what they have already shared with the company. These native ads also no longer require users to leave the Facebook environment, which speeds up the process, and the data collected by these lead ads is easily downloadable into your CRM of choice or even to a simple spreadsheet or Google doc.
The second miraculous ability of Facebook to supercharge your targeted ads is due to its truly comprehensive segmentation ability. The data sets that the platform gathers on its users is more than just unbelievably rich; it's also classified using a level of granularity that goes beyond typical demographic segments like age, gender, and location.
There are two major contributors to this process. One, Facebook collects data from its platform and also from across the wider internet from third-party sites that have agreed to provide marketing data to it on visitors. Two, the ability for Facebook users to record their interests on the platform further inform the system for targeting purposes. A user that has showcased an interest in "buying a house" or one that has been browsing Zillow can be targeted as a demographic segment, narrowing your focus to warm or even hot leads.
Last but certainly not least, using Facebook's targeted marketing and advertising can help you forge connections with prospective clients without necessarily relying on segmentation or other ad tools. Social media itself is a powerful tool in and of itself when it comes to building authority, which helps you integrate into a community and become a trusted expert. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that prospects in that community turn to you instead of competitors when the need arises for real estate services.
Using Facebook's tools to share non-traditional marketing content to your chosen demographic segments raises awareness of your brand in ways that show prospects you're not all about attracting new customers. Creating content that entertains and educates homeowners in the form of images, videos, blog entries, and other related content, all without directly marketing your services as a real estate agent, helps generate goodwill for your brand. Facebook's ad tools will help you both arrive at the forefront in the minds of your demographic and stay there for as long as you need.
