Advertising Clients,
Good news! I just completed 30 days with Lindsay, one of your your advertising managers, here in San Diego.
I have a long message for you about our updated plan to get you Facebook ad results.
Hang in there with me for this one....
I reviewed every campaign and can tell you with a high degree of certainty that the top 3 performing real estate Facebook campaigns for lead generation are:
1. Request a free home value report to a zip code
2. Search for homes in a zip code
3. Promoting your listings to a zip code
Click here to view an example of each of these ads.
It’s not surprising to me – looks like “farming” with postcards digitally on Facebook essentially.
From a return on investment standpoint, generally you’ll pay about $5 for a buyer registration and $10 for a full seller lead (name, address, phone, etc.), depending on your market.
You’ll want to pick zip codes with the highest turn over at the highest sales prices.
If we spend $500 on Facebook, we should expect 100 buyer leads, 50 seller leads, or a combination of the two with these campaigns.
You should expect to close 1 home for every $500 you spend on Facebook at a very minimum. Again, this is at a very minimum – if your close rate is less, the advertising is not working.
This is based on looking at many Facebook accounts and what people are paying for leads.
Most top agents we talk to will spend 10% of their commission to get a deal.
With a typical commission of $5,000, a $500 investment into Facebook ads is the very most you should spend to get 1 deal you list within 90 days of registration.
If your average commission is higher, that usually means your lead costs will likely be higher as well. For example, if your average commission is $10,000, you can spend $1,000 on Facebook to generate 50 full seller leads at $20 a lead. If you only close one deal, you’ll still see a 10x ROI.
Let me stress - these are very minimum expectations.
Remember, many of these leads are very upstream from making a buying or selling decision since the call to action is not to speak with an agent, so many of your sales will come to you after months, if not years, of nurturing. That’s all “bonus” ROI, in my opinion.
You should see clients directly from your ad spend within 90 days.
My official recommendation, if you have the budget, is to put $500 into each campaign for a total of $1500 over 33 days ($15 a day per campaign). You should, at a minimum, generate 3 listings within 90 days from this investment, assuming a $5000 commission for a 10x ROI.
If that’s too much, you can put $500 into one campaign for 33 days.
The best part of these 3 recommended campaigns is the results are 100% tracked. It’s not a “branding” campaign where we only know how many people see it.
We can tie leads from your advertising directly to closings.
We’re making a direct offer, driving people to your website, and tracking every unique registration with both a Facebook conversion pixel and URL codes. These are the questions we must answer definitively every month:
1. How much money did we invest?
2. How many leads did we generate?
3. How many are qualified?
4. How many closed?
These questions will be answered on a new monthly report we'll create for you.
Your home search website, or free value report tool, must accept the Facebook conversion pixel and tracking codes so we can answer at least the first two questions for you every month.
If they do not, we will not be able to track leads to closings.
Here’s an example of a URL with tracking codes:
www.amazinglouisvillehomes.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=40201&utm_campaign=free-home-value
These extra words are included with your lead information so you know exactly where your leads came from when you follow up.
If your current websites to do not support tracking codes or the Facebook conversion pixel, we recommending buying Real Geeks and upgrading to their Facebook Marketing Tool.
These are the only three campaigns you should run when you start advertising on Facebook.
You must confidently know you’re getting a positive return on your advertising investment or it’s not a sustainable marketing campaign for the long term.
We are in the process of setting up these three campaigns for you. Please make sure you get on a phone call soon with Leah or Lindsay so we can confirm the following systems:
1. Determine your target zip codes
2. Confirm your Facebook pixel installation
3. Confirm your website/CRM accepts tracking codes
4. Discuss how we get notified on new listings to promote
5. Update your custom audience email database
6. Website log ins to make sure it all works
Once we see positive ROI from these three foundational campaigns, here are additional Facebook campaigns we recommend to complement your results.
1. Remarket all your website traffic with a direct offer for a home buying or selling consultation 14 days from last visit.
2. Workshops at your office to teach your “lead generation secrets” to existing real estate agents in the area in the business under 2 years for recruiting.
3. “Why Rent When You Can Buy” offer to zip codes where rent prices match or are greater than mortgage prices.
4. “The Most Expensive Listing in This Area” ad where you post the most expensive home. A lost of people tend to click on these ads.
5. “Just Sold” posts to all the neighbors around your listing for 7 days with the Yelp! or Zillow review in the post. We Photoshop “SOLD” over the listing photo for you.
Click here to view an example of each of these ads.
When it comes to audience targeting, we exclude all area real estate agents from your ads while remarketing your website visitors, the people in your database (Facebook matches email address to user accounts) and homeowners who are also likely to move in key zip codes.
There is, without question, more advanced targeting available, but there is a difficult balance of how many/few people you want to reach versus your cost per lead. We’ve seen cases when it makes more sense to reach a wider, less targeted audience to get lower cost leads.
The quality of your leads will always need to be reported back to us since you’re calling them.
We’re here to help you go over the deeper specifics of the campaigns if that’s of interest to you. Otherwise, our job is simply to do our best to get you leads that convert to deals quickly!
We need to get these 3 campaigns set up for you as quickly as possible.
Email lindsay@getvyral.com or leah@getvyral.com to set up your time on the phone to go over all of this.
I’m super confident in these 3 Facebook marketing campaigns after I’ve reviewed them with all the people who know what they are doing with Facebook ads in real estate.
Thanks for working with us for your advertising.
Frank
P.S. Leah is back working directly with clients now too, so you may be working with exclusively Leah or Lindsay going forward. They will let you know who you are working with shortly.