Advertisements are everywhere – online, on TV, on the side of the road, in our mailbox, and so on. If done effectively, advertising your real estate business can be a very successful strategy to help it scale. Don’t waste your time, effort, or money putting out an ad. Instead, study this real estate advertising guide and put its advice to work to create and run ad campaigns that can help you grow your firm.
Advertising is defined as spending money to have a message, name, or logo displayed in a specific way, at a particular time, and on a particular channel for a specific audience to sell a specific good or service. Each real estate advertising has a different purpose, but the most typical ones are to produce buyer leads, seller leads, or sell a house for the maximum money. Ads are, in the end, a tool for growing and scaling your real estate business.
Real estate ad campaigns can be technical, analytical, and complex, depending on the strategy you use. However, it’s crucial to remember that the people are at the heart of any successful real estate firm. It will be challenging to build your business and grow your income the way you desire if you don’t help existing clients honestly or communicate efficiently with new leads.
You can’t expect to generate leads and sales by creating an ad in 20 minutes. So instead, consider honestly and objectively who you want to attract, where they spend their time, and how you can reach them the most effectively.
The six fundamental steps to creating a successful real estate ad are as follows:
1. Identify Your Target Market
Let’s be clear: an “audience” does not only refer to those who attend Broadway performances and concerts, and the group of people you wish to attract is your audience in marketing.
As a real estate agent, you have one quick way to narrow down your target market: by geography. You probably don’t want to attract homeowners in Pennsylvania if you live in Nevada. You should, however, continue to narrow your focus. Do you wish to work with first-time homeowners, for example? Then there’s your target market. Do you want to work with people who are selling high-end homes? That’s who you’re talking to with your ads.
As a real estate agent, it’s completely normal to work with various buyers and sellers. When running advertising, though, it’s better to be as detailed as possible. Rather than targeting multiple sorts of people with one ad, you’ll have greater success if you run distinct advertisements for buyers and sellers.
Ask yourself the following questions as you narrow down the kind of people you want to target with your ads:
- What are the places where this audience spends the most time? (Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and other social media platforms)
- When they require assistance, where and what do they seek from professionals?
- What are their aches and pains?
- What catches their eye?
2. Figure out the goal for your ad campaign.
Finally, real estate ads are meant to help you expand your business and earn more money. However, before launching an ad campaign, you need to narrow your focus.
The following are the most prevalent forms of real estate ad campaigns:
- Generation of leads
- Promotion of the listing
- Brand recognition
There are many other options, but these are the most common objectives for Realtors or brokers who execute ad campaigns. To accurately measure and improve over time, you must first understand your ad’s purpose.
3. Create a marketing funnel for real estate.
A “funnel” is a marketing phrase that refers to the process of someone becoming a client after clicking on an online advertisement. Real estate marketing funnels can get complicated, but they don’t have to. What matters is that you have a strategy in place to follow up with every lead or customer you produce through your advertising campaigns.
A simple funnel can be made with simply a landing page and an email sequence. To generate fresh leads and send automated emails, you can start with a free email marketing platform like Mailchimp. Even leads who don’t find you online can benefit from this easy funnel. You can guide visitors to your website by handing out flyers or using placards, and then let your funnel do the rest.
Your funnel will grow as you continue to run successful real estate advertising. You may want to invest in CRM (customer relationship management) software with more in-depth features to follow up and market each potential lead.
4. Choose your real estate marketing strategy.
Not all forms of advertising are created equal. Take some time to investigate and test a few alternative approaches if you’ve never dealt with ads before. You’ll quickly discover that the techniques for running different sorts of marketing, such as print ads versus real estate Facebook ads, are vastly different.
It would help if you also thought about how you currently generate real estate leads. If you’re already getting consistent leads from Facebook, company referrals, or search engines, that’s probably the ideal place to start with your first real estate ad.
Continue reading to learn about the most effective online and conventional advertising tactics.
5. Make several different versions of your ad.
Regardless of the type of ad campaign you’re conducting, this tip is critical. When launching an ad campaign, it’s always a good idea to compare a few different ad types simultaneously. First, pause the poorly-performing variants after the campaign runs long enough to determine which variant is doing best. Then, continue trying new versions of the best-performing variant, collect more data, halt the ones that aren’t performing well, and repeat. This approach is known as A/B Testing, and if you’re not using it when running your real estate advertisements, you’re throwing money away.
A Successful Real Estate Ad’s Elements
If you’re unfamiliar with real estate advertising, each ad provides the following information:
Copy for the advertisement (i.e., text)
There must be at least one image or video (there are exceptions, like online text-based Pay Per Click – PPC – ads or advertorials)
A rallying cry (what you ask or tell the user to do: call, subscribe, request info, book a showing, etc.)
There are millions of articles, books, and videos on how to run a successful ad campaign. Still, when it comes down to it, all great ad campaigns include ads that grab attention, resonate, and motivate a particular audience to perform a specific action.
Your ad has a decent chance of attracting the attention of your target audience if you use the proper messaging. On the other hand, images can make or break the success of your advertisement. The picture superiority effect states that images are identified sooner, remembered faster, and longer than any other format.
Would this image catch your attention if you were going through a social network feed of content?
Most likely not. You’re unlikely to get many showings if you use this image in a Facebook real estate ad for one of your listings.
How keen do you think the same purchasers would be to click on this ad image, on the other hand?
Because it includes home qualities that purchasers want in homes, it is significantly more likely to attract potential buyers’ attention. Choosing the right image for your commercials is integral to launching a successful advertising campaign.
Do you wish to attract buyers by digitally staging the images of your listings? Here is where you should begin.
You must discover and address your audience’s problems to create an ad that will resonate with them. If you want to attract first-time homebuyers, for example, one of their problems may be that they don’t know how to prepare financially for homeownership. As a result, you may talk directly to their anxiety and offer them a clear, step-by-step strategy to help them develop credit so they can buy a home.
You may motivate your ad’s viewers to take action in various ways. One method is to provide a straightforward process for unlocking value. “Enter your email, and I’ll give you an estimate of how much your house is worth,” for example. In addition, setting a deadline, limiting the availability of an offer, or rewarding action can help boost motivation (note: only use these strategies in an honest way). As an example, “On June 5th, register here for a free first-time homebuyers class. There will be a total of 20 tickets available. Everyone who attends will be entered into a drawing for a $50 Visa gift card.”
6. Manage and publish your ad campaign
You’ve finally reached the point where you may fully activate your adverts! You’ll be miles ahead of your competition if you follow these instructions, and you’ll get more significant results with less effort and money.
You should regularly measure the cost per the desired result while your marketing campaign is running (or conversion – typically a subscriber, registrant, or appointment booked). Don’t worry about cost per view, click, or any other measure. Unless you’re running a brand campaign (which we don’t advocate, especially for individual agents or small brokerages looking for a quick return on their ad expenditure).
By Talitha Turkin
By IndoorMedia Marketing