Real Estate Marketing Guide
Advertising
As a real estate agent, you can expect to budget and plan out real estate ads across multiple channels. For your realtor ads, you will want to advertise both your listings and ads for your personal brand.
Your niche will dictate the words you use in your advertising and the focus of the ads will be catered to your target customers. For luxury listings you talk about the quality of the property, while if you were targeting something suburban for a family’s starter home, your ad might touch on how functional and spacious the floor plan is.
In your branding ads, talk about your territory and the top benefit you bring to your clients. In your listing ads, talk about the standout feature of the home, whether that’s an oversized kitchen island or covered deck for entertaining. What makes your listing stand out will be what makes your ad standout.
For platforms like Facebook, there are certain limitations to the type of targeting you can use to target housing ads.
Promoting your listings in the first 30 days is the most critical period of the home sale. When your prospects see but home and branding ads overtime, brand awareness will increase.
Facebook/Instagram Ads
Facebook ads can be effective to connect with your target demographic. While Facebook ad targeting for real estate professionals is highly regulated due to some previous discriminatory housing advertising practices by some advertisers, you can still reach a qualified audience through Facebook ads.
There’s many shapes and sizes of Facebook ads, which also include ads on Instagram. You can create one ad and optimize for both Facebook, and Instagram. On Facebook you can advertise in the newsfeed, or within Facebook messenger app. You create video or still image advertisements, targeting mobile, desktop or both.
The best part of Facebook advertising is you can precisely target your target audience on the social network platform that they spend the most time on. You can target ads based on education level, hobbies, location. Be careful, certain targeting is in violation of the Fair Housing Guidelines, such as targeting advertising by age, gender, race, or socio- economic level. You can also place Google display banner ads on specific websites of your choosing where you feel
Targeting restrictions
Facebook will no longer allow advertisers to target by the following:
Age: A default option of “18-65+” will be required.
Gender
Zip Code: Also known as micro-targeting based on neighborhoods
Facebook will also not create lookalike audiences targeting these same criteria.
Examples of Facebook ads
The just listed ads
The video ad – branding
Just listed video ad, just listed drone video ad
Content offering download ads – your buyer and seller guides, home worth estimation, schools report, etc.
Ads targeted at people thinking of selling (target their pain points) Ads targeted to future buyers – young couples, retirees, etc.
Ads with happy customers (SOLD sign, smiling!) Shows you’re successful
Carousel ads of a few of your listings
Retargeting – place ads for people that have visited listings on your website before.
Open house ads
Use carousel ad format for listings ads
Paid Instagram
Instagram ads are popular because you are targeting people on a social network that is only on a mobile app, so busy people on the go will view your promotion. Instagram ads are embedded with a feature to drive web traffic from the ad to your landing page, where you can post an agent intro video to quickly grab the prospect's attention. Consider your budget before you create your campaigns. All Instagram ads can be managed through Facebook Ads Manager. Targeting for ads can be setup just the same as for Facebook.
On Instagram, you can advertise in the newsfeed as well as stories. Users can swipe up to land on a landing page. An enticing content offer will be persuasive in getting people to click through, like a “free real estate buyer’s guide”.
Facebook Messenger
This is another Facebook ad option that lets you show your ads within the Facebook messenger app. You can setup the option to have prospects from your messenger ads message you directly on Facebook creating a new lead-generation opportunity.
Offline Advertising
Offline advertising options can be more pricey than digital, including magazine ads, park bench ads, local business or school sponsorships, and more. You can also use tools like direct mail to send your ad and listings directly to consumers in their homes.
Google Ads
Google Search ads allow you to promote your real estate business based on keywords searched for in Google. You can bid on keywords like “South Austin realtor”, or “South Austin home search”. When these are typed into Google, you’ll bid for top ad position. By appearing in ads at the top of searches, your brand will be highly visible.
You can offer a call to action in your ads like – “get a free home value estimate”. With Google ads, you track and measure clicks, but also you can measure how many users click through to your ad and take the time to complete a contact form.
First, set a monthly budget to invest in Google Search Paid per click. You can make a goal of clicks, conversions (lead generation),
Remarketing is another option with Google. By setting up audiences in Google ads of people that have already visited your website, you can target display ads to these people in an effort of getting them to return to your site. You can also set remarketing audiences based on interest and other sites viewed. Your banner ads will only be shown to people who are interested in real estate, so you create more qualified traffic because you know they are legitimately interested.
Because more than 90% of your web traffic won’t take action when they visit, you need to increase return rates. Retargeting allows you to do just that.
Video Ads
Video ads can be placed on Facebook and Instagram. You can also create video ads that will run on YouTube and the Google display network. The Google display network distributes your display ads to thousands of partner websites like popular blogs, local news websites, and more. YouTube video ads can run within other related or targeted videos or channels.