For those of you that know me, you know I’ve been a huge advocate of using Facebook ads to turbocharge your real estate investing business, especially as of late.
There are only a few things that work really well to get deeply discounted properties (mailing, cold calling, and online ads).
Because EVERYONE is mailing the cost per acquisition for mailers has gone through the roof.
Cold calling works great, but it is something that most investors won’t do.
This is where real estate investor lead generation with Facebook ads fit in: they are just as easy to scale as mailers and don’t require you to pound the phone all day. Unlike other forms of marketing, Facebook ads are extremely predictable.
When you mail or cold call, there is a lot of variability on a month to month basis in terms of cost per lead. When it comes to Facebook, you know within a very narrow window what your cost per lead is.
Another major benefit of Facebook ads is that they can also be turned up at a moment’s notice.
So when you need more leads you can ramp up your campaigns, and vice versa.
Facebook Ads for Real Estate: The Why and How of Getting (REAL) Leads
Real Estate Investor Lead Generation with Facebook: Making Money on Facebook Leads
Now that we know the benefits of Facebook Ads, let’s talk about the execution.
The Targeting:
For real estate investor lead generation it is crucial that if you are paying to show your ads, that you are showing the right people. One of the main reasons why Facebook is such an incredible tool and why Facebook is worth so much money as a company is that Facebook knows everything about you.
They know your age, whether you are a homeowner, what you like(and don’t like), and much more. And with this information, you can put your ads in front of only the people who are most likely to want to sell to an investor.
There are two ways to achieve this:
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The Ad Itself:
One important thing to understand about Facebook ads is that you are interrupting what someone is currently doing.
They didn’t come on Facebook to see an ad. They came to see what their friends were up to.
So from a high level, it is critical that your ad stands out, or else it won’t even get noticed.
There are a few important things to make sure your ad stands out.
- The image – this is the most important part of your ad, believe it or not. The picture is what “stops” the person from scrolling. If you can’t stop them from scrolling, they won’t read the ad and you are dead in the water.
- The wording – once the person “stopped” because of the image that you used, the next thing you need to master is the “copy” or the wording of your ad. Where most people make a mistake is that they write extremely “professional” ads. By professional I mean boring. Again, users aren’t going on Facebook to see ads and they will skip over them if it isn’t interesting. You need to tell a “story” more than list out the benefits of working with you. One thing to start doing immediately is to start reading the Facebook ads in your current news feed and look at how the good ones are written. Then copy the same style.
- Lead capture: how you capture your leads also makes a big difference. It is great for you to have a great image and great copy but if they are dropped to a website that doesn’t convert, it will all be for nothing. I’ve tried various sites and bar none carrot is the best performer. If you are spending significant money on Facebook ads, you NEED a Carrot site. The price is a drop in the bucket compared to what the ads cost and you will get more leads per dollar spent. One thing to note is that I used to have a non-carrot site that looked really pretty that did not convert. I see many people making this same mistake. Don’t repeat this mistake.
You are probably thinking “I know that I need a great image and great copy” but how do I know what to do on Day 1?
Can’t you just give me what is working?
I have good news and bad news on this question.
The good news is that anyone can figure it out fairly easily. The bad news is that it takes a little bit of work.
The reason that I can’t just give you what is working for me is that what is working on Facebook changes over time. One of the drawbacks of Facebook ads is that you have to manage them. An ad that was working a month ago, might now work anymore.
The reason for this is what Facebook calls the “relevance score” The relevancy score is determined by how people respond to your ad. If you are serving up content that Facebook users find annoying, they will hide it.
Because Facebook makes its money by users being on Facebook all day every day, they don’t want to serve ads that are annoying to the users. So, what happens is that if everyone is hiding your ad, Facebook will show it less and you will pay a lot more per lead and eventually the ad won’t work at all.
The good news is that it is really easy to figure out what is working with just a small amount of money using a concept called “split testing”
Split testing is the process of comparing two ads with one different variable. For example two ads with the same wording but with different pictures. Or, leaving out a call-to-action:
You would run these ads together and see which one performs better and then spend more on the winner.
The more that you split test Facebook ads, the better your cost per lead will be. This may sound like a lot of work, but if you are going to run Facebook ads, you need to do this or someone else needs to do this for you.
When someone tells me that Facebook ads don’t work, I know it is either because they have not gone through the process of split testing OR they don’t know how to properly monetize the leads(which is going to be my last point related to facebook ads).
How to Get your Online Real Estate Marketing to Play Nice With your Offline Marketing Efforts
Monetizing Leads
If you are going to spend the time and money to run Facebook ads, you need to maximize the return on your investment. MOST people aren’t doing this. There are three components to making money on Facebook Leads: converting leads into appointments, converting appointments into deals and maximizing your ROI on Leads
- Converting leads into appointments: you need to follow up with these leads as soon as possible and multiple times (I recommend calling/texting and emailing every day for the first 10 days). You also need a good CRM (I use Follow Up Boss) and a really good email sequence (mine was written by a good copywriter). It is also very important to know what to say when making these calls. My team has a free weekly training on how to turn these exact leads into appointments. To get free access go to www.oceancityweeklytraining.com and sign up for the Wednesday at 11 am free class. All of these follow up systems are used just to get the appointment (which is half the battle)
- Converting appointments into deals: Once you have the appointment, you need to convert it. Motivated sellers are NOT MOTIVATED BY MONEY so what you say and do on the appointments matters, big time. You need to say and do the right things when you get sellers face to face. To learn more about how to do that check out my free Tuesday at 10 am training at www.oceancityweeklytraining.com.
- Maximizing ROI on Leads
Real Estate Investor Lead Generation with Facebook: You Have To Be Able To Maximize Every Lead That Comes In
Where most people go wrong here is that they only make money 1 way on their leads and because of that they have a hard time getting a great ROI on their money. You NEED to be able to make money in multiple ways or else you will constantly battle for profitability. For comparison purposes, I get over 12x return on my money spent on Facebook.
Examples of how to maximize every lead include:
- Retail leads – when the seller wants too much money for the house, you list the property or find an agent that can list it
- Wholesaling – for the deals that you don’t want or can’t fund
- Fix and flipping – for your high-profit deals
- Buy and hold great rental properties for long-term wealth
If you aren’t utilizing the above 4 strategies it is going to be hard to compete with someone (like me) who can.
Implementing all 4 of these strategies is not difficult, you just have to know how to do it.
To learn all of my strategies on how to maximize leads go to www.realestateinvestingiseasy.com for a full training session on this exact topic.