- Have a strong presence where consumers search: Google
- Use your Google business profile to make your Google Ads more effective
- Take advantage of advanced targeting capabilities on social media sites, like Facebook
- Anticipate changes in consumer behavior to stay ahead of the competition
- Leverage the growing reach of videos and virtual home tours in your advertisements
Do you feel like your marketing is getting stale? Or that your real estate ads aren’t reaching enough people? If either is true, it’s time to breathe a little life into your marketing. These five tactics will make your real estate ads more engaging, expand their delivery to even more people in your target areas, and, generate more, higher-quality leads.
5 Clever Ways to Boost Your Real Estate Ads
1. Have a strong presence where consumers search: Google
The first thing you need to do is understand that being everywhere isn’t as important as being in the right place. It would be pointless for you to spend time on TripAdvisor since buyers and sellers don’t go there to find a real estate agent. That’s a bit of an extreme example, but it may surprise you to learn that it’s also not worth too much of your time to build up your presence on sites like Yelp or Bing.
That’s because a majority of serious homebuyers and sellers looking for agents start in one place: Google.
It simply dominates all other sites as the go-to search engine for Americans. No matter whether someone received your marketing postcard or saw your real estate ad on Facebook, they’ll turn to Google to search for your name and read your credentials. When they do, you need to have a presence there, otherwise your risk losing out on a client you could have otherwise had. Your Google business profile can be filled with positive reviews and plenty of information about your business—website, listings, photos, reviews, and thought leadership content—so consumers have everything they need to make an informed hiring decision.
Remember: The average consumer needs to read 10 reviews before they feel as though they can trust your business. If your Google business profile is managed properly, it’ll be the first and last stop for consumers before they reach out to you—which they can also do directly from your profile.
2. Use your Google business profile to make your Google Ads more effective
Linking your Google business profile with your Google Ads account can actually help improve the performance of your real estate ads and generate quality leads. Once these accounts are connected, you can enable a setting called the location extension. This grabs your verified business address from your Google profile and appends it to your Google Ads.
This simple step is the only way to make your ads eligible for placement in Google Maps. Ads appear in Maps when people use search terms like “real estate agents in [city]” or “real estate agents near me.” This widens your reach and gives you an edge over competitors who haven’t taken this step.
The location extension also helps boost your ad in non-Maps search results. That’s because Google will give preference to ads that contain more information since searchers will find them to be more helpful. It’s a win-win situation. Google’s goal is to give its users the best possible experience so they return to the platform. You can trust that when Google does serve your ad, it will be highly relevant to the search query and more likely to get engagement (i.e. clicks).
Learn how to enable the location extension and what other benefits it provides.
3. Take advantage of advanced targeting capabilities on social media sites, like Facebook
Facebook is an excellent platform for building brand awareness with your target audience. You can get very granular with Facebook’s ad targeting, reaching people who are newly married and meet a certain income threshold, for example. But there are two other valuable audiences you should be targeting as well.
The custom audience
Facebook helps you get your real estate ads in front of people you already know. You just upload email addresses or phone numbers, and the system will match them to its user base.
There are multiple benefits in spending money on the people who already know you. First, it reminds them that you’re an active, successful real estate agent. This keeps you top of mind when they or a friend are ready to buy or sell. Second, the people you know are more likely to share your ad, extending its reach organically to their network of family and friends. Third, it’s a tactic for nurturing the audience that knows only a little about you (like cool leads or people you spoke with at an open house). The repetition of seeing your brand helps build awareness and trust.
The lookalike audience
After you upload a custom audience to Facebook, you can create a lookalike audience. Facebook will take common characteristics of your custom audience and find other users in its database who are similar. This helps you find new people who are likely to be interested in your real estate services.
4. Anticipate changes in consumer behavior to stay ahead of the competition
Because of the pandemic, many consumers are driving more than they ever had before. And savvy agents are taking advantage of this opportunity to advertise to would-be homebuyers and sellers on the road.
Waze reports that its 30 million monthly active users in the U.S. spend an average of 438 minutes per month in the Waze app. This platform is a clever place to advertise because your ad will be served to people who are driving nearby. That means they either live in the area, work close by or have another good reason to be in the neighborhood. It’s hyper-local advertising at its finest.
Waze real estate ads are the digital equivalent to a yard sign, except they can also reach people who are blocks away from the listing.
They are great for building awareness of a local listing but are most impactful during an open house. An event with specific start and end times adds urgency and makes people more likely to take action. Drivers simply tap the ad to be redirected to the property.
The takeaway here is this: You can (and should!) leverage Waze now, but this phenomena is also an excellent example of the larger reason to stay ahead of consumer trends. Especially now, consumer actions are changing their behavoir with relative frequency. So, stay on top of the news and get creative in your advertising. For example, in the coming winter months, with more people indoors, you might want to boost your advertising on entertainment social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
5. Leverage the growing reach of videos and virtual home tours in your advertisements
Pictures might be worth a thousand words, but they don’t always tell an engaging story. Videos, on the other hand, are not only better for showing off your new listing, they reveal your personality and make it easier for viewers to connect with you. Authenticity was the marketing buzzword for a while, but it still holds true. Showing others who you are will help them feel comfortable with you (an otherwise stranger) and more inclined to, at the very least, consider working with you.
Additionally, because of the pandemic, many would-be buyers and sellers are becoming more choosy when it comes to attending open houses, opting only to go to the properties they believe they could make an offer on. Because of that, many of them are looking for video tours of the property, which offer more detail than pictures. So, if you’re going to offer video tours on your listings, why keep them relegated to just the listing page? Why not get more out of your work?
Instagram is the best platform for real estate video ads because the network was built around engaging media. In fact, posts with videos get 38% more engagement than those with static images. Plus, the advanced targeting you use for your Facebook ads—custom and lookalike audiences—can be also applied to Instagram since they are powered by the same ads management tool.
How Homesnap Can Help
Homesnap offers real estate agents a suite of marketing tools across the Internet’s most powerful advertising networks. Homesnap Pro Ads creates, publishes and optimizes your listing ads on Facebook, Google, Instagram and Waze. We’ll also manage your ads’ geographical and advanced targeting, including custom and lookalike audiences.
Homesnap Pro+ is the only tool that will build and manage your Google business profile, as well as help you generate new, positive reviews on a regular basis. It will also link your Google business profile with any Google Ads that you run through Homesnap Pro Ads to enable the location extension and push your marketing further.