How We Generated 297 Realtor Leads Using Facebook Messenger Ads.

The Problem

Realtors have a tough job when it comes to marketing themselves. In most industries, you can easily separate yourself by pricing or unique features of your business. Certain business types, however (realtors included), are highly regulated and require different strategies for finding new clients.

With real estate, it’s 100% a relationship game. Nowadays homeowners can search Zillow or Trulia and find anything they want. They have more information than ever, which makes it even more difficult to stand out as a realtor.

When going through our discovery session with our realtor client, we realized that we need to be in front of prospective buyers early. If we were too late, our prospective clients were already in contact with a realtor and we’d miss out on the opportunity.

Once we identified the right timing to connect, we put together our strategy for a marketing campaign using targeted Facebook ads.

The Process

We started our campaign strategy by getting answers to three main questions:

1. How are we going to get the right people to see our client’s ads?
2. What can we offer our audience to get them to engage with us? (and give us an email, name, and phone number)?
3. How will we engage these new leads to schedule appointments?

Generating Traffic

Through our competitive research, we found that SEO was going to be out of the question. All the major brands like Realtor.com, Trulia, and Zillow owned the front page rankings.

With that in mind, we decided to move forward with a Facebook Ads campaign. We wanted to reach first-time home buyers and focused our targeting buyers looking for homes under $500k.

Converting Traffic to Leads

Here’s an example of one our Ads that we ran through an A/B test that performed the best. It’s simple, and wasn’t our personal favorite but ended up converting 20% higher than our other ad variations.

When someone clicked on our ad they received an automated Facebook message giving them a link to view homes under $500k. The link was a custom URL that led to a filtered MLS page on our client’s website.

If we stopped here, it would be up to the realtor to create their own follow-up process to keep on top of all their leads.

For this client, he wanted to automate the screening of initial leads, so we integrated his Facebook ad campaign with ManyChat, a Facebook bot service.

ManyChat allows us to set up automated follow-up sequences (shown below) that asked our leads questions to help qualify them.

 

Lead Nurturing

Once our leads ran through our messenger funnel, we classified them into groups:

A) Leads who are ready to buy.

B) Leads who are not ready to buy that we’ll add to our long-term nurture campaign.

C) Non-Leads / Tire Kickers or whatever you want to call them. They either clicked the ad by mistake, or have no interest in buying.

Those in groups A & C are pretty easy to deal with. The client contacts A’s right away with a phone call, and we remove the C’s from our list.

The majority of all our leads though fell into this “B” category. They weren’t ready to buy yet and had no interest in continuing in further dialogue.

These leads made it to our CRM, for which we used LionDesk a CRM for realtors.

Once in LionDesk, we attached them to a follow-up drip email series that lasted for 180 days.

Here’s a screenshot of how our initial outreach looks. We sent our first email immediately along with a phone call from our client. If they didn’t respond to our phone call, we sent a text message 2 hours later.

The Outcome

Our Campaign Stats

1. Total Ad Clicks: 1,393
2. Total Leads: 297
3. Conversion Rate: 21.3%
4. Cost Per Subscriber: $0.36

We ran this campaign for 4 months on a modest budget for our client (under $1k of ad-spend per month).

We ended with 1,393 Ad Clicks which resulted in 297 leads at an average conversion rate of 21.3%. Our cost per subscriber (in this case a subscriber gets added once they click on our ad) ended up to be $0.36.

We tested our messenger campaign against a traditional ad campaign that sends users to a landing page. We found that the messenger ads brought in leads for around 50% less cost.

Once a lead answered a few pre-qualification questions they were more likely to schedule a call.

In Summary

We were able to learn a lot in our realtor campaigns. The two most important takeaways were to have a long-term follow-up strategy in place and to follow up with hot leads immediately. There’s no brand loyalty in real estate so you need to be aggressive with leads who show interest.

Are you looking to help drive more traffic & leads for your business? Check out our services.