Grow Your Business With Facebook Ads For Real Estate Investors

Have you been considering using Facebook to find motivated seller leads for your real estate investing business, but you’re not sure how Facebook Ads for real estate investors work? 

In today’s ever-growing competitive real estate market, it’s becoming more and more important to reach your prospects where they are (Hint: They’re almost all online).

Facebook is becoming one of the most popular marketing channels for investors. 

It is one of the best platforms to build your brand in your local market, and generate a steady stream of motivated seller leads each and every month.

And Facebook Ads have made it even easier to capture leads. 

In this post, we’re  going to show you the top five reasons why you should be using Facebook Ads to grow your real estate investing business.

Our Marketing Director, Josh Arras, covers this topic in a training video we released on our YouTube channel.  

You can check out the video below. (NOTE: If you want to be notified every time we release a new video on our channel make sure you subscribe, so you don’t miss out!)

Both in the video and this post you will learn why Facebook is still one of the best kept secrets to help you grow your real estate investing business.

So we started seeing this question come up quite a bit in our private members only Facebook group. (If you're an active REI BlackBook member you can join the community here)

Our members wanted to know how to leverage Facebook, specifically Facebook Ads, to help them grow their business. 

Now for most real estate investors, the lifeblood of your business is your ability to generate motivated seller leads. And really your ability to generate awareness in general for your business, and the service that you offer to your marketplace. 

Facebook Ads is one of the best ways to do this. Facebook Ads aren’t necessarily a substitute for the marketing channels that you're currently doing either.

Whether it’s more traditional channels like direct mail or bandit signs, maybe you're doing some radio ads, or maybe you're doing some Google ads. Facebook Ads are a great bolt on strategy to help you really amplify your message. They help build awareness and know, like, and trust in your community. 

The Top Five Reasons You Should Use Facebook Ads For Real Estate Investors To Grow Your Business

So with that said, let's jump into the top five reasons why you should be using Facebook Ads to grow your business. 

1. Build Know, Like, & Trust

Number one, Facebook Ads allow you to build know, like, and trust while also generating leads. 

Facebook Ads give you the ability to really amplify your brand awareness. 

Now, we know a lot of people talk about branding and how brand isn't important. We're not necessarily saying we want to drive brand awareness. While that is a healthy side effect of running Facebook Ads, it's not the main strategy.

The main goal of running Facebook Ads is to help you generate motivated seller leads. It also works on the disposition side of your business, helping you sell properties as well. In this post we’re going to focus on seller leads for right now. 

Facebook Ads give you the ability to tell a story unlike other traditional marketing channels like direct mail, or even pay-per-click. With Facebook Ads, you can run video ads, you can run standard static image ads with copy and text, and you can talk about the service that you actually offer. 

You can build relationships. You can build that know, like, and trust over time with your marketplace. 

What this does, is it allows you to build what we call top of mind awareness. So not everybody that you're getting in front of is going to be in the market. Which means they're not going to be ready to sell their house right away.

It might be 12 months, 18 months, two years. Maybe they're actually never going to be “in the market”, but they might know somebody that is. 

At that point in time, are you top of mind? 

Are people thinking of you, are people thinking of your company or your brand?

 If not, it's probably because you're not putting your message out into the community, out into the marketplace enough. 

Most real estate investors and realtors and small businesses in general, think they need to run radio ads, and billboard ads and buy ads on bus stops, or buy TV commercials. 

All of this is very, very expensive. 

And they're doing this because they want to create top of mind awareness. 

The problem with those traditional marketing channels are that number one, they're super expensive. And number two, you don't get a lot of insight. If you were to go buy a billboard today, and you were going to say, I want to buy a billboard on the highway, going West.

What the company is going to tell you is how many cars drive by that billboard every single day. 

What that company is not going to be able to tell you is how many people actually stop and read that billboard. 

Because let's say if 10,000 cars drive past that billboard every single day, maybe only a few hundred actually look at it. And of those few hundred, maybe only a couple actually read it. 

2. Quick Results & Easy To Track 

And that brings us to reason number two, why you should be using Facebook Ads. Which is the data and insights that you get while running ads. 

So if you were to go run a traditional, just static image ad, which would be kind of the same as a billboard or an ad you would run on the side of a bus or at a bus stop. It's just a static image that says what your company does.

It might say we buy houses. It might say, sell your house fast. If you're to run that on Facebook, you're going to see exactly how many people saw it. 

So you're going to get insight on your reach, but you're also going to be able to see how many people actually clicked on that ad. You’ll get to see how many people visited your website and how many people opened your lead form.  

So you get really actionable advice and you can act fast. 

You'll know if it's going to be a successful campaign after two to four weeks. And if it's not going to be a successful campaign, you can shut it off and you can adjust on the fly.

Typically if you take out billboard ads, or ads on a bus stop, or TV or radio, many times you're locked in for a number of months, if not years. And it's really difficult to change the ad creative, to change the ad copy, to change the message. 

With Facebook Ads, you can literally shut your ad off and within five minutes, create a new ad with a simple tweak. Then you can see how that simple tweak either positively or negatively affects the results of your campaign.

No other marketing channel is going to give you these insights and the ability to adjust your campaign on the fly. And because you can get these ads out so quickly, you can start generating leads right away. 

We held a Facebook Ads workshop last year at our headquarters at REI BlackBook. 

One of the attendees of the workshop followed our exact ad strategy, used our exact ad template, and posted his ad. And within a week generated a lead that turned into a contract. He was able to buy that house and fix and flip it.

This lead came within one week of publishing his ad, and the total ad spend to get that property under contract was $140. 

3. Start Small & Scale Up From There

That brings us to reason number three that you should be running Facebook Ads to grow your business. Which is you can start small and scale up as you have success. 

You can get started running Facebook Ads with as little as $5 a day.

It can be argued that every real estate investor should be running a video ad of some sort and spend at least five to $10 a day just to build an engaged audience. 

For as little as $150 to $300 a month, you can get your video in front of thousands of homeowners in your marketplace. 

Thousands of people will actually watch your video. And going back to the data and insights that you get with Facebook, you can actually see how long somebody watches your video. 

Are they watching it 50% of the way through? Are they watching it 75% of the way through? You can actually see if people watch it over 95% of the way through. 

You don't get that kind of data when you're running traditional TV commercials or radio ads. As soon as you start to see success, whether success for you is engagement, you're seeing people actually watch your videos, take action, click on links, and you're generating leads. Or you start generating leads that turn into contracts and revenue for your business. 

You can reinvest some of that revenue into your ads. Now, instead of spending $300 a month, maybe you're spending a thousand or $2,000 a month. 

Again, you can start small and you can scale up from there. 

4. Build Engaged Audiences 

Which brings us to reason number four. Which is the ability to build an engaged audience and retarget them with relevant offers. 

What we mean by that is, if you're running a low dollar video view ad, so you're saying, “Hey, Facebook, I want to put this video in front of people in this marketplace for $10 a day.” So you're spending roughly $300 a month to do that.

You can then say, “Hey, Facebook. I want to show this ad that says, we buy houses, get a cash offer, to people that have watched at least 75% of my video.” 

If somebody is willing to stop scrolling on Facebook, watch a 90 second video of somebody talking about why you should sell your house to an investor, or how real estate investors make offers, or how to sell your house as is, whatever that message on the video is, you can then say, “Hey, Facebook, I want to see people that watched this video, and I want to serve them this ad that is directly related to the video that they watched.”

So you can now say, we buy inherited houses. Or we buy houses as is, get your cash offer. And now, instead of sending this direct ask ad out to your entire marketplace, because these are people that might be in the market. Or the people seeing the ad might be out of market, meaning they have no interest in selling a piece of real estate. You can ensure that your ad only gets in front of people that are “pre-qualified” because they've already watched your video. 

Many people refer to this as an invisible list. It's just a list of people that have engaged with your company in some form or fashion. 

That might mean watching a video of yours on Facebook. It might mean visiting your company's website. It could mean visiting a specific page on your website. 

As an example, maybe they visit the page where they can get a cash offer on your property. You know that person is somewhat qualified because they've taken some sort of an action. This then gives you the ability to send highly relevant ads and highly relevant messages to a very small targeted audience. 

Which means you don't have to spend a massive amount of money to get your ad in front of the right people.

5. Highly Customizable & Engaging

Now onto the fifth reason why you should be running Facebook Ads for real estate investors to grow your business. Reason number five is that you have a ton of different options. 

It's completely customizable. 

You can run video ads, you can run static image ads. You can run something that's called lead ads, which is basically the person, your prospect or lead, never has to actually leave Facebook.

They can watch a video of yours. Or they can read an ad of yours. They may click a button and say, yes, I'm interested. And Facebook actually sends you their contact information, their name, their email, their phone number, and it will go directly into your REI BlackBook account because we have a direct integration with Facebook Lead Ads.

So it's very easy to test different ads against each other. 

You could say, “Hey, do my videos work better or do my static image ads work better?”. 

Does it work better if I have really long copy? Meaning I've got an ad that's this long and very descriptive. Or does it work better if I just have a few lines of copy and I'm very direct and to the point? 

And this is going to be different for you, depending on what market you're in, depending on what type of audience you're going after. But we promise you no matter who you're trying to target, they are on Facebook, and it's your job to put your message in front of them in a way that resonates and builds know, like, and trust.

So maybe today they're not ready to sell their house. 

Maybe they never have a house that they're going to be ready to sell, but they see your videos. 

They see your ads, they see your images and they see it frequently enough that if somebody in their family or one of their friends has to sell their house, you're now getting referrals from a Facebook ad. 

So Facebook Ads can help you indirectly generate motivated seller leads, because you're building that know, like, and trust with people in your community. 

If you'd like to learn how to run your first Facebook ad to help you generate motivated seller leads, we wrote a guide to show you how to do it step by step. It’s The Real Estate Investor’s Guide To Generating Motivated Seller Leads, and you can check it out here. 

Facebook Ads for real estate investors can help you build a profitable campaign that’s designed to generate a steady flow of motivated seller leads, while building your brand authority in your local market.