This is part two of our guide to social media strategy, content, advertising and more. Part one of our guide, which covers social media strategy to optimise engagement can be found here. 

Part two will cover social media advertising strategies to fill your pipeline for the New Year and beyond.

The Strategy:

The average person spends 5.5 hours a day looking at their phone and at this time of year, with more free time, our hours of screen time per day tends to increase. This means that your potential vendors, buyers and landlords for 2022 are more likely to be exposed to your advertising at this time of the year.

It pays to have developed a social media advertising strategy that considers first your objectives, then your content and your budget.

Objectives:

Agents have been making the switch to largely online measures for prospecting both potential sellers and buyers over the past two years, and many have realised quickly that a holistic advertising strategy should be functioning on a higher level than simple post boosting.

Before you start any advertising on your social media platforms you need to consider your objectives – what exactly do you want the end result of your advertising to be?

We see a number of similar objectives from real estate agents:

• To promote a listing

• To generate selling leads

• To build your general database of contacts

• To grow your social media following

Our advice is to think even more deeply about your objectives. Ask yourself, ‘what measures will I use to determine whether my ad has been successful?’ 

If you want to promote a new listing, will you consider your ad successful if your property has been seen by X number of people or only if you’ve received X number of enquiries on the property? Once you know what end result you’re aiming for you can determine your content and your budget much more efficiently.

Content: 

You’ve worked out your objective, now it’s time to consider your content. First things first, do you want to run a social media ad or a social media campaign?

There is a difference.

A social media ad is a stand alone promotion with one distinct objective and audience. A social media campaign is made of multiple individual ads that aim to promote a listing or service in a variety of ways. 

Today, we’ll consider what a social media campaign may look like if your objective is to promote a listing. Let’s say more specifically that you’d like your property to be seen by 5,000+ users on social media and that you’d like to receive 10 enquiries through your campaign. 

We’ll look at three potential ads you can run throughout the listing’s time on market to achieve these results:

• Ad One –

Present your property as a ‘sneak peek’ listing to social media users in the local area. You can use your chosen social media platforms’ demographic targeting to ensure you’re promoting your listing specifically to users interested in property. Set this up to reach as many people in your area as possible to start with! *HINT: You’ll want to focus as much as possible on the exclusivity of this information, any of the users who see this ad on their social media pages should know that they are some of the first to see the listing.

• Ad Two –

Create a more defined audience of users looking for similar properties and retarget an engaged audience from your original ‘Sneak Peek’ ad. Give users enough detail to spark interest in the property, but not so much that they won’t feel the need to enquire for more information. In this ad you’ll want to give targeted users the opportunity to enquire directly through the ad about the property. A social media lead form is a great way to set this up as users won’t have to leave their chosen social platform to submit their details for more information.

• Ad Three –

Once your property has sold, you can take your campaign full circle and focus on the sales story. Let social media users know the most important details of your sales result – Did you achieve a record sale or a stand out time on market? These are the perfect stats to promote! If you take your campaign full circle, you can generate selling leads as well as promoting your listing, with a call to action that prompts similar interested sellers to learn more about your result or let them know what buyers in their area are looking for. 

It’s important to note here, that while you’ll still want to keep an overarching objective for your entire social media campaign, (in this case, promoting your listing) the way you measure your success may differ slightly for each single ad you create.

Social media gives you the freedom not just to promote your listings, but to promote yourself and your services as an agent. Our downloadable advertising guide offers 3 free ad formats you can run with 3 different objectives in mind.

The Budget:

You’ll have your own external considerations when it comes to setting a budget for your social media advertising, but your optimal budget will also be affected by internal factors like your objective and whether you decide to run a single ad or a campaign.

A campaign tends to run over a longer period of time and you’ll want different budgets for each ad in the campaign you run. You’ll need a higher budget to run a campaign and you’ll need to determine which ads are more important to your end result before splitting the budget between them.

If you’re working with a smaller budget or have rarely used social media ads, consider starting by trialing single ads rather than a full campaign. You can then develop a larger campaign based on what single ads you notice are consistently achieving the results you want! This is a far more effective use of your budget and you’ll be better able to determine what cost per result you should expect to see.

You’ll quickly learn what ad objectives will allow you to stretch a smaller budget further. For example, 5,000+ eyes on your property can generally be achieved with a smaller budget, while direct enquiries on an ad tend to cost more per conversion so you’ll want a larger budget.

Want to prioritise property enquiries? In the above example of a property campaign, to achieve more enquiries split your budget 70/30 with more budget towards your second ad and less towards your initial sneak peek ad. 

In need of ideas before you start your social media advertising? Download our 3 free ad formats and a glossary of need-to-know Facebook advertising terms.