How do I get a better return on investment for my Facebook property advertising? It’s a question real estate agents all over Australia and New Zealand are asking, but marketing guides often don’t answer this question accurately for all regions. The real question is how should you run your ad campaigns for your farming area?

We’ve looked at some of the content you can use to generate engagement and leads and some easy ways to increase your page followers before, but we wanted to dive deeper with the help of the iRealty Pro team.

We sat down with two of our iRealty Pro Account Managers, Brydee Woolston and Bella Devencorn, who run advertising for clients across rural, regional and urban areas to get their insights on the differences in advertising for each area.

Here’s what they had to say.

1. You’re running hundreds of campaigns every month for real estate agents across Australia and New Zealand. Can you tell us some of the regions you’ve targeted in your advertising campaigns?

BW: We really are all over the map. In the last month alone I’ve run lead campaigns for inner-city apartments in both Brisbane and Sydney, but also farms in The Atherton Tablelands and in the Western Downs region.  

BD: Yeah, no two days are ever the same in terms of the campaigns we’re running. We’ll go from the Central Coast, NSW to Auckland, NZ to Broome, WA.

2. How much would you say the location of a property you’re running an ad campaign for effects how you set it up?

BW: It’s definitely something we consider when we set up a campaign. Obviously there are a lot of factors you’re thinking about… What’s the property type? The price range etc. All of these things make a difference to whom we target, to our advertising copy, even to the images we use in the ad. Property location is a big part of that process – narrowing down who we should be targeting.

BD: Yeah, small things like is this region more popular with investors or homeowners? But, even beyond that, location can affect decisions around how long we’ll run a campaign for or whether we want to expand or narrow the targeting radius around the property location we’re targeting.

BW: That I would say is the biggest impact. How widely we target in the region.

3. So the location of the property has quite an impact on who you choose to target when you run ads. Can you explain that in more detail for me?

BW: Well, when we’re talking about the ‘radius’ we’re targeting that’s exactly how it sounds. Meta advertising, and the iRealty Social ads builder both give you the option to target by a specific suburb or property address, and then you can target a certain radius around that spot. 

We change how wide we make that radius depending on where the property is. So if I’m running an ad for an Inner-Sydney apartment I’m only going to go maybe 5 miles around the property address. That’s because the population is larger in those areas – you don’t have to target a wider radius because the audience within that 5 miles is already large enough. If I’m running an ad in somewhere like Chinchilla, a less populated region, we’ll extend our radius to reach more people.  

There’s differences in how we target when we’re trying to reach interstate buyers, of course, but changes in radius like that are something we need to consider in all of our ad campaigns.

BD: It seems small, but it makes a big difference to the success of an ad campaign. That would be one of the biggest pieces of advice I would give to agents running their own ad campaigns. Test out a few different radius’ and see what works the best for you, particularly if you’re in a less populated region.

4. Are there advantages to advertising in certain regions?

BW: I think one of the biggest things I noticed straight away as an Account Manager, was that smaller budgets seem to stretch further in rural areas. A lot of people assume that advertising in rural areas would be a disadvantage because there are potentially less people you can reach, but on the flipside of that there’s often less competition for ad space so you get more bang for your buck. 

I’m averaging a cost per lead of around $5 to $8 for farms in Mareeba and then about $10 to $14 in inner-city Brisbane. We’re still getting plenty of leads for both, but you often have to pay that little bit more to beat out the competition in an inner-city area.

BD: That’s true, but I think once you know how to adjust your campaigns depending on your area, you’re going to have success no matter what you do so the advantages and disadvantages of the region won’t matter too much. 

BW: Yeah, completely agree. You adjust your campaigns to take advantage of the differences. Not just the radius, which I know we’ve talked about a fair bit, but you can get a lot more specific with your targeting when you really know the area. If you’re selling a riverfront property in Brisbane you can really narrow down your audience to find people interested in luxury property (and people who can afford it, of course)! Or, you can narrow down based on industry, like, is mining big in the region – target within that profession.

5. We’ve talked a lot about inner-city and farming areas. What about more coastal regions?

BW: I love advertising in those regions. It’s always a lot of fun! I think a lot of the same lessons apply in who you’re targeting. Agents know their region well so my advice is not to overthink it – you know the types of buyers you get in your area, I’d say make a list of the kinds of people already enquiring on your properties or who you see at open homes and see what targeting options Meta has that matches up with your list.

You’d be surprised at how specific you can get with it. There’s big audiences for topics like holiday homes, people looking for sea changes. A lot of our coastal clients in places like the NSW Central Coast or the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast in QLD or in Broome in WA have had great success with targeting a higher age range and looking specifically for retirees.

BD: Yeah, and how wide you want to make your audience, the budget you put on your ad is going to depend on population figures. You probably won’t want to go as wide in the Central Coast as you would in somewhere like Orange. 

That kind of applies to all, not just coastal regions.

The good thing is, we’ve already collected a lot of this targeting information and the iRealty system has audience presets we can use…so instead of putting in every piece of detailed targeting you can think of you can just select that you want your ad to go to our coastal audience preset and it’s automatically done for you.

We loved chatting with the Pro team and getting their insights on how property location changes the decisions they make when setting up social media ads. Don’t forget to download our ultimate Facebook advertising guide and start running campaigns for yourself.