It is true what they say in real estate, listers are lasters! You need a healthy listing inventory and a pipeline filled with good home seller leads to have a sustainable business as a real estate agent.
Fact is however: most agents are struggling to keep their listing pipeline filled.
In this case study we’re going to show you exactly how we generated 22 home seller leads in 2 days spending just $25 on Facebook ads!
And we’re going to give you the EXACT ad copy we used to get this result.
Before we go into the details, here’s the proof…
Facebook Ad Manager Screenshot – Click to Enlarge
Now here’s how we did it and how you can do it as well
1. Targeting
Since we were looking to generate home seller leads in our area, we decided to use Facebook as our ad platform, because of the very detailed targeting options available to marketers.
We defined our ideal audience using following criteria:
- Geographic location: in this case we used a radius of 10 miles around the office of our customer. In other cases we have used zip code targeting, which works just as well.
- Demographics: we’re looking for home seller leads, so we’re targeting homeowners
Then we took it one step further and narrowed down the audience using some extra criteria like length of residence to exclude recent movers, just to make sure we target people who are more likely to plan a move in the not so distant future. While generating leads can be a lot of fun in itself, our customers are ultimately looking for listings and closing, meaning paychecks.
In this case we ended up with a targeted audience of 17,000 home owners on Facebook, all highly motivated to click our ads (at least that is what we like to think).
Size matters!
When you’re targeting people who have never heard from you and don’t know you or your brand, 17,000 audience size is way too little to run a successful campaign! However we understand the local character of real estate so we do it anyway. This case study shows not only that it can be done, but also shows the stellar ROI we achieved.
Here’s what a similar audience setup looks like in Facebook:
2. Bait
We’re looking for leads, meaning we’re looking for contact details. What is of so much interest to a random home owner that he or she is willing to give an email address and even a phone number in exchange for this piece of information? What is the one question every homeowner (that is thinking of moving in the near future) would like to see answered?
WHAT'S MY HOME WORTH?
That’s it, that is our lead bait, our lead magnet, irresistible to every home owner no matter what the market, good or bad, up or down.
So all that is left to do is to craft an ad answering this question and put it in front of our ideal customer.
A good ad for Facebook marketing needs following elements:
- a stunning visual
- a grappling headline
- strong ad copy touching a pain point or answering a question
- an irresistible call to action
- some element of gain, logic or fear works well, and even better if you add some scarcity in the mix
Ads on Facebook are the modern day version of billboards next to a highway, with that difference that they are only shown to your ideal customer and that you only have to pay if someone actually pulls over and calls the number on the billboard!
3. The Landing Page
So we’re spending money on ads, paying for every click. Now we need a good place to send those people who couldn’t resist the urge of clicking our ad.
We need a fantastic landing page that does one thing, and does it well: convert visitors into home seller leads!
We spent thousands of dollars on ads to fine tune our ad copy and the landing page to finally arrive at the ultimate home seller lead machine.
Here’s what our landing page looks like:
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So this looks like your average home valuation out of the box landing page, but it is not. Yes, there’s the stunning video background, the call out to our target audience (“ATTENTION HOME OWNERS”), the repeat of the headline of our ad and some key copy, but that’s not all! There are some subtle elements used on this page that have a big influence on the ROI.
Listen to Shane Melaugh from Thrive Themes explain it in this video and you’ll know what I’m talking about…
Pretty cool right? So yes, it’s not just one landing page, but an entire series. A sales funnel for home seller leads.
RESULTS
As demonstrated in the picture above, we ran the campaign for 48 hours and spent $25,45 in total. This gave us 15 partial leads and 7 full leads!
Partial lead being someone who entered their address but weren’t ready to enter their contact details to get the report. While we don’t have the contact info we still can market to those leads and try to convert them into customers. We know the address so we can send them something in the mail or we can go to the door. It’s also possible to do a reverse search for the phone number and even email address using a service like Spokeo or Cole’s Realty Resource. And we can re-target them online! Our landing pages tag every visitor so we can target them later, across different channels, with a highly targeted message to nurture them into customers on autopilot.
Full leads being someone who provided their contact info and received a home valuation report.
To be complete, out of these 7 leads, 3 also opted in for the third step of our funnel and downloaded a copy of the “Home Seller Guide”, fully branded to our customer, making them what we call, MOTIVATED HOME SELLER LEADS
