Our in-market targeting techniques generate hundreds of real estate seller leads per month that accumulate multiple sales. This is why real estate sales teams love doing business with us. We have better targeting and ROI than most purchased prospects on the market, and, we only work with one real estate broker per area. Here are the 4 case studies of our successful real estate seller leads campaign using in-market targeting.
Hi, Jessie here. I’m excited to talk to you about how to get real estate seller leads from Facebook. I’m doing this on a Facebook live, and I tried to do it earlier today, but the connection was a little funny. By the way, before I dive into this if you want to see precisely how we do Facebook ads to get seller leads for real estate, go to http://www.getleadsfirst.com. Because you need leads first before any sales process is going to do you looking good and because you need to get to them first before your competitors do. So let’s dive right in. The first one, I have as a case study. I figured I’d just show you our ads and I printed it out. I’m old school on paper today. I wanted to give you an example of this, of what happened and then explain how we did that.
1.) Florida
So the first one is when we did in Florida, this Florida campaign, was ended up being $16.90 a lead. Now compare that to the Zillow empire, you could be spending a hundred, right? The average seller leads nationwide for all of these campaigns, by the way, is about 14 bucks. So this is just riding around there. In this campaign, we had eight seller leads, the generated one sale, and it was only $135 spent. Let me repeat that. This campaign produced eight leads in a sale. A sale means that the realtor listed the house, they sold it and got a commission. I think that commission is probably a lot more than a couple of hundred bucks. So if you’re having an issue with advertising, maybe you are frustrated with trying it. You’ve tried it on Facebook, it didn’t work, or you’re paying for somebody to do it and it’s not working or you’re buying it from the big powerful suppliers, like the Zillows and the Syncs and the Boomtowns of the world.
Then you’re gonna really like this because you’re going to be able to get them cheaper and better. The biggest problem with most lead companies, by the way, and review sites, and the powerful suppliers, like the Zillows of the world, is that they’re being sold to multiple agents. So how would you – that kind of makes it – it’s hard to put a value on that because if you say I could get a lead for $100. However, how many other people’s it sold to? If you get a lead for $50, how many other people that sold to? So for example, if you spend, let’s say you spend $40 on a lead, but it’s sold to three other people, how much more would you pay if you knew that it would not be given to anybody else and it was exclusively yours?
Think about that. Would it be worth triple double? At least something to think about. Now in this, how we did it was we created an ad on Facebook, which was a community page. It wasn’t branded for the particular agent. That’s a whole different strategy called intent based branding. But this particular version is more a direct response marketing, which is when you make a marketing effort, an advertisement that actually gets an immediate response, that its purpose is not just to get your name out there, but its purpose is actually to get someone to click on something, call or to register for something like a Webinar. That direct response is what we’re looking for in most marketing. Now I think there’s a place for the two to come together, both branding and direct response, which is called intent based branding.
Either one works well or both of them. This particular approach is just that looking for that, the needles in the haystack that are ready to take action now.
The next thing we did about this ad was, it calls out to the copy: “Attention Florida residents get a free home valuation report.” So what we’re doing is we’re making an offer, an offer that would be better than something that Zillow would offer because we can provide more accuracy because a realtor is going to take the time to do a real evaluation report. The other thing is these are first non-brand community pages. They’re making a benefit-rich offer, and they also are very education based. So they look educational as opposed to salesperson hitting them over the head. You know, me, me, me, I’m the best realtor on the planet.
So we’re doing the opposite of that with this and not all kind of a warm and friendly educational approach. That’s another thing that makes it work better. Another thing that makes it work better is that we’re targeting specific neighborhoods with specific pictures and copy. A quick tip on photos, if you’re a realtor, take a picture with vertical with your phone instead of horizontal looks a lot better in Facebook timelines. So the results, eight leads, 3,934 reach impressions, 5,065 resulting within the eight leads for $16.90.
2.) California
Here’s our case study number two, California. A similar approach, similar branding approach, “Attention California residents, home valuation.” You could try this on your own. You could give this information to your marketing team and have them try to do this. However, there’s a lot more detail if you want to get all of the nitty-gritty on how we buy data for the targeting and how we use in-market targeting to improve whom we put the ad in front of.
Then how we create the ads and split tests. You want the overview of that, go to getleadsfirst.com, and I go through all the details there. The result on this one, similar $5.78 per lead and the ad generated a $515,000 listing in the first eight leads for 31 bucks, resulting in a $12,875 commission to our realtor, all in less than two days. Leads like this convert five to 10% to contract in the first six weeks is what we found on average. So that’s an extra $12,875 for the realtor. The lead wasn’t sold to anybody else. It’s only given to the realtor. They can generate that they can make the phone call and create a relationship. It’s a happy day. Now I have to say that I can’t make any income claims.
I do not promise you anything like that. All I can promise is that we work hard. These ads seem to be working for all of our clients, and the results may vary, and we guarantee our level of service. But, you know, most people who try advertising and marketing fail miserably, so no income claims here whatsoever. I’m just excited about what we’re doing for our clients. I do want to say that, that most teams do love us because if you have teams, you have enough people to give the leads to who can make the calls. If you don’t, you could try and a service like Agentology to make the calls for you if you don’t want to make all those calls. There’s nothing like the personal phone call, and we can generate hundreds of leads. My goal is typically 100 at least starting per month of seller leads.
We help you streamline text and email. That’s another thing, the reason why sales teams, typically love us and that helps filter and qualify leads and it saves you much time, tons of time saved. Energy, money, all that. Most acquisitions, we’re getting about $200 to $600, you know, per ad spin. That sustainable and our average clients profit at least ten times, eight to 10 times minimum, what they invest in us. So if you’re afraid of advertising, remember, if you think advertising is expensive, try not advertising. I know when you start, you can hit up your warm market and referrals, but as you grow, how do you get more? Well, you need a high volume of leads coming to generate happy clients, which create more referrals for, and also give you more opportunities to give to your power partners, your mortgage officers, and whatnot, in the hopes of getting more referrals back from them as well. So it would help if you had leads.
Henry Ford always said it, that the one thing that you’d never cut down on is advertising. You got to get the word out about what you do. So I’m excited about this. If you want help with it, go to getleadsfirst.com. Because you need leads first, before any sales systems going to be worth its weight in salt, and because you need to get to the leads first before your competitors.
So here are some other results. These are just also from Facebook reporting. This one 55 leads, $8.31 cost per lead. Here’s another one, 598 leads. We got the cost down by $5.73. Now there’s a bigger ad spend about $3,400.So that was a bigger account than they wanted more leads. Then here’s another one, spend about 700 bucks. $739.32 cents, 35,963 impressions, 25,856 on the reach resulting in 101 leads at $7.32 cents.
3.) Ohio
Here’s another case study. This is Ohio, one in Ohio. We had – and these are the metrics from Facebook. This one resulted, again, we’re doing the community based friendly approach with high-value offers, evaluation reports that are more accurate than Zillow key. The other key is to make sure that the pictures are good in front of homes. Make sure the ad copy lines up with that value that you’re giving. And not just me, me, I’m the best realtor. The next tip is to make sure that is geo-targeted, that you are hitting up specific neighborhoods and not just blanketing everything. You can – if a city is big enough, I’ll show you a case study here in a bit, you can subdivide it into different areas, and you can run individual ads to different neighborhoods within a city if it has enough population. That’s what we did to solve a problem later on.
So this Ohio study, we’ve got 137 leads at four to 8% appointments in less than six weeks. That means 48% are turning into appointments regularly within the six, within six weeks, the first 48 leads generated eight opportunities, three seller appointments, three tentative seller appointments, one seller referral lead from out of state, one buyer referral lead from out of state. Isn’t that cool? The projected ROI to exceed five plus transactions in the first two months. I have some specifics down here on the chart.
I’ll go over a couple of them. This one, 26 leads at $8.51 a lead, 13 leads, $9.45. I think the most expensive down here, four leads at $ 23.26. Still, compare that to what you would pay if you were paying one of the big boys to do it. You can do this on your own. You can take back power from the powerful suppliers. You keep giving money to the Zillows and the Syncs and the Boomtowns in the world, especially the Zillow, the more powerful it gets and the more it dominates the market homogenizes the market makes you more reliant on them, and pretty soon they replace you. That’s the goal of all of these sites. The same thing happens in Home Advisor and Angie’s list. With the contractors, they take over, and then they jack up the prices. So you’ve got to take back control, and that’s what we do. We love doing it for our clients.
4.) Bellingham, Washington
Here’s another one that’s more local. This is to me, I’m in the Seattle area, and this is up in Bellingham, Washington near the Canadian border lower population. So I wanted to bring this example up because what do you do if you don’t have enough people? This is a fascinating study here because a lot of the cities near the Canadian border don’t have the population density. It’s a lower population so Facebook can’t get it’s targeting. So we solve this in a couple of ways for – first of all before I go there, you always have your balance.
If you’re a realtor, you want leads close to home A.) because you know that neighborhood better than anybody else, you can speak directly to that with your expertise. B.) You don’t want to have to drive all over Timbuktu. So those are two reasons, but we have to balance that with the realistic expectation, how many leads we can get you, how many leads you can get to continue to grow your business. So if you’re trying to get more leads, you got to understand that the population density matters. So here’s what we did. I’m going to show you an example of how we had to adjust. Now I’m going to give you the good early results and then the lousy results in like two weeks later. Not now. When I say lousy, there’s still amazing compared to most, but for me, they’re not as good as they could be. Now a lot of this has to do with we buy data, and we use data in the targeting before we even start with Facebook.
That’s the key. If you can start with a list, you can get a lower cost per click with the list. Could be customer lists for look like matching or it could be a list of people that are in market targeting lists, which we had a license to buy. You can do some Internet research to purchase lists of people that are behaviorally showing that they may be in the market, that is available out there. It’s rare, but it is possible. We start with that, which is what helps us get superior, results with the cost per clicks and the low price of advertising.
So here’s my friend Alison, who’s a client, and March 14th to the 21st, 48 leads, boom, $9.59 a lead, total ad spend $460.50. That’s amazing. Now, granted it was at the beginning of an advertisement. Whenever you start an ad, you tend to get better results, when Facebook’s blasting it out there, I guess maybe they’re just feeling pity for a new advertiser and an area. So it does go down a little. This one went down more than we thought, and there was a reason I’ll get to that. So we had a couple of top performing locations in the big city that’s near her. Bellingham was the main one and the main reason why that one did better. However, that was fine. Then what happened was, let me skip ahead. March 28th, so there’s a week that I’m skipping it here to move forward, to show you two weeks later on March 28th to April 3rd okay, now remember the leads before we’re 48 and in that week, now on this week, they’re only 18.
Oh, what happened is still good. But you know, like, oh no, why did it drop? Also, the cost went up by double almost $18.68 up from $9.59, and our ad spend a little less because we weren’t able to spend as much because there weren’t enough people. So here’s what happened was, and we adjusted after this. Our total leads, by the way over the three weeks is 96, and our goal is a hundred and a whole month. So we’re still ahead of the game, but it drove our average cost per lead up from that $9.59 up to $14.37 all in, and now we’ve only spent $1379 in our ad budgets, $2000 for this. So, okay, not bad, but why did it increase? Well, here’s the reason. There are too many cities with not enough population. We were blanket advertising the big ones, Bellingham with one ad.
So what we did to solve this is we broadened out a little bit and included some more cities. However, we don’t, we can only do that so much because Allison doesn’t want to drive all over the place and there are certain areas with more population that she’ll consider selling listing homes in. Then the second solution was we found that Bellingham – because it’s a significant enough population, could be subdivided into different neighborhoods and run as the individual neighborhoods. So that is a solution. An excellent tip there. If you have any problems with that, we add to – again, we have to create new campaigns. We have to create new ad sets and new ads within those ad set that are split testing. So there’s much work. I know I’m just glossing over the big picture here, but you have to understand that, you do need to have all of those things I mentioned plus targeting in an area.
Then it would be best if you split test ads and ad sets within a particular area to find the best performers. If you want a detailed list of all these steps, go to www.getleadsfirst.com go over how we do it there. Now that was the result of those weeks. I’m happy to say since then we’ve got it back up because we did that targeting. So there you go. There’s some; there are some perfect examples of how to do Facebook ads better or to do them at all. If you want to get some real estate seller leads, works for buyer leads a little bit differently, but it’s the same concept. You’ve got to start with useful data, you’ve got to start with value, and you got that you’re offering something that they want and then you have to do a lot of testing, testing, testing, testing.
I don’t think I’m an expert marketer. I’m just an expert tester. You know, that’s what we do. So, I and my team and I love my team, and we work hard for our clients. We’re happy to say we’re getting results. If you’re looking for better results then go to www.getleadsfirst.com. if you’re a real estate agent, if you’re not, go to www.stoddardgency.com and can learn a little bit more about our other services. All right, you guys, I hope that was helpful. If it was, please leave a comment below or ask a question if somebody could also markdown in the comments, put the links that I mentioned, that’d be helpful for me too. All right, you guys take care. Have a great day. Talk to you soon.
