Create Real Estate Facebook Ads That Generate Leads in 7 Steps (+ Examples)

You can use a variety of Facebook’s powerful advertising tools to create real estate ads that successfully target your audience, capture leads, and build your brand. However, the process of creating Facebook real estate ads is a bit of a “choose your own adventure” journey, and the specific tools you use to create them as well as how they will appear in the platform will depend on your individual marketing goals. That said, there are seven basic overarching steps you can take to get you started with successful lead generation.

If you want professional assistance creating Facebook real estate ads, use the built-in tool in Real Geeks. In addition to creating Facebook ads, Real Geeks also tracks ad performance for cost-per-click (CPC), likes, shares, and more using tracking pixels. Your leads will funnel into the Real Geeks customer relationship management (CRM) tool, where you can follow up with easy lead nurturing and conversion strategies to grow your business.

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Here are the seven steps to creating successful and effective lead-generating real estate Facebook ads:

1. Select Your Campaign Objective

The very first step to creating real estate Facebook ads is to find the Ads Manager in the drop-down menu. Then click “Create Ad,” and you will be prompted to choose your campaign objective.

Objectives are based on the three stages of the sales cycle: awareness, consideration, and conversion. You’ll choose an objective based on what you want potential leads to do as a result of your ad, like clicking through to your real estate landing page or website, watching a video, filling out a form, and so on.

Each objective allows you to target visitors in different stages of the sales process. Some are contemplating the purchase or sale of a property within the next year or so, some are just exploring potential options, and others are ready to employ the services of a real estate professional within the next few weeks.

Before placing your ad, consider whether you are targeting someone in the awareness, consideration, or conversion phase of the sales cycle. For instance, if your Facebook ad is for a new construction property that won’t be finished for six months, you want to target clients in the consideration stage. If you are posting a current listing, target a conversion stage client. Take a look at the sales funnel below to further understand the strategies you can utilize for your real estate Facebook ad:

• Awareness: Show up with future buyers or sellers to build a familiar brand. Leads in the awareness stage aren’t active or may simply be toying with the idea of buying or selling their property. Introduce your brand and services with videos or images.
• Consideration: These leads have a long-term plan to buy or sell a house and are actively looking for options. Spend most of your ad space on next steps to show sellers and buyers why they should and how they can work with you.
• Conversion: Active buyers and sellers in this stage are ready to make a decision. Ads should include a very clear call to action (like clicking a link or filling out a form), tied to currently available listings and services, and offer specific reasons to choose you as their real estate agent.

It’s important to target individuals in each cycle with the goal of bringing them further down the funnel toward conversion. By targeting clients who are months or even years away from a transaction as well as clients who are ready to convert now, you will be building a sustainable pipeline of continuous clients.

2. Create & Name Your Campaign

With a clear objective, the next step is to name your campaign. Your campaign name will only be for internal reference and won’t be visible to users. You will also select whether or not this campaign will include a single advertisement or an ad set with multiple ad variations.

The next prompt will ask you to add any special categories. All real estate Facebook ads will be under the “Housing” category. In the last few years, Facebook has made changes to ads in the housing category to prevent discrimination. That means that you will have a smaller set of targeting options and you will be unable to target by age, gender, or ZIP code, as this could be considered a violation of Fair Housing Regulations.

Even though there are some restrictions to the housing category, when you get to the option to target a specific audience, you will be able to set other parameters to direct your Facebook ads to the intended target. Other parameters you’ll be able to set to target your ad include location radius and interests like hobbies, businesses, and entertainment, as well as where ads will be placed and displayed.

3. Set a Posting Schedule & Budget

Scheduling your Facebook real estate ads is as simple as choosing a date for the ads to start running and a date when they will stop running. The Facebook algorithm handles the specifics of how often your ads are shown. Similarly, setting a budget is relatively simple—just input a maximum daily budget.

However, the actual amount that is spent on your ads won’t always be the same. The pricing of Facebook advertising is based on a bidding system, which you can learn more about in our guide on Facebook ad costs by industry, but it all happens behind the scenes. You can adjust your daily budget for each campaign over time until you start getting results and land at a good cost per lead.

The average cost per real estate lead is $9.76, but depending on your lead generation platform, can cost anywhere from $20 to $80 per lead. On Facebook, the average real estate lead costs anywhere from $0 to $25, each based on the clicks you get on your Facebook advertising campaigns—which is a great return on investment compared to other platforms.

To optimize your ad campaigns for the highest return on investment (ROI) without spending hours, days, or weeks figuring out the technical details, check out Artur’in. Artur’in’s team can create and manage your Facebook ads, and automatically schedule real estate Facebook posts to help you stay active and top of mind. Instead of spending a lot of time creating social media content, you can focus on nurturing, converting, and serving your clients as efficiently and effectively as possible.

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4. Identify Your Target Audience

Some real estate agents make the mistake of trying to appeal to everyone in their marketing and ad campaigns. In reality, being successful in real estate requires getting specific about who you want to work with, so you can attract the type of clients you want as you build your business. This is particularly important when creating real estate Facebook ads, but it deeply impacts every level of your marketing.

You might want to specialize in a real estate niche like expired listings or first-time homebuyers, or you may want to target a specific type of client. For example, you may want to work with retirees who are downsizing or corporate professionals relocating to your area. The more specific you get about your market, the easier it will be to target your Facebook ads.

So how can you target a specific audience with the particular restrictions that apply to real estate and housing ads? In a way, you’ll have to do a bit of profiling like in many popular crime shows.

By putting yourself in the mindset of your target audience, you can still reference specifics in order to reach the leads you are interested in capturing. For instance, if you are looking to generate first-time homebuyer leads in Westfield, New Jersey, you want to think about who this buyer is and what their interests could be in order to narrow down your audience.

You are allowed to target by a general location radius, so you’ll first add the location into your criteria. Then, you want to think about the area and who would be moving there. Westfield, New Jersey, is a suburban town with a median home list price of $800,000. It is close to New York City and is a quaint town full of boutique shops and a highly rated school district.

An example target audience could include people who are married with a family and who are leaving a rental property in a more metropolitan area in search of more space, quality schooling, and an easy commute to New York City for nightlife or work. When identifying interests for Facebook ads, you may want to consider interests like family and relationships, food and drink, and business and industry. By thinking backward and profiling your target audience, you can specify your outreach to people who are interested in your particular ad and listings.

Be prepared to manage and nurture the new leads generated through real estate Facebook ads by having a real estate customer relationship manager (CRM) in place and an automated prospect follow-up system ready to go. BoldLeads will help manage your Facebook ads, funnel generated leads into your CRM, and automatically send emails to nurture your new prospects. Try the BoldLeads CRM and lead generation today.

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5. Select Ad Placement

When you choose to run Facebook real estate ads, you might envision your ads showing up in a few particular places that are of interest and are frequently visited by your target audience, like Instagram, Google search results, and news feeds. However, there’s a wide variety of placement options for your ad. You can choose to let Facebook automatically place your real estate ads on various channels, or you can manually specify where and how you want your ad to be shown to users.

There are four primary channels where your real estate Facebook ads can be placed: Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and Audience Network. Ads placed on Audience Network may be placed on many other apps and websites that support advertising across the web.

These are the additional placement options:

• Facebook News Feed
• Instagram Feeds
• Instagram Stories and Reels
• Facebook and Instagram In-Stream Videos
• Search Results
• Messages
• In-Article
• Apps and Sites

To decide on where you want your real estate Facebook ad placed, refer back to the profile you created for your target clients. Based on the prior example of first-time homebuyers moving to Westfield, NJ, think about where these clients are looking at ads. If you think your audience is more likely to use Instagram, you will want to concentrate most of your advertising on that platform.

6. Create Your Ad

After all the technical elements of your real estate ad are complete, it’s finally time to design and create your ad. This is the actual product your audience will see, including creative details like images, video, and ad copy. Depending on your objectives and placements, Facebook will show the most fitting ad formats. The most common formats for real estate Facebook ads are single-image ads, video ads, and carousel posts. You can learn more about each of these options in our more in-depth article on Facebook advertising.

The ad creation process will have a direct impact on the overall success of the ad. Don’t just throw an image into your ad or write ad copy on a whim. Take the time to develop an ad that communicates clearly and is visually appealing enough to stop people from scrolling.

Here are dozens of examples of effective ads created for real estate lead generation.

This ad is targeting individuals who are looking to sell their property. Since it has information from the past year and last month, they can be focused either on sellers within the awareness or conversion stage of the sales funnel. They also give information about houses and condos, which could be those looking to upgrade to a larger home from their current living situation.

This agent is targeting leads in the conversion phase since they are showing images for a property that is currently on the market. Also, since the community is a 55-and-older, they will be searching specifically for recent retirees who would be looking to downgrade from their current home.

This agent is using their upcoming listing to target the consideration and conversion audiences. By providing access to an off-market listing, consideration phase leads who are looking to purchase within the next six months can start to look at homes without making a firm commitment. Also, those who are looking to convert soon can get access and negotiate an off-market property and price.

This Facebook ad is reaching out to consideration and awareness clients. Neither group may be willing to make an immediate commitment to selling their home, but the agent is hoping to capture their attention and convert them to a client early in the sales process.

If the idea of building and optimizing your own real estate Facebook ads is overwhelming, outsourcing the job might be the best choice. With Constant Contact, you can design engaging social media ads to simplify the process and expand your reach to targeted audiences. Email marketing templates make it easy to stay in touch with clients and continue to grow your network.

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7. Integrate Your CRM & Convert Leads

Before you hit publish, it’s absolutely necessary to create a plan to collect, track, manage, and communicate with your new flow of Facebook ad-generated real estate leads. Without a thorough plan and the right tools, your contacts will inevitably fall through the cracks.

Don’t spend any money on ads lead generation if you don’t have a customer relationship manager (CRM) with a Facebook integration like the one in Pipedrive. It is an incredibly comprehensive CRM with all the necessary features like email campaigns, visual pipelines, contact segmentation, and activity reminders. Start with a free trial of Pipedrive.

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Bottom Line

Learning how to use Facebook ads to grow your real estate business can be intimidating, but it is undeniably powerful—and surprisingly affordable, compared to other advertising channels. By following these steps to create real estate Facebook ads, you’ll be able to multiply your reach and generate more real estate leads in less time.