Social Media for estate agents has become a major tool when marketing to prospective buyers. We’re increasingly seeing “cribs style” shots of luxury homes on Instagram and Facebook. They inform us that we too could live a decadent lifestyle, with images of marble flooring, sweeping staircases and captions such as, “You won’t believe what’s inside this house!”

Humans are inherently nosy… we all click and take a look whether we can afford it or not, as we want to see how the other half lives. However, social media for estate agents can be more tricky than you might think. You want to attract interest but you don’t want to pay-per-click if the clicks aren’t going to develop into leads, this is where you’re going to need a strong social strategy. Most estate agents offer houses that vary hugely in price from as little as £50k to well into the millions. This means that your audience will vary depending on the house you are marketing. It’s not just price that will affect the target audience – it’s lifestyle needs too. A studio apartment in the city could attract a different audience from that of a 4-bed cottage in the countryside….even though the budget may be the same.

So how do we reach the right people?

Facebook Advertising is a fantastic tool when planning and strategising. Our previous article, How Facebook Advertising Can Generate Leads, gives more in-depth information. But for the purposes of this article, we’re focusing on the use of targeting within the Facebook Ad Manager function. Target Audience Facebook is a leader in its audience targeting capabilities.

There are 3 main types of targeting:

Core audiences  This is Facebook’s best known and most flexible targeting feature. You can select your audience base manually from options such as Demographics, Location, Interests and Behaviours. These options cover everything from basic information to things they browse, post about or like both inside and outside of Facebook. A very handy tool for narrowing down to a VERY specific target audience.

Custom audiences Your custom audiences are people that already know about you. They’ve been on your website (thank you Facebook pixel), they’ve downloaded your app or they’ve purchased from you before. Either way, this offers the opportunity to use these warm leads to gently remind them to use your services again…that you have something they like!

Lookalike audiences This uses your current followers audience insights to promote your posts/ads to a similar audience. A quick and easy way to advertise your organisation if you only have one target audience. Social Media for estate agents is different, for the vast majority of people a house purchase occurs infrequently. There are wide and varying personas to target… families, business people, young singles, couples. Then you have lifestyle needs with people looking to sell and downsize, people outgrowing their first home, retirees, etc. The personas are endless and this is why ‘core audiences’ are a great way of reaching a wide range of potential house buyers. Split Testing also known as A/B testing, is basically using the same advert or promoted post but targeting multiple audiences. You may slightly edit the way it looks or the caption, but it is essentially the same advert. This works well on Facebook as you can monitor the performance and pause any that aren’t doing as well as others.

You can run as many as you like at the same time. For example, you may have a 3-bedroom house in an affluent area with schools nearby and excellent links to motorways etc. This could be home to a family of four looking for somewhere near good schools, a young family with a newborn, or a couple looking to buy a first home before starting a family, there are already 3 audiences – 3 adverts. Using the audience selector within Ads Manager will enable you to target all 3 personas separately therefore only reaching a relevant and potential lead.

WDA has a wealth of experience in helping estate agents succeed with their digital marketing goals. We realise we’ve thrown a lot of different information your way, if you’d like more information about our bespoke digital packages (that can be tailored to your specific business needs) then why not get in touch?

Contact anna@marketing.dev-wda.com today.