Facebook Farming Strategy for Real Estate

Did you know you can farm a neighborhood on Facebook just like postcard farming?

Consistent lead generation can be a struggle. The problem is that traditional lead generation strategies like neighborhood farming and print mail-outs are becoming more expensive, so many real estate agents are looking to the web for a new strategy.

Facebook marketing has proved to be a much more effective and much less expensive approach to neighborhood farming.

Why is Facebook farming better?

Facebook farming is more cost-effective, and it allows you to focus your reach. With Facebook you have the ability to target specific demographic ranges. And you only pay for real activity “eye-balls”. With Facebook you avoid wasting thousands of dollars each month on unopened and unseen print marketing.

Plus, if you wanted to dedicate your entire “mail-out” budget to Facebook, you would be able to target literally every demographic in your city.

Print farming takes a lot of prep work and generates random responses. Facebook farming on the other hand is repeatable and much more predictable. Within one month of running a Facebook campaign you will generate far more leads than you could with print farming.

Okay, how does it work?

First, you need to build your audience.

Facebook has many fantastic options when building your audience, the first of which is geography. In the audience manager, you can specifically target people that live in a particular geographic area. You can target by the entire city, or even narrow it down by zip code or other factors.

You cannot draw a polygon of the exact area you want to target. Instead, you target a geographic area by such parameters as:

-Countries

-States

-Provinces

-Cities

-Congressional districts

-ZIP or post codes

-A radius around a pin dropped on the map

Next, you can further narrow your audience options by demographic features. This is a powerful tool that works well on this platform and is superior to options available for traditional postcard farming. For instance, what if you only want to target sellers? You can target people that specifically own homes.

What if you are advertising a new listing in your farm area and it’s a luxury listing? If that is the case, you can specify annual income as a demographic feature to thin your marketplace and make sure your ads are falling into the correct people’s hands.

These are two examples, but there are literally hundreds to choose from; everything from ethnicity to political party, to social interests, and much, much more.

Okay. I have my audience. Now, what do I use for content?

If you’re having a hard time determining the type of content to use, ask yourself: What will my clients value? For many clients, endless posts of listings are neither useful, nor what they are looking for on social media.

If you want your Facebook marketing efforts to pay off, engage your audience!

And the best way to do this is with help of video!

Why video?

Here are some facts:

Fact No 1

With postcards, you don’t know who might be interested in your service until they call you. With Facebook videos you will know potential clients by analyzing the video views percentage.

How?

In Facebook’s Ad Manager you can see the number of people who watched 50%, 75% or 100% of your video, and by segmenting these people according to the duration of video they watched, you’re can focus on those who were most engaged, and connect with them.

If people watched at least 75% of your video, that means they are interested in the topic, and they are probably planning to sell their home now or in the near future.

Otherwise, they wouldn’t have watched the video almost to the end.

Fact No 2

Video ads can be 100 times cheaper than postcards.

The average price to design, print, and mail small batches of real estate postcards is $0.50 – $2 per card.

As you may imagine, these costs can vary considerably depending on the quantity ordered, their size, and printing quality.

Let’s take an average cost of $1 per card.

Now!

The average price for Facebook video ads is $0.01 – $0.04 per video view.

Let’s an average cost of $0.02 per video view.

Do you see the difference?

For the $1 you would spend on one postcard, you can reach 50 potential clients on Facebook with help of a video!

Pretty cool, huh?

Fact No 3

A whopping 80% of all online leads convert during follow-up.

But here’s the crux. Even though the conversion rate is high, unless you stay in contact with them, there is a good chance your leads will end up working with another agent. One of the worst feelings is watching a lead you generated working with another agent because they “fell through the cracks”.

You’ve invested the money to set up a system to capture and verify a future buyer or seller from Facebook. But without a nurturing system you may be leaving 80% of your deals on the table. It would be like a farmer growing a crop, harvesting on the first day of the season, and then leaving all their remaining produce behind for other farmers.

Therefore it is very important to have as much video content as possible so that a potential client sees your videos often and always remember you.

Are you lacking video content?

Well, you can use our videos!

We have created a series of animated videos which explain various home buying and selling processes.

It is unique and interesting video content that you can use for Facebook farming.

And best of all, you can access some of these videos absolutely FREE!

Simply press the orange button for more details.

See you on the other side!