Property Managers there’s a new Facebook Advertising option that you really need to start exploring, it’s perfect for promoting holiday rentals and rental properties. Hold on this is this going to change how you think about using Facebook to market your listings.
You’re Thinking Small
How do you currently promote your listings using Facebook? Not at all, maybe you're boosting the odd listing here and there, bonus points if you're using an app to speed things up.
Both these methods are fine but they're also limited in that you're focusing all your efforts on select properties based on a hunch, even if you promote multiple properties automatically they’ll all have individual campaigns with targeting that likely overlaps or worse is identical, this means your ads compete with each other actually driving up your ad costs and pushing down their performance, crazy right!
Time and time again we see real estate businesses thinking small about their digital advertising by putting digital into the V.P.A category, effectively creating a hit and miss marketing approach, you need to stop doing this and start thinking about the big picture, here’s why. One to one campaigns were never designed to sell products, there were designed for lead generation promoting services not listings. Buyers are at different stages of the process and some will be interested in listing that others are not, but how do you know which listings to promote and to who and for how long, how much is too much, how much is too little, does your head hurt?
It’s never going to work this way, we need to simplify and have a one size fits all approach to do this at scale for more than a few listings. Think about how much more efficient it would be if all your properties could be promoted equally, you wouldn’t need to make assumptions or get V.P.A or decide which properties will benefit based on a hunch, what if you could pool your ad spend across the business and let Facebook work out which listings should be promoted and when based on what people are searching for, viewing on other websites like your competitors. This is a far simpler and far better way to do things and allows you to leverage the power of artificial intelligence and the massive amounts of data Facebook has on user allowing it to put exactly the right listing in front of exactly the right user at exactly the right time.
One auto updating campaign, one ad budget, no more lost opportunities, just maximum results at the lowest cost.
It should be clear by now that there are major benefits to a simplified approach but it does mean you need to adopt a big picture mindset to digital advertising. How? Firstly you need a central ad budget for listing promotion, forget V.P.A, consolidate your digital ad spend across the business and make it available for every listing campaign, if you are prepared to put the property on the office window then you should also have it on Facebook.
Thinking small is holding you back from harnessing the full power of Facebook Ads
A centralised ad budget will enable two things, one you will be able to generate more opportunities because you have a more diverse range of properties being promoted to a more diverse range of buyers or tenants, two your ads can now be more aggressive because Facebook can allocate a greater proportion of your budget based on demand, no more guesswork.
I'm Thinking Big, Now What?
Now that you have a big picture view of digital advertising we can start to talk about how to put this new vision into practice, this is where Facebook Dynamic ads come into play. Dynamic Ads allow you to promote a wide range of listings with one campaign, they also allow users to be targeted using advanced behavioural tracking, search activity and artificial intelligence to deliver exactly the right property to exactly the right user when there motivated to take action. This is so powerful and it’s the same technology travel, eCommerce and automotive have been using for years. This approach prevents lost opportunities because you’re no longer only promoting a small percentage of properties and you’re no longer making assumptions about what’s working and what’s not, you're using Facebook to track down the ideal customer, the crazy thing is you will also spend less money on your ads overall, no waste just maximum impact, this is the future.
Running multiple campaigns for separate listings to the same area simultaneously actually increases your overall ad spend and reduces your campaigns performance, your ads actually end up competing with each other for the same audience.
With Social Estate you can even have your campaign set up to automatically add and remove properties from the campaign in sync with your CRM and exclude properties from promotion altogether.
What do Dynamic Ads Look Like?
Facebook has so many placement options creating ads for each can be a huge job, with dynamic ads, ad creative is built for you guaranteeing your ads the maximum number of placements.
How Are Dynamic Ads Generated?
Each ads images and copy is customised for the user it is being presented too based on what Facebook knows about that users preferences. This results in ads that users are more receptive to and ultimately convert at lower costs.
If you like the above and want to get started running your own campaign read our Definitive Guide to Dynamic ads for Real Estate or our team can help get you set up.
If you have any questions regarding this article leave a comment or get in touch with our team at [email protected]