Are You Ready For Facebook Ad Retargeting? Get Started Here!

If you have purchased anything in the past 10 years online, odds are you may have purchased a good percentage of those items from a retargeting ad.

Facebook retargeting is one of the most powerful tools out there. It is loved and used by the world’s top marketers because it helps to achieve one of the highest return on investments on ad spend. Now given that most of the marketers running retargeting ads are doing it for physical goods that you purchase online–watches, necklaces, services, other types of goods or packages–consider that most of these items may fall below $10,000, $5,000, or even under $10.

So if you think about real estate and how it is one of the largest transactions in a person’s life–their largest asset that could be worth $150,000, $500,000 or a couple million dollars–the return on investment for running retargeting ads to real estate consumers surpasses the return on investment if you’re selling something like diamond earrings or a pair of shoes.

In terms of marketing, a real estate consumer has a much longer life cycle and a much longer decision cycle before they actually move forward with either buying or selling their property, so Facebook ad retargeting naturally is a perfect fit for this type of consumer.

Knowing the consumer process

During the several weeks or months or even years of going through the decision cycle of where to buy or when to sell your home or who should help you in the process, these consumers are online.  Often they’re online searching and looking for answers to these questions as they are going through this new life stage.

The transitional life stage of buying or selling a home falls into several different categories. Immediately these categories are either homeowners that are baby boomers deciding to downsize–folks trading in their larger home for a more manageable one story property that fits their lifestyle–or millennials in the Peter Pan generation starting to venture out and buy their first home. 

These are just a couple examples of the life stages that some homeowners and buyers are going through. However, as a marketer, you have to take a deeper look into the process in order to truly get deeper insight and to be able to stay in front of and capture these prospects and turn them into profitable clients.

Each one of these prospects are going through their own type of journey online and they communicate and socialize on Facebook. Now if we think in the process of marketing funnels, and we take a look at the inbound marketing process–attracting new leads, creating interest and desire, and then capturing and connecting with them–then we need to design better retargeting to each prospect in order to push them along our idea of the journey, leading them with breadcrumbs to our front door.

Now if the last paragraph didn’t make any sense to you, that’s okay. Let’s dive in a little deeper and I’ll explain.

Understanding “The Funnels”

In the world of online marketing, and especially Facebook, we work in what we call funnels.

Naturally a funnel is wider at the top, narrower in the middle, and then there’s the most narrow part at the bottom.

Top of Funnel

With any type of funnel campaign, you’re using some type of marketing, some type of content and using an ad to attract your ideal prospect.  With the right targeting, you are reaching the right prospect with the right message.

We call this a top of funnel ad. This type of funnel ad is attracting prospects to content that should resonate with them and help educate or enlighten them. This can be an e-book, a blog post, or a simple video explaining what it is that you want them to know.

Ideally with any type of top of funnel advertising, you are casting a wider net to highly targeted prospects, but you’re bringing them in because they clicked on the ad and took some sort of action or viewed a portion of that video. Now this is where pixels and the retargeting come into play.

Using a Facebook pixel, we would either install the retargeting pixel on the blog post, the landing page or use video views or ad interaction from Facebook. Then we would segment this as a custom audience to retarget the people that have interacted with that page, watch the video, or clicked on the ad.

Middle of Funnel

Now that we’ve attracted those prospects and gotten them to take a specific action, we want to retarget them. This is where the middle of the funnel comes into play. The middle of the funnel is where we build more brand awareness. This is where we start to build authority and help position you as the expert and the solution to their problem.

In the middle of the funnel stage, we are moving people from awareness to interest. This is where the funnel starts to get a little bit more narrow. We’re still creating brand awareness opportunities inside of this middle of the funnel, educating and enlightening them and positioning your brand in front of them. However this is also where we want to get them to take one more step toward the commitment. This could possibly be a micro-conversion like downloading an e-book, a checklist, or a how-to guide, something that we can present to them, as a real estate consumer, that would interest them and be of value to them. During this stage, we are also trying to delight them with more information. This part of the funnel is getting more narrow because not everyone will have the same interest at this point in their life stage.

Examples of the middle of the funnel Facebook ads that you might use include a seller guide e-book, moving checklist, infographic covering the top things you should do when selling your home for the most profit, etc.

These ads would present specifically to the people that took an action at the top of your funnel. This is pushing them through the funnel, getting them to take that next action in the middle of the funnel.

Yet the next stage of the funnel is what we call desire in decision-making.

Typically this is when you’ve already captured a lead. They may have converted on your website or landing page, and they may also be browsing your competitors’ real estate websites, or out looking at open houses. The goal here is to create some sort of ad that builds desire and then leads them toward a step of decision-making.

If you have a unique selling proposition, this is the time to position it in front of these prospects. If you don’t, then this is also a good time to create a brand awareness ad and let them know that you are open for business and ready to help them.

For this type of ad, your call-to-action should be clear. You should have a goal to get them to make some sort of step forward, whether to contact you or take a specific action on your website.

This type of ad could be something like this: “On average, homes sell within 98 percent of their list price. Our goal is not just to save you money but to make money when selling your home. Click here to set up your free seller consultation.”

Bottom of Funnel

Finally, the bottom of the funnel is what we call the action stage.

This stage is specifically where you want your prospect in their current life stage to take action either by contacting you, or responding when you contact them.  

By now they have gone through your entire funnel and they have gone through some sort of process of indoctrination by being nurtured and educated on who you are, what you do and what you offer as a real estate brand.

The goal with any type of funnel is to create leads that are warm, ready and willing to move forward with you and do business. If you’ve created a well-performing funnel, then by now at the bottom of the funnel you can either reach out to these leads by a phone call, text message or email and also run a retargeting ad to the people that have engaged and entered the middle of the funnel.

The type of ad that you use might be a case study that highlights the success of one of the homes you marketed and sold, and at the bottom of that case study you may also have a clear and concise call-to-action for them to register for a free seller consultation or a “list my home” form.

This is just one example of many different types of real estate ad funnels.

Make Your Own Marketing

Using Facebook retargeting and retargeting pixels, you can create your own Facebook real estate funnel. You can make your funnel as complex or as simple as you want, just remember to attract, delight, educate, and nurture, and don’t forget to have them take action.

Now, you may say, “Sure, that’s all great, but how do I create a Facebook pixel and how do I even start to create a Facebook funnel?” Well you’re in luck! I’ve created a video on how to create a Facebook custom audience and a retargeting pixel.