facebook ads real estate case study

13 Inspiring Real Estate Facebook Ads Examples [2024]

Facebook ads are the easiest and fastest way to get more real estate leads, clients, listings, and sales. Here’s exactly what to do.

Table of Contents

Almost half (46%) of realtors say their highest quality leads come from social media, compared to MLS (30%) and relationship management (26%). And yet, 24% of realtors spend less than $50 a month on lead generation.

But given that 96% of home buyers look for listings online and 80% of sellers contact only one real estate agent before hiring them(!), you should really up that budget.

Relax: you don’t need to spend thousands on ads. You just need to know the real estate Facebook ads formulas that work, and try them for yourself.

Grow. Create. Engage. Schedule. Publish. Measure. Win.

13 great real estate Facebook ad examples

1. show a floor plan.

When I was looking for a house, I had a few specific, deal-breaker layout requirements. I would scroll to the end of a listing’s photos to check the floor plan first, then go back and see the other photos.

Am I weird? Probably. Are there other weirdos like me out there? Definitely.

Floor plan ads aren’t just for new construction projects. Try a Facebook ad about your latest listing’s floor plan, especially if it’s unusual or interesting.

Source: Silversaw on Facebook

Why it works:

• Instantly captures the attention of buyers who know what they want.
• Effective ad format for new construction presales.

2. Call out a pain point

Instead of talking only about the property, try getting super specific for a certain type of buyer or seller. Figure out what their biggest struggle with buying or selling is, then create an offer around that.

This company knows downsizing can be overwhelming and physically demanding for seniors, so they created an all-in-one service for them.

Source: Rosie’s House on Facebook

• Your most successful ads aren’t the ones that reach the most people. They’re the ones that reach the right people.

3. Push your latest listing

Yep, this Facebook ad is exactly what you think it is. Nope, there’s no top secret strategy here: Advertise your latest and/or coolest listing.

Think of it this way: Not every commercial airs during That Big Annual Game. Not every campaign needs to be a potential Oscar nominee, okay?

Go with a single image or carousel ad. Facebook even has a special real estate Facebook ad format for properties. These Facebook ads are the “bread n’ butter” of real estate social marketing .

Source: Guarantee Real Estate on Facebook

• Buyers want to see listings. Especially millennials, who spend about 14 hours a week looking at house listings on social media.

Bonus: How about saving a ton of time advertising your new listings and open houses on Facebook? With Hootsuite, you can easily create paid Facebook ads from your existing Facebook Page posts in minutes .

Check out how to make real estate Facebook ads with Hootsuite:

4. Highlight recently sold listings

For seller’s agents, this is your equivalent of the above real estate Facebook ad example. Feature one recently sold listing, or choose a few examples from the same zip code, and briefly touch on a factor you had to overcome to sell it.

Source: Rick Moore Realtor on Facebook

• Positions you as a neighborhood expert.
• Shows your capabilities, rather than telling.
• Opportunity to show off your problem solving skills for difficult-to-sell listings.

5. Brag (a bit) about awards

Did you hit the top 1% of sales this year? Have you won any other award, like an honorary recognition from your city or community organization?

Use it to (modestly) show off how great you are. Of course, don’t brag too much and risk turning people away. Use your good judgment to figure out where that line should be.

This ad is especially effective with the addition of “2012” because viewers instantly understand the positive connotation of winning this award for over 10 years and form an instant subconscious judgment of, “They must be good.”

Source: Leeds Real Estate on Facebook

• Inspires trust.
• Develops your reputation, especially if the award was specific to a type of property, client, or location.

6. Brag (a bit)

Did your last listing sell in 24 hours? For $100,000 over asking? Within your client’s super tight timeline? Or some other extreme or unusual achievement?

Client testimonials are great, but pointing to real results you’ve achieved are undeniably effective, too.

Source: Umer Farooq on Facebook

• Nothing demonstrates your capabilities better. As the expression goes, “The proof is in the pudding.”

7. Promote a video tour

Video is the new default on social media nowadays, with the popularity of video-first formats like Reels growing 50% year over year .

Facebook knows video ads bring in tons of eyeballs. They constantly add new features to further improve video ad conversion rates. Why? Because the more results you get from ads, the more ads you’ll buy, and the more profit Facebook will make.

Two recent changes are especially powerful for video ads: Making in-feed videos play automatically and the new video views objective. Facebook claims these changes have led to increased reach and lower video ad costs — both good things for you.

Source: Curtus Collins on Facebook

• Video tours capture attention right away.
• Videos the king of the Facebook algorithm .

8. Offer a free home valuation

First-time and experienced sellers both know the market is always changing. Those considering a move may take you up on your offer to appraise their home.

Bonus: Find out how to target your ads super effectively, including to people who may want to move soon, at the end of this article.

Source: Tasha Carnes-Perez on Facebook

• Can be targeted to specific groups of people based on demographics, location, or interests.
• Leads who fill out the form tend to be highly qualified.

9. Post a candid Reel from your latest listing

Polished video tours make effective ads, but you don’t always need a perfectly designed asset. Record yourself walking through a home and talking about your favorite features. Or show off just one part of the house, like the lush backyard oasis on a hot summer day.

Being in front of the camera may feel awkward at first but showing up casually and authentically is important for building your brand, and it’s what people want to see more of.

Source: Home Sale Hardy on Facebook

• The old marketing expression — “People buy from people they know, like, and trust” — is still true. Candid video lets people see your personality.

10. Create a neighborhood guide

If you specialize in a certain city or have several listings in the same neighborhood, create a blog post or page on your website about that area.

Include facts buyers would find interesting, such as the population, average age ranges, any great restaurants or attractions nearby, how walkable it is, and more.

Source: Kathy Zajac Real Estate on Facebook

• Buyers imagine their dream life, thanks to your lively neighborhood description, and see your listings as the way to get there.
• Attracts people already interested in moving there.
• Very effective when combined with advanced location targeting.

11. Promote listings in a specific neighborhood

Facebook’s new properties ad format also allows carousels , so you can feature multiple listings within one ad. You could advertise a group of either luxury or affordable properties aimed at a specific type of buyer lead, or feature several in the same neighborhood.

This is an easy way to target your real estate Facebook ads by location without having to create a dedicated neighborhood guide.

Source: Sheri Dettman & Associates on Facebook

• Highly effective when combined with advanced Facebook ad location targeting.
• Higher chance a buyer will like at least one listing, resulting in clicking through to see it.

12. Share a testimonial

For most people, buying or selling a home is the largest transaction they’ll ever make. That’s probably why 36% of sellers ask friends and family for realtor recommendations.

Sure, your Facebook ad isn’t the same as Aunt Marg saying, “Call Mike!” across the table at family dinner. But simply seeing that someone somewhere was happy with your work goes a long way toward getting strangers to trust you and reach out.

Plus, these ads are easy to make: Collect client testimonials in a document. Create a social media template, swap out the copy, save the image, and upload it as a Facebook ad.

Source: Caleb Wilkerson on Facebook

• Reviews and testimonials are powerful for every business, but especially for “big ticket” services like real estate.

Bonus: Make testimonial ads even easier with Hootsuite’s Canva integration . Pull up your template, customize, and insert it into your post without ever leaving Hootsuite Composer.

You can even choose a template by image size, including Facebook ads:

Try Hootsuite for free

13. Focus on lifestyle

“This is a house, it has 3 bedrooms, and a roof, and…” Yeah, buyers deep into their search may gloss over the generic details after a few weeks. Listing ads are important, but try changing things up by creating real estate Facebook ads focused on the lifestyle around the home, versus the home itself.

Is it close to Disneyland? Are there 4 coffee shops within walking distance? Are the world’s very best tacos a mere 5 minutes away?! These are the things people care about.

I can almost smell the forest and picture myself dipping my toes in the pond after reading this listing aimed at nature lovers:

Source: Premier Real Estate Services on Facebook

• Allows people to visualize themselves living in that home and neighborhood, taking advantage of those amenities.

Bonus: Get the Facebook advertising cheat sheet for 2022. The free resource includes key audience insights, recommended ad types, and tips for success.

Facebook ads for real estate best practices

Optimize for mobile.

Your ads should look great across all devices, but it’s especially important to ensure they’re mobile friendly. 76% of buyers use a mobile device — phone or tablet — to look for listings and agents, with Millennials doing so twice as much as older generations.

First off, ensure you’re using the correct Facebook ad image size . Then, consider mobile behavior.

For example, 85% of mobile users watch videos with the sound off. Ensure you have captions for any spoken content (which also makes your content more accessible ), or create video ads that don’t rely on sound to get your point across.

Run A/B tests

As with sales strategies and home staging, trends on social media change, too. Don’t be afraid to try out different types of Facebook ad content, or style of images or videos, to find out what works best for you.

The easiest way to try something new is to A/B test your Facebook ads. Create one ad the way you normally would, then create another version of it with one thing different.

Why just one thing? Because if you change too much at once, and the new ad converts higher than the regular one, that’s great… but you won’t know exactly why the new ad worked so well.

For an A/B test, try changing these things. Remember to test just one at a time.

• The caption copy
• Text in the actual Facebook ad
• Your brand voice
• Visual style or layout
• The call to action
• Who you’re targeting
• Your budget

Check our complete social media A/B testing guide for a step-by-step process to follow.

Track results

How can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? Cliché and true.

Tracking your growth over time is vital to figuring out what works to bring in the best results. It’s also motivating as heck to visually see your progress over time.

What should you track? First, the basics:

• Follower count
• Average engagement rate

And for Facebook ads, the basics are:

• Impressions
• Clicks and/or leads generated
• CPC (cost per click)
• CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions)
• ROAS (return on ad spend)
• Conversion rate

Finally, how do you keep track of all this?

You can either remember to log in to Meta Business Suite and click around the various analytics reports to find the numbers you need to know… or find everything you need instantly inside your Hootsuite dashboard.

Hootsuite Analytics brings all your social profiles together (including Facebook ads if you’re an Enterprise user) so you can see an overview of the most important metrics across all your accounts in one place. You can also dive deep into a specific account or create your own custom reports that auto-update 24/7/365 while you’re out serving your clients.

Wondering how often to track your analytics? What each metric means? How to turn analytics numbers into real strategic improvements?

Find out all that and how to incorporate social media analytics into your routine.

Use automation

The best thing social media can do for your business is bring you real estate leads. But the best thing you can do is spend as much time as possible with your clients. Automating your social media tasks allows you to do both.

Think you don’t have time to learn deep Facebook ads strategies, or manage campaigns? Not to worry: Hootsuite does it for you.

Besides planning, scheduling, and publishing all your social media content, Hootsuite can automatically create Facebook ads from your existing content. Yep, this is the absolute easiest way to get started with Facebook ads for real estate.

The Hootsuite Auto Boost feature automatically identifies and boosts posts that meet specific criteria. Check it out, and how to set up automatic Facebook ads in 6 minutes:

If you’re ready to take charge of your own ad campaigns, try Hootsuite Social Advertising . Create custom Facebook ad campaigns — plus Instagram and LinkedIn, too — and see the analytics, ROI, and results of both your organic and paid content together.

Finally: one place to do everything you need to on social media, and instantly see how it’s working. *exhales in tranquility*

Try advanced targeting

If you’re ready to get nerdy, Facebook ad targeting can save you a ton of money. By targeting your ads, you’ll reach less people, but you’ll only be paying to reach the ones you want.

Fair warning: Targeting Facebook ads is tricky if you’re new to social media advertising. If you’re a beginner, I’d recommend using Facebook’s automated targeting options, or let Hootsuite auto-boost your Facebook posts .

Real estate Facebook ad targeting options include:

• Location (country, state, or city)
• Behavior targets, such as people interested in or who follow real estate related Facebook Pages, such as Realtor.com, MLS, or many other options

Ready to dive into targeting? Find out how in our complete guide to Facebook advertising .

Hootsuite is a realtor’s BFF with all the content scheduling, publishing, and analytics tools you need combined with automatic Facebook ads and campaign management — across all your social accounts, all in one place.

Get Started

Get new clients and close more deals with Hootsuite, the #1 social media management tool for real estate agents .

Become a better social marketer.

Get expert social media advice delivered straight to your inbox.

As an ex-agency strategist turned freelance WFH fashion icon, Michelle is passionate about putting the sass in SaaS content. She's known for quickly understanding and distilling complicated technical topics into conversational copy that gets results. She has written for Fortune 500 companies and startups, and her clients have earned features in Forbes, Strategy Magazine and Entrepreneur.

Related Articles

How to Generate Leads in Real Estate: 22 Foolproof Tips

Working in real estate means you’re always on the go. We’ve got 22 great ways to help you generate leads and connect with new audiences.

The Complete Guide to Marketing Real Estate on Social Media

These social media real estate tips will help you become an unstoppable lead-generating machine.

The 7 Best Social Media Platforms for Real Estate Marketing

Learn how and why these 7 social media platforms will help you build your real estate business.

26 Real Estate Social Media Post Ideas to Get New Clients

Snap, share, sell. Wish it was that easy? Use these real estate social media posts to attract new clients (buyers and sellers).

Facebook Marketing for Real Estate *Full* Case Study: $50k in Commissions, 700+ leads!!

In this video and article, I'm going to give you something very different than what you’re used to. My goal here is to basically create the definitive case study for how to generate maximum ROI, for real estate, using Facebook and Google marketing. Just pure, unadulterated value.

Education Facebook Marketing Realtor Success Tips

Finally, an amazing resource??

Nelson here from AgentFire.com. If you’re like me and you’ve tried searching for articles or videos on real estate marketing strategies for Facebook and Google – you already know that it’s slim pickings. Everything I found (and believe me, I looked) seemed to be vapid, superficial type content with vague suggestions and limited to no supporting evidence.

So in this video and article, I’m going to give you something very different than what you’re used to. My goal here is to basically create the definitive case study for how to generate maximum ROI , for real estate , using Facebook and Google marketing. Just pure, unadulterated value.

If you get to the end of this article/video and feel like you’re not walking away with multiple gems that have the potential to dramatically improve your online real estate marketing, then I will personally bake and mail you a cookie (you pay the shipping & handling).

Now with that said… shall we begin? ???

$2500 and 2 months

I first had the idea to create this case study a few months back.

Anyone that knows me knows that I love a good challenge. My  life is basically one big challenge (I’m currently making a documentary about my relentless but measured approach to achieving my potential in my physical, mental, spiritual, business, and a 2nd language). So I couldn’t just make a simple case study… instead I needed a really challenging scenario.

And here it is: We decided that we would take a budget of  $2500 dollars and a time frame of 2 months – and challenge ourselves to generate the highest ROI possible using Google and Facebook marketing.

Put in other words, “here’s $2500, you’ve got 2 months to generate the most ROI that you can… GO”

Our Client: Janie Howard

Did I mention that I like challenges? 🙂 To make this even  more interesting, we decided to pick a client from one of the most competitive markets in the entire USA. 

Meet Janie Howard – she’s a really really good human being, and she’s also the owner of Woodleaf Realty, a small brokerage located in the ultra-competitive market of Colorado Springs, CO.

Janie’s overall experience when it comes to online marketing and ad-spend is very reminiscent to what I’ve heard over the last year from practically every agent I’ve discussed online with – let me know if this sounds similar to you:

• Doesn’t really know where to start when it comes to marketing their website
• Has spent money on Zillow and not happy with the ROI
• Mixed to little results in other online marketing attempts

Despite her best efforts to generate leads for her team, Janie was not finding success. If you want more insight into her overall experience with us, you can read her review below. Her websites are woodleafrealty.com  and more recently  coloradospringsmilitaryhomes.com  (which we launched after the success of the campaigns we’ll be discussing in this article / video, and mayyy be the subject of another case study like this one if enough people ask for it… more on that at the end of this article!)

Our Results – A Quick Summary

With the $2500 budget that we had to work with, $2300 of the budget was allocated to Facebook marketing. From that we were able to generate over 768 leads , with some other pretty insane stats: $.38 cent cost per click , $2.98 cost per lead , and a 3.647% click through rate!

In this snapshot we’re showing our overall results for Facebook Ads , which span 14 different campaigns (including campaigns where tweaks were made).

The remaining part of the budget ( $200 ) we allocated to Google Remarketing. There we were able to generate 472 clicks at .44 cents per click .

This was all done in just a 2 month span.

Now, based on all of the closed deals that we’ve been able to link directly to these campaigns, Janie and her team have been able to close over $50,000 in net profits from real estate commissions – that represents a 20x ROI!

And what’s more – this number does not include profits from new deals over the next months and years that Janie will close thanks to our carefully executed drip email and remarketing campaigns…. The actual ROI when all is said and done will be even higher!

How we Researched

Colorado Springs is an interesting market as it’s got a very wide range demographically speaking – first-time homebuyers, new construction, people looking to upsize, people looking to downsize and military relocation, just to name a few.

Given that we ourselves were not familiar with the area, the first thing that we did was sit down with Janie to discuss her market and to get a general idea on where she felt that the best opportunities might be.

After gaining insights and understanding about the market from Janie herself, we did some keyword research, as well as competitor research to see what other agents in the area who were really getting busy with online marketing were doing.

Pro Tip: Your goal when doing research, should never explicitly be to just get a list of keywords to target. Instead it should be to identify where the real opportunities are within your market and develop a plan of how to best capitalize on them . Here’s how we did that within Janie’s market.

Keyword Research

For keyword research, my favorite tool is SEM Rush – without question. It gives you info for both PPC and organic traffic and can help identify both short and long tail keyword opportunities.

This is a paid tool, so if you want to use a free tool, my recommendation is to just use Google’s Keyword Planner .

Once we had a list of keywords and phrases that we felt represented the best ROI opportunities, it was time to check out the competition a bit.

Competitor Research

To check out competitors we used a tool called Spyfu – if you’ve never heard of this, you now at least owe me a cup of coffee ☕.

What we love to do when working on a campaign is to first check out what savvy local area competitors are doing with their PPC keywords – Spyfu delivers all of that information to you on a platter. So if you’ve got a savvy competitor that’s absolutely killing it with their online marketing, you can check out not only which keywords they’re using, but roughly how much budget they’re allocating to those keywords.

It’s generally pretty fair to infer that if a competitor is dumping a massive amount of coin into a specific keyword or set of keywords, it’s probably because it’s working for them. This is my top piece of advice when it comes to formulating the initial strategy for your own campaigns!

Now the other possible scenario here that you have to be careful to watch out for, is that your competitors have no idea what the hell they’re doing and are just arbitrarily dumping massive amounts of dollars into a campaign just hoping for a positive result. That may sound like a joke, but this actually happens a lot… like… literally more than 50% of the time. This is why I said to focus on ‘savvy’ local area competitors.

If you’re checking out PPC for “Brenda”, the local agent whose built up a massive referral network but doesn’t know how to text message, whose now running her own online marketing campaigns, don’t expect to find any gems .

Spyfu isn’t free, but if you’re going to be running your own campaigns, I can’t recommend it enough. Even if it’s just for this one feature.

Niche Markets With Facebook Marketing

So after doing our research and considering everything, we determined that to start, we were going to focus two individual niche markets that we felt represented the best opportunity to generate high ROI. Those markets were:

• First Time Homebuyers

We decided that the best platform to attack these niches was Facebook , which we’ll explain here in a second. First let’s give you a macro perspective of exact formula that we used (and that you can re-use) to generate maximum ROI on the campaigns that we ran.

The Simple Formula for High ROI Real Estate Ads

Below is a macro level overview of the exact formula we used to generate massive ROI for Janie. It’s also what we feel confidently is the  best  way to find success specifically with Facebook focused marketing.

Does that seem like a lot? It’s really not…  and to help you out we’re going to break down each individual step for you and go into vivid detail.

Once you get the swing of things, each one of these steps could be set up and repeated for different target niche markets in just a few minutes. Rinse and repeat!

Let’s go ahead now and show you how we applied this formula to Janie’s first campaign, step by step.

Step 1: Identify a Niche Market That You Can Target

Every real estate market is different, and each one of them has their own unique opportunities. When I say ‘niche’ what I’m referring to is anything deeper than “buyer” and “seller.” Niche markets could include:

• Looking to downsize or upsize
• New Construction
• School Districts
• 2nd Home Markets

The list goes on and on. One of the great things with Facebook marketing, in particular, is that it allows you to target users on an  unprecedented  level – There are diamonds here just waiting to be discovered.

As an example, without a doubt, the most niche campaign we’re currently running for a client right now involves targeting families from South America who have relocated to the Washington DC area for Technology Jobs and are looking to buy! This level of ‘niche’ is entirely possible with Facebook marketing!

In Janie’s case, we determined that the ‘looking to downsize’ market was a great one for us to target because Colorado Springs has a large population of middle-aged homeowners living in large homes that they no longer need, mainly because their children have already left the nest.

With a niche market selected, next  you need to figure out how you’re going to target them…  this is where Facebook Ads TRULY shine! They give you tons of fantastic demographic targeting options that will allow you to really zero in on your niche.

For our ‘downsizing’ campaign, we determined that the people we wanted to see our ads most likely met the following criteria:

Now here’s exactly what we targeted in Facebook:

1.1 Basic Targeting:

• Location : We targeted our ads to a +10 mile radius of Colorado Springs
• Age : We’re targeting a ‘downsizing’ demographic which tends to be an older group, so we targeted 55 and up.
• Language : Anyone that speaks English 🙂 If you’re bi-lingual, you should definitely target any relevant languages.

1.2 Advanced Targeting: INCLUDES

Here are all of the Include  targeting methods we used (users who met this criteria we  included in our audience) along with a short explanation of each one.

• Behaviors > Residential Profiles > Length of Residence > 6+ Years Given that we’re targeting downsizers, we figured that anyone that’s been living in their home for  less than 6 years is going to be much less likely to sell ( according to the National Association of Homebuilders , the average buyer stays in their home for an average of 13 years. )
• Demographics > Home > Home Ownership > Homeowners We obviously want to target people that own homes 🙂
• Demographics > Home > Home Type > Home Value > $500k+

1.3 Advanced Targeting: Excludes

Here are all of the  Exclusions that we setup (users who met this criteria we  excluded from our audience).

• Behaviors > Residential Profiles   > New Mover / Recent Homebuyer Again, since we’re targeting people looking to downsize, we don’t want to be targeting anyone that has recently purchased a home.
• Demographics > Home > Home Ownership > Renters Can’t sell a home that you’re currently renting!
• Demographics > Home > Household Composition > Young adults in home Our ‘ideal’ market consists of older homeowners whose children have left  the home.

1.4 Notable Mention: “Likely to Move”

Facebook does have a targeting option for ‘ Likely to move ‘. However, for whatever reason, we’ve almost always had better success not using it. I wish I had a better explanation but I don’t. Definitely A/B test yourself as your results may be different.

1.5 Notable Mention: “Income and Net Worth”

Financial targeting like ‘income’ and ‘net worth’ have also been invaluable with most of the campaigns we’ve run. For the ‘downsizing’ market though these options weren’t important.

FYI  Google Adwords also allows you to target by income (the only difference is that on Google, you’re targeting by what ‘percentile’ people are in, in regards to highest and lowest incomes).

Step 2: Make Your Offer An IDX Results Page – Call it a “List”

Now while we have had lot of success for campaigns offering guides, buyer/seller rebates, or other methods – these are a bit more involved to get setup.

If you’re looking for a high value campaign that can be setup in minutes, one of the easiest and most effective ways to create an offer with high ROI is to simply use a ‘curated’ IDX results page.

For our ‘downsizing’ market – we achieved this by offering a list of all of the single story homes for sale in the area. To do this, using Janie’s IDX, we simply created a saved search page with the following criteria.

• Property Feature: 1 Level (aka single story homes)
• Location: Colorado Springs

Pretty easy no?

Step 3: Create Compelling Ads

Here are our first set of ads for the ‘Looking to Downsize’ campaigns that we ran.

3.1 The Logic Behind These Ads

We decided to go with a Facebook Carousel Ad. This ad type allows you to show up to 10 images (or videos), along with headlines, links, and call to action, on individual cards.

We chose this format because we had many different ‘value points’ that we wanted to feature in our ads, and a carousel format allowed us to succinctly feature a different ‘value point’ on each individual card.

As you can see from the above graphic some of those were:

• Our List of Single Story Homes This is the main ‘value offer’ for our demographic – that we’ve created a ready-made list of single story homes ready for them to view – so it was important that we feature it in the actual copy for our ads.
• Updated Every 15 Minutes Janie’s IDX – ShowcaseIDX – updates their results every 15 minutes or so, which is actually a huge advantage over other MLS’s and portal sites like Zillow. We wanted to feature that as a ‘value point’, knowing that consumers always want the most up to date info.
• Sign Up For Updates We understood that many of the people seeing our ads are not quite ready to pull the trigger. For that reason, we wanted to advertise as a ‘value point’ that you’d be able to sign up for daily or weekly updates.

We also tested a number of different Ad Texts – for Carousel ads, Ad Text is the short paragraph above the carousel portion) – Our goal here was simply to present our offer – our list of ranch homes – in a way that effectively resonates with our target audience.

3.2 How to Create Your Own Ads

So, as you can see via the  carousel ad example above,  we didn’t need to do any fancy design work. We simply found some good looking single story home photos of homes Janie has listed in the past, and used those.

First is Fiverr.com – do a search for Facebook Image Ad and click ‘Social Media Design’ from the ‘refine results’ list – you’ll find  tons of great gigs where you can get quality images created for your ads for as little as $5.

Next up, for those who want to create their own ads, is Canva.com . It’s really simple and you can take pre-existing templates, and simply swap out the background image and some text and in just a few minutes, you’ve got an ultra-professional looking ad.

3.3 A/B Testing… Easier Than You Think

If you’re going to  truly get the most out of Adwords/Facebook Ads,  you need to A/B test!!!  I know that sounds scary, now let me show you exactly why it’s not!

Between my company and our clients, I’ve personally managed over $300k in ad spend… and even with all of that experience I still routinely see statistically significant results that make my head spin.

One example of this is one I gave previously – how I’ve had better results generating seller leads when not using the ‘Likely to Move’ Facebook targeting option.

What works in one area may not work nearly as well in another. Desktop ads may convert better in some areas than others – males may convert better than females or vice versa… So A/B testing is really important, and again,  it’s easier than you think!

At the most basic level , you could simply launch 2 or 3 campaigns with different headlines, ad texts, and images. Then, once you have some data, i.e. 50 total conversions, you’ll start to see which campaigns are clearly doing better than others – lower cost per click, lower cost per conversion, higher click-through rates etc – and then you can just put more budget into the stuff that’s working the best.

Here at AgentFire, we use an awesome tool called  AdEspresso . I’d like to share a short story.

When I  first started with Facebook Ads back in 2014, I paid someone $750 to help with AgentFire’s marketing. This person was an idiot, but they did  introduce me to AdEspresso, and for that reason, I consider my $750 money well spent.

AdEspresso’s base price is $49/month and covers the needs of 99% of people reading this article (up to a $3000/month ad budget) – if you’re going to be going to war with Facebook Ads, it’s a weapon you should be armed with.

Here’s a screenshot of a recent campaign we launched for Janie using AdEspresso:

As you can see, we’re testing 2 Headlines, 2 Ad Texts, and 3 Ad Images – it’s really easy to do that right? Then when you’ve got all of your different variations set, you simply publish and AdEspresso will actually mix and match all of those different variations to create individual ads using every possible combination – so in this example, 2 x 2 x 3 = 12 Different Ad Variations – all published with just a single click of a button!

AdEspresso will then track each of those 12 ad variations and show you individual stats for each one, so you’ll know exactly which ones are working and which ones aren’t!

3.4 Keys to Compelling Ads

As far as selecting your ad image and writing the copy for your ad – don’t overthink it.

Your ads should try to achieve a pretty even mix of all of the following:

Grab Attention

Always use a relevant image that’s likely to stand out.

Value Proposition

Once you’ve got their attention, you need to create an enticing enough of an offer to get them to click, but make sure it’s value based and not spammy crap! Don’t advertise something like ‘the secret to getting top dollar for your home’ and then link to a 250 character article that you copied from inman about why they need to work with a real estate agent – you’re just going to make people angry.

Pain Points

Every single niche market has multiple pain points. For example, with our ‘first time homebuyer’ campaigns, we know that finding homes near top school districts is generally a ‘pain point,’ so we leverage that into the copy/offer.

Be Personal

Seriously, make sure you sound like a down to earth human, and  not a used car salesman.

3.6 Emoji Power ⚡

? Fun fact:  in all   of the A/B tests that we ran where one ad copy had emoji’s, and the other didn’t,  the ad with the emoji’s converted better! ???

If you want to quickly sprinkle emoji’s into your ad copy,  check out emojipedia.com   where you can search every emoji known to man – when you find the ones you like, just copy and paste.

Step 4: Create A Simple Landing Page

The landing page is the page that users are directed to  after they’ve clicked one of our ads.

The goal of the landing page is for the user to enter their contact information in exchange for whatever you’re offering (in this case, we’re offering a list of single story homes in Colorado Springs).

We’ve tested many different landing pages for Janie’s campaigns, here are some examples:

4.1 How to Create a Landing Page

So here at AgentFire, we use AF Lead Pages . It’s our killer real estate landing page solution which allows you to create and deploy high converting landing pages that are completely optimized for Facebook and Google Market in just a few clicks.

Our sites also seamlessly integrate with leading 3rd party CRM’s like LionDesk and Followupboss – so of course, to create killer landing pages, my top recommendation is for you to just sign up and see for yourself why this is just one of many industry-leading features that made us the top publicly reviewed real estate solution of all of 2017 – *cough* does this count as a sales pitch? ?

Buuutt, just in case for some odd reason you don’t want to sign up, then I do have a couple of pretty good alternatives to recommend.

Now the top 3 ‘landing page’ builders in the world – and you’ve probably heard of them – are leadpages , instapage , and unbounce .

As for my personal favorite? Definitely instapage.com .

In my most recent visit to instapage’s website,  I wasn’t able to find a way to filter by ‘real estate’ – but if you check their  lead generation templates, you’ll find tons of great real estate landing pages.

Now… for the same monthly price as instapage, you could just sign up for AgentFire and get tons of real estate optimized landing pages -along with a drop dead gorgeous website  loaded with tons of other features ? – but I digress!

4.2: Should you require phone numbers?

This is probably the question I get the  most when it comes to setting up landing pages, and the answer really depends on you.

The reality is that no matter how you slice it, you will get  fewer people that opt-in on your landing pages if you require a phone number.

In Janie’s case – having phone numbers was a critical part of her follow-up process, so we did require them.

However in other campaigns that we’ve launched, where we’ve also had really well crafted drip email sequences setup (more about that later), we’ve seen great results as well.

One important note is that if your landing pages are using Facebook or Google Logins, you  won’t  be able to capture phone numbers… unless…

Here at AgentFire (ok ok, last sales pitch I promise) – we’ve developed a great workaround to that problem.

We’ve built out a  2 step, Social Login –> Phone Number setting, so that when users opt in on your forms via Facebook or Google, we then reveal a  2nd step to collect their phone number. Even if they don’t enter their phone #, we’ve already captured their name and email in the first step!

Step 5: Immediate, Friendly Follow-up

I’m not an expert here so I reached out to Janie for some pointers, and she provided some real gems which I’m going to summarize below:

Follow-Up Immediately

Reaching out to a fresh lead within minutes will almost always trump what you say. In other words, if you respond immediately and it’s a legitimate buyer, it almost doesn’t matter what you say. If you can’t do that, then you should leverage scripts that involve asking questions and offering value.

Use Scripts

Ok so don’t literally have a script in front of you that you read verbatim, but rather develop some sort of intelligent, repeatable approach for how you’re going to follow up with leads depending on the sort of campaign that you’re running. A quick google search for ‘real estate scripts’ will reveal all sorts of great ideas that you can use or incorporate into your own.

Don’t be a Salesman – Show You Care

“People don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.” Introduce yourself in a nice friendly voice and establish very quickly that your objective is not just to secure new business, but rather to provide any sort of value that you can.

Face to Face

If you get the opportunity, set a face to face appointment. The sooner you can transition from ‘unknown phone voice’ to ‘in-person human’, the better.

Automated Personalization

Make sure to leverage CRM’s, drip emails, and set reminders to follow-up so you’re constantly nurturing leads in a non-salesy way.

Step 6: Drip Email

A strong followup or drip email sequence is a  critical piece of the conversion pie. Drip emails are an automated sequence of emails, usually spaced out over days, weeks, and months, that begin to send once you’ve received the lead information.

A strong followup or drip email sequence is a critical piece of the conversion pie. Drip emails are an automated sequence of emails, usually spaced out over days, weeks, and months, that begin to send once you’ve received the lead information.

Our current favorite CRM is LionDesk (liondesk.com) – and that’s the CRM that we use for all of Janie’s lead management and drip email.

By the way guys – we do not have any sort of business arrangement with LionDesk – in fact of all of the companies I’ve mentioned in this article, the only one that we’ve got an affiliate relationship with is ShowcaseIDX.

Now back to CRM, as far as LionDesk goes, there is no other CRM in the market that provides more bang for the buck – for a single agent, you’re looking at $25/month!). Seriously… they rock, and our clients love them too.

For Janie’s campaigns, we set up a 12 Month  drip email sequence (which we do and recommend for all of our campaigns).

For the first week or so, we’re sending roughly an email a day, and from there the campaign becomes much less aggressive.  Every single email tries to provide  value   in some way.

Here’s a quick sampling of what some of those emails look like:

6.1 Important Note on Drip Emails… Be Personal!

Extremely important – make sure that your drip emails  are *not* spammy. 

Over the last few years I’ve been in contact with thousands of individual agents, and very often I find myself enrolled into their drip emails. It never ceases to amaze me the sort of absolute crap some agents send out.

I think most agents have this idea in their head that it’s better to reach out and touch someone with  something than with  nothing.  I can assure you, if the stuff you are sending is generic, templated crap that you yourself would delete with anger if it found it’s way into your inbox… well I’ll let you process that.

That being said, when it comes to drip email, you have to consider what your objectives are. Here are what mine would be:

• Stay top of mind
• Offer / Provide  value
• Demonstrate Expertise
• Sound like I wrote the email myself even though I’ve got it on auto-pilot
• Show enough personality to stand out and maybe crack a smile – people  want to do business with nice people, and a little personality does wonders to break down barriers.

So here’s a good example of a really successful email that I setup for an ebook download.

6.2 Notable Mention: Listing Alerts

Similar to drip campaigns, listing alerts can send automatic emails to people who subscribe to your email list – and are a great tool  especially  for clients who are in the market to buy.

For our clients, this is mostly done through our preferred IDX – Showcase IDX (full disclosure, we’ve got an affiliate relationship with them, but they’re seriously the best IDX available for WordPress hands-down).  When visitors are searching for properties on an AgentFire website using Showcase IDX, they can be prompted to sign up for email alerts on specific listings or property searches that they set up.

The alerts/updates can be set at specific intervals that suit your preference. IE: Daily, Weekly, Monthly  (ShowcaseIDX actually has an instant notification feature which is killer)

Pro Tip:  You should periodically scan the list of prospects that you have receiving listing alerts, and reach out with a personalized email about an individual property (or small group of properties) that you think this person would  love based on the criteria they seem to be favoring. I.e. If you see someone has created an alert for ‘bethel school districts’ – reach out directly with the property or properties you think represent great value.

Step 7: Google Remarketing

*Editors Note* – We did all of our remarketing through Google only , since at the time, we didn’t have much experience with Facebook remarketing, and we didn’t want to waste any of our limited budget testing stuff when we knew we could generate definite results through Google. If we had to go back in time, we’d use a mix of both.

Ok… whew… so we’re going to go into pretty heavy detail here as well. If you’re going through this article in one shot, now may be a good time to grab some more ☕.

I’m also going to make a statement – I believe that used properly,  Remarketing on Facebook and/or Google represents the absolute HIGHEST ROI possible that you’ll see for your marketing dollars.

So first let’s look at how Google Remarketing works:

So, let’s explain this in real basic terms:

If you DON’T have Remarketing Setup:  98% of all website visitors that visit your website are not going to convert into a lead – once that visitor is gone, they’re gone forever.

If you DO have Remarketing Setup:  That 98% of website visitors that didn’t convert are now going to see your advertisements follow them around the internet for a period of up to 180 days as they’re browsing the web – which is a massive second opportunity!

*Important Note*  – What we’re talking about here is  all website traffic . Obviously as you can see in the case of Janie’s campaigns, when you’re running a targeted ad and landing page, you’re going to have  much higher conversion rates (ours was closer to 14%, and would have been even higher if we didn’t require phone numbers).

Bottom Line: EVERY REAL ESTATE WEBSITE SHOULD HAVE REMARKETING SETUP AND RUNNING!@!@!

7.1 Reasons for Remarketing

Bear with me folks, I need to really hammer in how important this is. Let me explain now the specific reasoning for using Remarketing.

Unbelievably Cheap:

I kind of hate saying that, since I do believe that in life, you generally get what you pay for.  Like Ikea furniture, which has never lasted more than a year for me. Anyway, with  all marketing, the  cost  is generally a confluence of numerous factors – one of the biggest ones is how ‘competitive’ the keywords or ad space is.

With Facebook Marketing , you can target people based on their interests, likes, age etc. This is generally casting a pretty wide net.

With Google Adwords , you can target people based on keywords, zip codes or areas, etc. This is generally casting a  decently wide net.

With Facebook and Google Remarketing , you can target  the exact people that visited your website. You’re not casting a net, you’re using a sniper rifle.  By only marketing to such a select group, your costs will be absolute peanuts in the scheme of things. If you’ve got a killer website that’s built to convert, then it makes sense to try to get as many of your visitors  back to your website as possible.

I’m very proud of this analogy, I’m going to have one of our designers turn it into a graphic.

Here’s that Graphic:

Second Chances:

As mentioned above, the vast majority of people who visit your site for the first time won’t turn into a lead. Remarketing gives you a very inexpensive way to get a second crack at them.

Branding & The Subconscious:

If your ads are following them as they browse the web, you’re branding yourself and forming positive subconscious associations with the people seeing them. What ‘type’ of impression you leave will depend on the actual ad itself, as well as how frequently you show it.

We’ve got a client that has such aggressive remarketing that I see his ads literally 100’s of times a day – I’ve never seen anything like it. At first I thought it was poor use of budget, but now I’m rethinking things. I literally see his ads in my dreams. This morning I was looking at a cereal box and it turned into his ad.

He’s become the subject of numerous meme’s in our company slack channels.

We actually had a client write in who said that they visited his website, and I quote ‘now cannot seem to escape him.

That’s powerful, no?

Be There When They’re Ready:

We all know that the buying & selling process can be a long one. A very common scenario is that someone visits your website during the initial stages of their search, and then clicks onto one of your real estate retargeting ads a month later and turns into a lead/deal.

Retarget With A Different Offer:

Let’s say someone visited your site because you were running an ad on Facebook for New Construction properties in a specific neighborhood. Maybe you had 5000 clicks to that page on your website. You can now target those 5000 people with a different but relevant offer.

Ex: ‘Interested in New Construction? – Sign up for my Top 10 List’ or ‘I’m a New Construction Expert – let’s grab coffee and talk new construction real estate’

7.2 Order really nice ads, in less than 5 minutes, for $5

As mentioned previously in this article, if you need some gorgeous remarketing ads created quickly and on the cheap? Check out fiverr.com  and do a search for  remarketing ads , google remarketing, facebook retargeting ads , etc.

Pro Tip:  For Google, you should go with what are called ‘html5’ ads – all this means is that your ads will be  animated instead of  static . For examples of some of the animated html5 ads we had created for Janie’s campaign, check section 7.6 below!

7.3 Which Sizes to Order Your Ads

For Google, you’re going to need to know which ad sizes you want created. Here’s my recommendation, which is based on which ad sizes historically convert the best:

• 250 x 250 – Square
• 200 x 200 – Small Square
• 468 x 60 – Banner
• 728 x 90 – Leaderboard
• 300 x 250 – Inline Rectangle
• 336 x 280 – Large Rectangle

7.4 Brand Remarketing

When it comes to remarketing, my recommendation is to  start with some simple  Brand Remarketing.  This basically revolves around creating ads that communicate hyper-local area expertise and/or social proof.

Later on, if you want to get more advanced with your remarketing, you can run campaigns that focus on some sort of secondary offer .

So ‘ Brand Remarketing ’ is remarketing with the objective of creating awareness and positive sentiment towards your ‘brand’.

‘ Secondary Offer Remarketing ‘ would be something like remarketing a ‘Free Buyer Guide’ type ad to people who have visited IDX pages on your website.

7.5 Ad Frequency and Duration

When setting up your remarketing ads, two of the most important decisions are  how many times per day and for  what duration your ads should show.

My recommendation would be to show your ads at  least once per day, for a period of 6 months.

Note:  I used to be under the impression that you shouldn’t  spam your ads, but I’m actually starting to change my position on that. Remarketing is so cheap comparatively speaking, and good brand remarketing should effectively  cement the association relationship between ‘you’ and ‘Real Estate’ that your site visitors have in their head. You should experiment with different ad display frequencies yourself to see which works best!

Pro Tip : Gorgeous ads are  cheap if you order them through Fiverr. To keep your ads from becoming repetitive, I recommend having multiple ad sets created, and switching them up every month or two.

7.6 A/B Test Your Remarketing Ads Too!

When you’re getting your ads created, you’ll often have the option to include a few minor variations.

Have some fun and test here. In the example below you’ll see we tested using  Discover and  Learn More   for the button CTA – and it turned out that  Discover got more clicks at a lower cost!

Looking back – what would we have done differently?

I don’t think that there’s much that we would have done differently, but I’ll mention two things.

Google Adwords

I do think that under  normal circumstances (i.e. not a fixed budget and 2 month time frame) what makes most sense if you’re going to be setting up your own campaigns, is to actually  start with Google Adwords. It’s more predictable and easier to reliably produce results, especially in the early goings. Once you find keywords and landing page combinations that you’re really hitting on, that’s when you should start diving into some niche type campaigns on Facebook.

Google Remarketing Secondary Offer

The Google Remarketing that we did for Janie’s campaigns was ‘general branding’, which is great and definitely worked well – however I would have also liked to test a bit more ‘secondary offer’ type stuff.

An example of that would have been, for anyone that visited the ‘first time homebuyer’ landing pages – to have done remarketing with an ad graphic and landing page offering a ‘free first-time homebuyer in person consultation’ or something along those lines.

By the way…

If you’re in the market for a cutting edge real estate website, why not quickly check out our complete tour overview video  on our tour page and see for yourself all of the ways that an AgentFire can improve your brand and hyper-local presence, generate more leads, and close more deals.

I started this company in my parent’s basement back in 2013, and heading into 2018 we’re now a team of 30+, with hundreds of satisfied clients across the U.S. and Canada. We were also the top publicly reviewed real estate solution of all of 2017 (based on all available public reviews, minimum of 50 reviews) – our product has  never been better, and the best is yet to come.

New for 2018 are our AgentFire Spark Sites , which have  all of the same features and functionality  as our custom websites, and at a fraction of the cost.

Seriously, do yourself a favor, take just a few minutes and check us out !

Closing Thoughts

Welp… we’ve reached the end! I really tried my best here to provide as much value as possible, I really hope you guys feel that I delivered on that promise.

As I mentioned earlier, if you have any comments/questions/things you want to see more of or explained better, just let me know in the comments for this video!

If you guys enjoyed this – then I’ve got some ideas for ‘deep dive’ type articles and videos that I’d like to explore moving forward – for example, I’d love to do a full case study on Google Remarketing – but I’d love to hear your suggestions first.

With the tremendous success of the campaigns detailed in this case study, we’ve now launched coloradospringsmilitaryhomes.com where we’re going to wage all-out war (pun intended) on the ‘military relocation’ niche in Colorado Springs. This is a tricky niche where we see tremendous opportunity, so maybe we’ll do a case study for that with much more of a Google Adwords if enough people ask for it!! 

Lemeno and best of luck in your own personal online marketing efforts! ?

31 Real Estate Slogans to Inspire You

If you want your brand to stand out in your hyperlocal market, you MUST have a strong real estate slogan. A good slogan can illustrate your mission, s…

We help agents, teams, and brokerages better achieve digital success.

SALES & SUPPORT

Accessibility

Accessibility modes, readable experience, visually pleasing experience, easy orientation, integrations.

Stay Ahead of Your Competitors!

🔥 Get the hottest real estate marketing strategies 1x per week + 🎁 our Ultimate Drip Email Bundle as a free gift!

• Email Address

(*we respect your privacy and will never share your information)

Case Study: How Dan Henry Turned $441 in Facebook Ads into $900,000 in Real Estate Sales

By the leadpages team    |    published jun 24, 2016    |    updated nov 17, 2023, by the leadpages team.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to discover truly innovative marketing tactics within a certain industry.

Take marketer and entrepreneur Dan Henry . By this point in his career he’s done just about everything you can do in online marketing. But when he first started out, he was simply looking for an escape route from his job delivering pizzas.

His first attempts at affiliate marketing led to several successful e-commerce and brick-and-mortar businesses, which eventually led to managing complex campaigns for all sorts of clients looking to get leads more effectively online.

One of Dan’s recent clients was a real estate company looking to sell out a large new condo development—and that’s where Dan got really creative.

Dan himself has provided one more special resource for you to take away from this post, so keep reading to make sure you get everything you need to take action on the insights you’ll find here.

In this article:

Step 1: flip the traditional real estate marketing formula, dan’s facebook advertising strategy, real estate success with leadpages, what’s next for dan, how to use dan’s strategies in your own real estate marketing.

The usual thinking on selling homes goes like this: list your properties everywhere, hold an open house, and make sure tons of people show up to increase your chances of finding buyers fast.

To Dan Henry, that seemed downright inefficient.

“I’m the king of unusual. I do not do anything like anybody else,” he proclaimed when I spoke with him to find out more about his campaign.

In this case, rather than reaching for standard real estate marketing tactics, he got inspired by another industry: nightclub marketing. Before taking on clients, Dan had used Facebook ads to successfully launch new nightclubs, and he saw an opportunity to reach this real estate company’s target audience of millennials and downtown professionals with some of the same strategies.

So, he said, “Instead of an open house, we said it was a VIP event. We had drinks, it was a lounge setting, it was very relaxed."

Guests at the VIP event

With this strategy, Dan transformed the standard sales process. Instead of being shoppers subjected to a pitch, customers became prospective party guests hoping for an invite. The opt-in button became a velvet rope—and all they needed to do to reach the other side was to provide their contact information.

Before this point, however, Dan had to spread the word about this exclusive VIP event to the right audience. And for this, he exclusively used Facebook Ads.

That was an especially smart choice due to the platform’s advanced targeting. Dan started by setting up audiences for the two groups his client was most eager to attract: millennials who lived in apartments nearby, and well-paid professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, who worked downtown.

Some of the Facebook Ads audiences Dan targeted

Young apartment-dwellers saw ads reminding them that they could be putting their rent money toward owning a home, while nearby professionals were targeted with more general messages about the new convenient and luxurious housing option they now had close to their jobs.

Two of the Facebook Ads Dan used during the campaign

In some cases, Dan was ultimately able to get leads from Facebook Ads for as little as $2 each—though he cautions against using CPL as the be-all, end-all metric for short-term campaigns like this:

“It’s not just about getting these leads, it’s about figuring out who buys the most. So say you sell 10 condos to millennial apartment owners, and your average lead cost is $2. But if average lead cost is $10 for a doctor, but doctors bought 30 condos—I would rather pay the $10 and sell more condos. That cost per lead is not that big a difference when you’re selling something that’s so high-ticket.

In the first phase of this campaign, Dan spent $441 on ads—which led directly to $900,000 in condo sales. Those buyers started as cold traffic on Facebook and ended up as VIP event guests—and, eventually, homeowners.

Let’s take a closer look at what happened in between.

At every step of the way, Dan kept his landing pages simple. Here’s the Leadpage he used to ask visitors from Facebook to claim their VIP ticket:

“I don’t think a landing page makes someone download anything,” he says. “A landing page should simply not get in their way … They already clicked through from your ad because they want what you offered, so the best thing you can do is not mess that up.”

Dan looks for simple, single-fold templates that make the transition from the Facebook ad to the opt-in as swift and seamless as possible. He’s found that Leadpages’ templates are the highest-converting pages of any he’s tried precisely because of their simplicity: “They either click the button or they don’t.”

In fact, the templates themselves got notice when he started using Leadpages to promote his webinars—“I paid for my Leadpages membership in about 24 hours,” he said. Attendees would ask him what software he used to create the webinar page, and he had his Leadpages affiliate link at the ready to give them so they could try it themselves.

Leadpages’ Lead Notifications feature was also useful to Dan in this campaign. The client wanted to use their own ESP and handle follow-up on their own, so once someone opted into the landing page, Dan would automatically receive an email with their contact data that he could simply forward to the real estate company. From there, the company could reach out however they saw fit.

In the meantime, new leads were taken to a thank you page that worked to expand Dan’s reach even farther. He says:

“I have a little trick on the thank you page where I ask them to share, and instead of linking to the landing page, I link to the Facebook post. That way they get the whole experience. I used to just send them to the landing page, but the conversion rate was like 5%, which is no good. So instead I took them to the beginning.”

It’s an important lesson: when you’ve constructed a sequence that works, make sure you’re preserving all its most effective elements when you scale it up.

“Everybody wants to hear about this campaign because of the amount of money it generated,” says Dan, but he notes that it’s not the only successful strategy he employed for this client. After the initial week and the high-converting VIP event, he kept fine-tuning his approach, targeting slightly different audiences, and setting up opt-in pages for downloadable resources specific to the condo development.

If he had to do it all over again, there are a couple of changes he’d make. If it were up to him, real estate agents would be calling new leads to confirm their RSVP and remind them about the event—something he thinks could have dramatically increased event attendance.

He’d also make sure staffing levels on the client’s side were sufficient to handle the volume of new leads coming in. Being overwhelmed by leads is a pretty good problem to have, but it’s a problem nonetheless if you miss out on opportunities just because there aren't enough hours in the day.

Despite his remarkable success, it’s likely Dan will be handling fewer campaigns for clients in the future. After applying many of his favorite Facebook marketing strategies to promoting his own webinars, he’s planning to shift more of his attention toward educating other entrepreneurs.

Why? Dan explains it this way: “My wife said to me, ‘Once a business succeeds, you immediately sell it. Why is that?’ And I said, ‘Well, once a business succeeds, I’m bored with it.’ And she was like, ‘Well, why don’t you teach? That way you could have a new business to mess with every day.’ I thought, wow, that’s a good idea.”

Soon he’ll be releasing a course called Facebook Ads for Entrepreneurs, but in the meantime, he was happy to share a few words of advice for real estate marketers who want to try a similar campaign.

Underlying everything Dan’s done is a laser focus on customer psychology. He doesn’t geek out on conversion-rate optimization strategies; he’s not one to snap up shiny new tools that promise the possibility of a few new leads here and there.

As a consequence, his advice is easy for even newer marketers in less digital-savvy industries to grasp and use—because anyone has the ability to research and discover what motivates their desired customers.

Here are a few of his top tactics:

• Follow the “Rule of 10:” Sometimes the insights that seem simple turn out to be hard-won. Dan didn’t come up with his winning formula overnight.“I spent $16,000 over the past few years figuring out Facebook ads with trial and error,” he says. “At the end of the day, I realized: it’s not about the Facebook ad, it’s not about the button. It’s about your customer. I call it the Rule of 10: the ad itself is only responsible for 10% of the success or failure of a Facebook ads campaign. Instead, focus more on the 90%”—that is, crafting an offer your customers will truly want.
• Use early successes to improve your campaigns: "We actually got some footage from the first VIP event, and I edited it together and used it in a promotional video," Dan says. Whether you're shooting video, collecting social media comments, or simply receiving testimonials from your first few clients, you can often make immediate use of them by incorporating them into your landing pages or ads. Then, watch your success snowball.
• Above all, make your opt-in offer unique: “Most of the time real estate companies will use pre-made landing pages and ways to get leads—all these rehashed ideas,” says Dan. “I don’t believe in that. When I take a client to get real estate leads, the entire campaign—the video, the landing page—is tailored to them . So I wouldn’t say, ‘Download this PDF on how to get a house for a good price,’ I would say, ‘Hey, would you like to download a PDF on the best floorplans in downtown Houston that have a skyline view?’ or ‘Download our complete inventory of 3-bedroom homes that allow pets.’“With this real estate campaign, we asked people to download a floorplan. And I think by personalizing it and making it unique, you completely stand out … People think, ‘Oh my god, there’s a human being with blood and veins behind this.’ And that’s why I have such high conversion rates.”

Have you discovered any unorthodox real estate marketing techniques that work online? Share them in the comments!

Share this post:

Curious about Leadpages?

Try it free for 14 days

Create web pages, explore our integrations, and see if we're the right fit for your business.

Popular Posts

The Future of Content Creation is Here—Introducing Image Generator and Writing Assistant

How to Create a High-Value Lead Magnet in 30 Minutes or Less

Best Lead Generation Landing Pages: Examples with Critiques and Optimization Checklist

What Makes a Small Business Successful? Our Insights After A Decade of Working With 434K Entrepreneurs

11 Facebook Case Studies & Success Stories to Inspire You

Published: August 05, 2019

Although Facebook is one of the older social media networks, it's still a thriving platform for businesses who want to boost brand awareness.

With over 2.38 billion monthly active users , you can use the platform to spread the word about your business in a number of different ways -- from photos or videos to paid advertisements.

Because there are so many marketing options and opportunities on Facebook, It can be hard to tell which strategy is actually best for your brand.

If you're not sure where to start, you can read case studies to learn about strategies that marketing pros and similar businesses have tried in the past.

A case study will often go over a brand's marketing challenge, goals, a campaign's key details, and its results. This gives you a real-life glimpse at what led a marketing team to reach success on Facebook. Case studies also can help you avoid or navigate common challenges that other companies faced when implementing a new Facebook strategy.

To help you in choosing your next Facebook strategy, we've compiled a list of 11 great case studies that show how a number of different companies have succeeded on the platform.

Even if your company has a lower budget or sells a different product, we hope these case studies will inspire you and give you creative ideas for your own scalable Facebook strategy.

Facebook Brand Awareness Case Studies:

During the 2017 holiday season, the jewelry company Pandora wanted to boost brand awareness in the German market. They also wanted to see if video ads could have the same success as their other Facebook ad formats.

They began this experiment by working with Facebook to adapt a successful TV commercial for the platform. Here's a look at the original commercial:

The ad was cut down to a 15-second clip which shows a woman receiving a Pandora necklace from her partner. It was also cropped into a square size for mobile users. Pandora then ran the ad targeting German audiences between the ages of 18-50. It appeared in newsfeeds and as an in-stream video ad .

Results: According to the case study , the video campaign lifted brand sentiment during the holiday season, with a 10-point lift in favorability. While Pandora or the case study didn't disclose how they measured their favorability score, they note that the lift means that more consumers favored Pandora over other jewelers because of the ad.

Financially, the campaign also provided ROI with a 61% lift in purchases and a 42% increase in new buyers.

Video can be memorable, emotional, and persuasive. While the case study notes that Pandora always had success with ads and purchases, the jeweler saw that a video format could boost brand awareness even further.

In just 15 seconds, Pandora was able to tell a short story that their target audience could identify with while also showing off their product. The increase in favorability shows that audiences who saw the ad connected with it and preferred the jeweler over other companies because of the marketing technique.

Part of Pandora's success might also be due to the video's platform adaptation. Although they didn't create a specific video for the Facebook platform, they picked a commercial that had already resonated with TV audiences and tweaked it to grab attention of fast-paced Facebook users. This is a good example of how a company can be resourceful with the content it already has while still catering to their online audiences.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame , a HubSpot customer, wanted to boost brand awareness and get more ticket purchases to their museum. Since they'd mainly used traditional customer outreach strategies in the past, they wanted to experiment with more ways of reaching audiences on social media.

Because the museum's social media team recognized how often they personally used Facebook Messenger, they decided to implement a messaging strategy on the Hall of Fame's official business page.

From the business page, users can click the Get Started button and open a chat with the Hall of Fame. Through the chat, social media managers were able to quickly reply to questions or comments from fans, followers, and prospective visitors. The reps would also send helpful links detailing venue pricing, events, other promotions, and activities in the surrounding area.

Since the Messenger launch, they claim to have raised their audience size by 81% and sales from prospects by 12%. The company claims that this feature was so successful that they even received 54 messages on an Easter Sunday.

Being available to connect with your audiences through Messenger can be beneficial to your business and your brand. While the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame boosted purchases, they also got to interact with their audiences on a personal level. Their availability might have made them look like a more trustworthy, friendly brand that was actually interested in their fanbase rather than just sales.

Facebook Reach Case Study:

In early 2016, Buffer started to see a decline in their brand reach and engagement on Facebook due to algorithm changes that favored individuals rather than brands. In an effort to prevent their engagement and reach numbers from dropping even further.

The brand decided to cut their posting frequency by 50%. With less time focused on many posts, they could focus more time on creating fewer, better-quality posts that purely aimed at gaining engagement. For example, instead of posting standard links and quick captions, they began to experiment with different formats such as posts with multi-paragraph captions and videos. After starting the strategy in 2016, they continued it through 2018.

Here's an example of one an interview that was produced and shared exclusively on Facebook.

The Results: By 2018, Buffer claimed that the average weekly reach nearly tripled from 44,000 at the beginning of the experiment to 120,000. The page's average daily engagements also doubled from roughly 500 per day to around 1,000.

In 2018, Buffer claimed that their posts reached between 5,000 to 20,000 people, while posts from before the experiment reached less than 2,000.

Although Buffer began the experiment before major Facebook algorithm changes , they updated this case study in 2018 claiming that this strategy has endured platform shifts and is still providing them with high reach and engagement.

It can be easy to overpost on a social network and just hope it works. But constant posts that get no reach or engagement could be wasted your time and money. They might even make your page look desperate.

What Buffer found was that less is more. Rather than spending your time posting whatever you can, you should take time to brainstorm and schedule out interesting posts that speak directly to your customer.

Facebook Video Views Case Studies:

Gearing up for Halloween in 2016, Tomcat, a rodent extermination company, wanted to experiment with a puppet-filled, horror-themed, live video event. The narrative, which was created in part by their marketing agency, told the story of a few oblivious teenage mice that were vacationing in a haunted cabin in the woods. At peak points of the story, audiences were asked to use the comments to choose which mouse puppet would die next or how they would die.

Prior to the video event, Tomcat also rolled out movie posters with the event date, an image of the scared mouse puppets, and a headline saying, "Spoiler: They all die!"

Results: It turns out that a lot of people enjoy killing rodents. The live video got over 2.3 million unique views , and 21% of them actively participated. As an added bonus, the video also boosted Tomcat's Facebook fanbase by 58% and earned them a Cyber Lion at the 2017 Cannes Lions awards.

Here's a hilarious sizzle reel that shows a few clips from the video and a few key stats:

This example shows how creative content marketing can help even the most logistical businesses gain engagement. While pest control can be a dry topic for a video, the brand highlighted it in a creative and funny way.

This study also highlights how interactivity can provide huge bonuses when it comes to views and engagement. Even though many of the viewers knew all the rats would die, many still participated just because it was fun.

Not only might this peak brand interest from people who hadn't thought that deeply about pest control, but interactivity can also help a video algorithmically. As more people comment, share, and react to a live video, there's more likelihood that it will get prioritized and displayed in the feeds of others.

In 2017, HubSpot's social media team embarked on an experiment where they pivoted their video goals from lead generation to audience engagement. Prior to this shift, HubSpot had regularly posted Facebook videos that were created to generate leads. As part of the new strategy, the team brainstormed a list of headlines and topics that they thought their social media audience would actually like, rather than just topics that would generate sales.

Along with this pivot, they also experimented with other video elements including video design, formatting, and size .

Results: After they started to launch the audience-friendly videos, they saw monthly video views jump from 50,000 to 1 million in mid-2017.

Creating content that caters to your fanbase's interests and the social platform it's posted on can be much more effective than content that seeks out leads.

While videos with the pure goal of selling a product can fall flat with views and engagement, creative videos that intrigue and inform your audiences about a topic they relate to can be a much more effective way to gain and keep your audience. Once the audience trusts you and consumes your content regularly, they might even trust and gain interest in your products.

Facebook App Installs Case Study:

Foxnext games.

FoxNext Games, a video game company owned by 20th Century Fox, wanted to improve the level of app installs for one of its newest releases, Marvel Strike Force. While FoxNext had previously advertised other games with Facebook video ads, they wanted to test out the swipe-able photo carousel post format. Each photo, designed like a playing card, highlighted a different element of the game.

The add offered a call-to-action button that said "Install Now" and lead to the app store where it could be downloaded. FoxNext launched it on both Facebook and Instagram. To see if the carousel was more efficient than video campaigns, they compared two ads that advertised the same game with each format.

Results: According to Facebook , the photo ads delivered a 6% higher return on ad spend, 14% more revenue, 61% more installs, and 33% lower cost per app install.

Takeaways If your product is visual, a carousel can be a great way to show off different elements of it. This case study also shows how designing ads around your audience's interest can help each post stand out to them. In this scenario, FoxNext needed to advertise a game about superheroes. They knew that their fanbase was interested in gaming, adventure, and comic books, so they created carousels that felt more like playing cards to expand on the game's visual narrative.

Facebook Lead Gen Case Study:

Major impact media.

In 2019, Major Impact Media released a case study about a real-estate client that wanted to generate more leads. Prior to working with Major Impact, the Minneapolis, Minnesota brokerage hired another firm to build out an online lead generation funnel that had garnered them no leads in the two months it was active. They turned to Major Impact looking for a process where they could regularly be generating online leads.

As part of the lead generation process, the marketing and brokerage firms made a series of Facebook ads with the lead generation objective set. Major Impact also helped the company build a CRM that could capture these leads as they came in.

Results: Within a day, they received eight leads for $2.45 each. In the next 90 days, the marketing firm claimed the ads generated over 370 local leads at the average cost of $6.77 each. Each lead gave the company their name, email, and phone number.

Although these results sound like a promising improvement, readers of this case study should keep in mind that no number of qualified leads or ROI was disclosed. While the study states that leads were gained, it's unclear which of them lead to actual sales -- if any.

This shows how Facebook ad targeting can be helpful when you're seeking out leads from a specific audience in a local area. The Minneapolis brokerage's original marketing and social media strategies weren't succeeding because they were looking for a very specific audience of prospective buyers in the immediate area.

Ad targeting allowed their posts to be placed on the news feeds of people in the area who might be searching for real estate or have interests related to buying a home. This, in turn, might have caused them more success in gaining leads.

Facebook Engagement Case Study:

When the eyewear brand Hawkers partnered up with Spanish clothing brand El Ganso for a joint line of sunglasses, Hawkers' marketing team wanted to see which Facebook ad format would garner the most engagement. Between March and April of 2017, they launched a combination of standard ads and collection ads on Facebook.

While their standard ads had a photo, a caption and a call-to-action linking to their site, the collection ads offered a header image or video, followed by smaller images of sunglasses from the line underneath.

Image from Digital Training Academy

To A/B test ad effectiveness of the different ad types, Hawkers showed half of its audience standard photo ads while the other half were presented with the collection format. The company also used Facebook's Audience Lookalike feature to target the ads their audiences and similar users in Spain.

Results: The collection ad boosted engagement by 86% . The collection ads also saw a 51% higher rate of return than the other ads.

This study shows how an ad that shows off different elements of your product or service could be more engaging to your audience. With collection ads, audiences can see a bunch of products as well as a main image or video about the sunglass line. With a standard single photo or video, the number of products you show might be limited. While some users might not respond well to one image or video, they might engage if they see a number of different products or styles they like.

Facebook Conversion Case Study:

Femibion from merck.

Femibion, a German family-planning brand owned by Merck Consumer Health, wanted to generate leads by offering audiences a free baby planning book called "Femibion BabyPlanung." The company worked with Facebook to launch a multistage campaign with a combination of traditional image and link ads with carousel ads.

The campaign began with a cheeky series of carousel ads that featured tasteful pictures of "baby-making places," or locations where women might conceive a child. The later ads were a more standard format that displayed an image of the book and a call-to-action.

When the first ads launched in December 2016, they were targeted to female audiences in Germany. In 2017, during the later stages of the campaign, the standard ads were retargeted to women who had previously interacted with the carousel ads. With this strategy, people who already showed interest would see more ads for the free product offer. This could cause them to remember the offer or click when they saw it a second time.

Results: By the time the promotion ended in April 2017, ads saw a 35% increase in conversion rate. The company had also generated 10,000 leads and decreased their sample distribution cost by two times.

This case study shows how a company successfully brought leads through the funnel. By targeting women in Germany for their first series of creative "baby-making" ads, they gained attention from a broad audience. Then, by focusing their next round of ads on women who'd already shown some type of interest in their product, they reminded those audiences of the offer which may have enabled those people to convert to leads.

Facebook Product Sales Case Study

In an effort to boost sales from its Latin American audiences, Samsung promoted the 2015 Argentina launch of the Galaxy S6 smartphone with a one-month Facebook campaign.

The campaign featured three videos that highlighted the phone's design, camera, and long battery life respectively.

One video was released each week and all of them were targeted to men and women in Argentina. In the fourth week of the campaign, Samsung launched more traditional video and photo ads about the product. These ads were specifically targeted to people who'd engaged with the videos and their lookalike audiences.

Results: Samsung received 500% ROI from the month-long campaign and a 7% increase in new customers.

Like Femibion, Samsung tested a multiple ad strategy where the targeting got more specific as the promotions continued. They too saw the benefit of targeting ads to users who already showed interest in the first rounds of advertisements. This strategy definitely seems like one that could be effective when trying to gain more qualified leads.

Facebook Store Visits Case Study:

Church's chicken.

The world's third-largest chicken restaurant, Church's Chicken, wanted to see if they could use Facebook to increase in-restaurant traffic. From February to October of 2017, the chain ran a series of ads with the "Store Traffic" ad objectives. Rather than giving customers a link to a purchasing or order page, these ads offer users a call-to-action that says "Get Directions." The dynamic store-traffic ad also gives users the store information for the restaurant closest to them.

Image from Facebook

The ads ran on desktop and mobile newsfeeds and were targeted at people living near a Church's Chicken who were also interested in "quick-serve restaurants." The study also noted that third-party data was used to target customers who were "big spenders" at these types of restaurants.

To measure the results, the team compared data from Facebook's store-reporting feature with data from all of its locations.

Results: The ads resulted in over 592,000 store visits with an 800% ROI. Each visit cost the company an average of $1.14. The ROI of the campaign was four times the team's return goal.

If you don't have an ecommerce business, Facebook ads can still be helpful for you if they're strategized properly. In this example, Church's ads targeted locals who like quick-serve restaurants and served them a dynamic ad with text that notified them of a restaurant in their direct area. This type of targeting and ad strategy could be helpful to small businesses or hyperlocal businesses that want to gain foot traffic or awareness from the prospective customers closest to them.

Navigating Case Studies

If you're a marketer that wants to execute proven Facebook strategies, case studies will be incredibly helpful for you. If the case studies on the list above didn't answer one of your burning Facebook questions, there are plenty of other resources and success stories online.

As you look for a great case study to model your next campaign strategy, look for stories that seem credible and don't feel too vague. The best case studies will clearly go over a company's mission, challenge or mission, process, and results.

Because many of the case studies you'll find are from big businesses, you might also want to look at strategies that you can implement on a smaller scale. For example, while you may not be able to create a full commercial at the production quality of Pandora, you might still be able to make a lower-budget video that still conveys a strong message to your audience.

If you're interested in starting a paid campaign, check out this helpful how-to post . If you just want to take advantage of free options, we also have some great information on Facebook Live and Facebook for Business .

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

25 of the Best Facebook Pages We've Ever Seen

7 Brands With Brilliant Facebook Marketing Strategies, and Why They Work

10 Brands Whose Visual Facebook Content Tickles Our Funny Bone

9 Excellent Examples of Brands Using Facebook's New Page Design

6 Facebook Marketing Best Practices

Facebook Fan Page Best Practices with Mari Smith [@InboundNow #18]

7 Awesome B2B Facebook Fan Pages

Learn how to maximize the value of your marketing and ad spend on Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram.

Marketing software that helps you drive revenue, save time and resources, and measure and optimize your investments — all on one easy-to-use platform

Case Studies

Case Study: A Real Estate Marketing Success Story

October 29, 2021

For most people, buying or selling property is something that only happens a few times throughout their lives, and it’s a major life event that they don’t take lightly. A real estate business’s survival depends on its ability to have a visible presence whenever and wherever potential clients are looking.

SEO (search engine optimization) marketing and paid advertising are often seen as opposite ends of the marketing spectrum, but with a smart real estate marketing strategy, they’re two sides of the same coin.

Local real estate business drives success with remarketing and SEO

One real estate business, with the help of their Marketing Success Manager and content writer , learned just how impactful it can be to combine the powers of SEO marketing with a strategic ad strategy.

Over a six-month period, they saw more than a million impressions, tens of thousands of clicks and hundreds of conversions.

How did they do it?

Seo and content marketing.

SEO and content marketing have been the main focus for this real estate marketing team, and as it’s their top-performing channel, it’s clear that this strategy has paid off for them.

First, they increased their rankings for relevant keywords by optimizing their website, including title tags and meta descriptions and page content.

They integrated advanced search tools and an IDX feed into their website through IDX Broker , adding value and giving their website visitors a reason to stick around longer.

Second, they added valuable content to their website on a regular basis in the form of blogs and web pages.

Third, they expanded their organic presence to YouTube, where they created informative videos and optimized them with relevant keywords.

This three-pronged organic strategy has helped to drive high-quality traffic to their site effectively and consistently — traffic that stuck around thanks to IDX Broker .

Retargeting ads

Often, when someone finds a real estate business online, they’re still in research mode and not ready to fill out a lead form.

Retargeting ads helped this real estate business stay top of mind with people who had previously visited their website but weren’t quite ready to commit.

You don’t have to choose between content marketing and paid ads. Like most digital marketing channels, they’re better together. A cohesive, multi-channel real estate marketing strategy can drive success across the board, especially when you have a great real estate website with an IDX feed to drive visitors to.

Build, manage and grow your small business with Marketing 360®

Marketing 360® is a singular platform that offers everything you need to build a modern, professional website , launch ads on popular channels , manage all of your contacts, projects and deals , schedule out social media posts , monitor your SEO performance and so much more, plus the marketing team you need to grow your business.

See our plans and pricing.

Account M15846 Screenshots taken on 5/25/21

Originally published on 5/25/21

*Results are based on past client performance. Individual account performance may vary. Results are not guaranteed.

Get Plans and Pricing Below

Case Studies , Reputation Management

Case Study: Property Management Uses Reputation Management to Learn About Customer Satisfaction

Case Study: Furniture Store Sees Conversion Rates Skyrocket

Case Studies , Social Media Marketing

Case Study: Furniture Store Boosts Visibility With Social Media Giveaway

Case Studies , Facebook Ads

Case Study: E-commerce Store Grows with Facebook Ads

Carpet Cleaner Marketing Case Study: Reputation By Design

Case Studies , Design & Branding

Case Study: Moving Company Perfects Website Conversions

Get the know-how to get ahead.

Get business, marketing and sales tips written by experienced industry practitioners. 100% free. Cancel anytime.

• Email address *

Read the e-Newspaper

Read the e-newspaper subscribers only.

• Subscribe to the Tampa Bay Times
• Sign up for the DayStarter morning newsletter
• Donate to the Tampa Bay Times

Keep up with Tampa Bay’s top headlines

Subscribe to our free DayStarter newsletter

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

ONLY AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIBERS

The Tampa Bay Times e-Newspaper is a digital replica of the printed paper seven days a week that is available to read on desktop, mobile, and our app for subscribers only. To enjoy the e-Newspaper every day, please subscribe.