If you’re looking for new ways to drive motivated sellers to your real estate investing business, Facebook Ads is one of the most popular ways to do it.
And there’s agencies willing to charge you thousands of dollars per month to help run your ads.
But when you want to save time & money, add a new skill to your toolbox, and sharpen your lead generation sword, this guide will help simplify the process for you.
We’re going to break down, step by step, how to run highly-effective Facebook Ads so you can supply your real estate investing business with a consistent flow of leads — with examples included.
Let’s kick things off with the most important step of all…
Step #1: Have a Plan
Before you get started running ads you need to develop a plan and some goals.
You also need to make sure the proper foundations have been laid to help capitalize on the traffic you’ll be buying from Facebook.
Without a solid plan and the right foundations in place, you could end up wasting a ton of time — and money when you realize something wasn’t right.
To get the best results from your ads, make sure you’ve covered all your bases.
- Create Your Website — If your website isn’t optimized to handle the traffic, you’ll be sending it into a dead end. That’s incredibly expensive (and not very efficient.) To make sure your website is set up to handle the traffic, use a service like Carrot. It’s the website platform built for real estate investors and the one I’ve personally used for the last 5+ years.
- Manage Your Leads — Having a good CRM in place before you start generating leads is how you accurately track where those leads are in your sales pipeline and make sure there aren’t any deals falling through the cracks. I personally love REsimpli because it’s intuitive and easy to use.
- Use Email Marketing — The name of the game with generating seller leads on Facebook is follow up, follow up, follow up. An effective way to do that is through email and SMS marketing. Since I’m not a copywriter, I rely on OmniDrip to build my follow up campaigns for me and get incredibly high conversion rates with the emails and SMS they write for me.
- Handle Lead Intake — You also want to make sure you’re managing the inbound calls you get from the leads you generate. A service like Call Porter answers my calls for me so I don’t have to sit around answering the phone all day. They book the appointments directly to my calendar, saving me a ton of time and energy.
- Send Direct Mail — Sending mailers out to each of the leads you generate will help ensure they convert from lead to prospect. Since this needs to happen on a consistent basis, I use The Americana and The Comic Card sequences to make sure my messages get noticed.
To make your campaigns as effective as possible, make sure you’ve laid the proper foundations — because how you handle the leads you’ve generated determines whether or not you’ll profit.
Check out the video below to make sure all your bases are covered before you start running ads.
Step #2: Create Your Facebook Ad Account
Now comes the fun part: getting your Facebook Ad account up and running.
The account is free to set up and a relatively simple, straightforward process.
To get started, jump over to Facebook and create a new Page — or skip this step if you already have a Facebook Page for your business.
Go through the steps and give your page a name, a profile picture, a small bio, and your website link.
To make sure you’re staying consistent, you can use the same branding assets from your website.
After your page is set up and looks good, go to the Ads Manager (click here) and click “Create An Ad”.
You’ll then be asked to login to your account. Log in and then you’ll be taken to the page below:
This page is where you’ll create the ads you’re going to use to generate leads.
Now, don’t get overwhelmed when you see everything that’s available. To simplify it for you, you’re looking at the dashboard that will tell you the performance of your campaigns, as well as let you create new ones.
Campaigns are the objection you’re trying to achieve with your ads. You can choose Auction (our favorite), Traffic, or Leads. You’ll want to test different objectives to see which ones work best for your specific campaign goals.
Next are Ad Sets. These are where you’ll define who it is you want to target. Facebook provides extremely detailed targeting options to help you find sellers in your local area.
Finally, the Ads are the actual images, headline, text, links, etc. that you’ll be using for your Facebook Ads. You can preview what those ads look like before you launch them. Keep in mind, too, that you’ll want to test different ads to see which ones perform the best for you.
That’s a basic, simplified overview of how the Facebook Ads platform functions.
Now we can dive into how you go about setting up your first ads!
Step #3: Setup Your Facebook Pixel
The Facebook tracking pixel is something you’ll want to add to your website.
It helps track conversion events — like a seller opting in to receive emails and SMS messages.
When Facebook can track the events that happen on your page, they’re able to help dial in your targeting so you find more people like the person who opted in.
It’s relatively easy to install, too.
To get started, you’ll want to go into your Facebook Ads dashboard and click on “Connect Data Sources”.
(If you don’t see this, you might need to create a Facebook Business ad account.)
Once there, click on “Web” and then choose “Connect”.
Then give your pixel a name related to your business. Click “Create Pixel” once you’re done.
From there, you’ll be asked to input your website URL which you’ll then be required to verify.
After, Facebook will walk you through the rest of the steps for installing your pixel. Once it is set up, you can run ads using the “Leads” campaign goal/objective and Facebook will deliver your ad to people who are most likely to be in your target market.
Step #4: Get Targeting
Next, you’ll want to start setting the targeting in your ad sets.
Facebook provides quite a few different options you can use but, to get started, choose “Traffic” if you didn’t set up your Facebook Pixel or choose “Leads” if you did set it up.
If you set it up, you’ll be given an option to choose the pixel that you want to use for tracking purposes.
You’re also able to set your ad budget and schedule when you want the ads to run.
Finally, you’ll get to start choosing the audience you want to put your ads in front of.
You have a ton of options but we want to keep it as simple as possible.
To do that and make sure you’re getting in front of investors, we recommend ONLY targeting people who live in the market you want to invest in.
Then, select 40+ for the age to ensure you’re targeting older, more motivated sellers and are excluding younger audiences from your targeting.
Now you’re done!
If you operate in multiple different zip codes or markets, you’ll want to create campaigns for each of those markets to properly measure and track the results of your campaigns.
Step #5: Get Creative
The next step is getting creative — and creating the images/videos, headline, text, and CTA you’ll use for your ads.
If you want to see ads that your competitors are running, you can visit their page and then click the “Page Transparency” button. After, click the “Go To Ad Library” and Facebook will show you all of their ads.
To help get your creative wheels spinning, here’s a bunch of examples from successful ads.
The one below is from Cash Offer Option LLC.
Here’s another ad example from USA CASH OFFER.
The one from Cash Jolt below is a great way to get the attention of motivated sellers.
Here’s one from STL Home Offers.
You can see why it’s working: it immediately calls out people wanting to sell their home fast. Then it includes a picture of what one of those homes might look like. Finally, it touches on their “Accelerated Home Buying Process” and invites people to click the button to get a free quote.
Similarly, the ad below from J.R. Heller Real Estate follows the same formula but lets people know they don’t care about the condition of the property.
And this one from “We Buy Ugly Houses” helps people see the expensive repairs that will need to be made if they want to sell it for top dollar and how to get cash for their house now.
This ad from Tallbridge Real Estate focuses on saving homeowners time and money and the frustration of performing repairs, paying fees, and dealing with open houses and showings.
Finally, this ad from Jay Rodriguez is a great example because it immediately calls attention to people who are fed up with paying rent and want to buy something of their own.
As you can see from the examples above, it doesn’t have to feel like learning rocket science.
Keep it as simple as possible, tell them what’s in it for them, and turn your ad on.
Step #6: To Retarget or Not Retarget?
Another element you’ll want to consider for your ad campaigns is whether or not to retarget people who visit your website but didn’t opt in to receive more information.
These retargeting clicks are often cheaper than the initial click you bought so it’s worth considering.
To do this, you’ll need to make sure your Facebook Pixel is installed.
Then, you’ll create a custom audience connected to your pixel:
Select the source for the audience and choose “All website visitors” and give the audience a name.
Then, once you’ve created the audience, you can select the Ad Set category while you’re running your ads. After you’ve finished, you’ll automatically begin retargeting people who visited your website.
This is great for staying in front of sellers who may not be ready to move forward right but may make a decision after they see your message a few times.
Step #7: Review & Iterate
For the last step, you’ll want to remember that dialing in your ad campaigns and getting the types of profitable conversions that are possible on the platform requires consistent review and re-iterations.
Remember too, though, that your ads are only one piece of the puzzle.
The messaging on your website and in your follow up campaigns matters just as much as the messaging you use for your ad campaigns.
Which means you’ll want to consistently test new ideas, angles, headlines, images, videos, etc. until you find one that profitably generates new leads for your investing business.
To do that, jump back to step #1 in this guide and repeat the process, testing and tweaking as you go.
Final Thoughts On Facebook Ads For Real Estate Investors
One of the best ways to generate new leads for your real estate investing business is Facebook Ads.
When you’re running them, though, you can’t forget the Golden Rule: the fortune is in the follow up.
The more you’re able to stay in front of the people you’re targeting on Facebook, the more likely they’ll become leads and then prospects — and finally closed deals.
To stay in front of them, consider using direct mail follow up sequences that are handwritten and personalized to their situation and proven to get higher-than-average conversion rates.
You can take a look at some of the best direct mail pieces we’ve ever used by clicking here now.
Get them plugged into your marketing campaigns and take a holistic, top-down approach to how you get in touch with people and you WILL generate more leads for your business.