Transcript:
Kevin: Alright so we’re going to get started guys, if you don’t know we have Mr. Travis Thom here with us, really one of the very best Facebook marketers in the country in the world when it comes to real estate Facebook marketing. Happened to have spent quite a lot of time with Travis learning lots of his great tips and tricks and secrets on how to generate leads, and we’ve generated thousands of leads through the methods that Travis has taught us, we’ve closed lots of transactions through the platforms that Travis has to offer, so man thank you so much for being with us man this is going to be a great webinar.
Travis: Thank you Kevin I appreciate, thank you and everyone at market real estate for having me here it’s always a pleasure to be around you guys. And so I’d like to go through some slides with you guys today and then do a little of a QnA at the end, I find most of the more of the best questions they asked are the ones towards the end some of the things that I don’t necessarily highlight in the slides, so let’s get started if you don’t mind.
Kevin: Yes, and then by the way if it’s okay Travis if anyone has a question in between, is it okay if they ask and then I’ll just kind of monitor that and let you know if there’s a question?
Travis: Yes definitely it’ll be great.
Kevin: Okay, so feel free to type it in the chat and then I’ll try to get to it. So if you guys real quick can you guys hear, can you see us in here its okay just type yes if you can and no if you can’t yes okay cool, all right.
Travis: Alright, so as Kevin mentioned I’m Travis Thom I’m a Facebook marketing strategist for the real estate industry, my agency we had run a Facebook evidence as an agency and Facebook coaching and training program. Over the past several years we’ve generated over seventy-five thousand leads from Facebook, Instagram and messenger all real estate campaigns we run campaigns all across the world, but the majority of them are within the U.S. So what I’m going to show you guys today is some of what we’ve learned through the methodologies we’ve developed of writing these kind of campaigns, every campaign and every market is a little bit different but I’m going to get to share with you some of the insights that we’ve learned and I’m going to kind of start with some of the journey about where we started.
So about 15 years ago I started in the real estate industry when as a 19 years old I became a real estate agent, and my first three years were really difficult and I wasn’t quite sure what to do, I first started off with the door knocking and postcards and cold calling pretty much everything that you’re supposed to do when you first start. When I was 19 years old everyone in my office was around 60-65 years old and they had their strategies and their ways, I was trying to learn from them but nothing was really sticking and I door knocked on about 2000 homes, the last I think when I was the last two years or the three-year period that was a really difficult dry spell for me. Now I remember going to my family ranch up in the winter it was January 14th in 2003, I was going to go tell them because we were gathering there that I was going to drop out of real estate that I just couldn’t cut it anymore, it was kind of a big deal for me because I grew up in a real estate family. My parents owned an escrow company, my next door neighbor was a custom home builder, my neighbor to the left of us owned a large mortgage company, the person across the street developed large UPS buildings and have leased them out to them and all my babysitter’s were real estate agents, so it was really like in my blood it was in my life that real estate it was what brought in everything to us.
So the fact that I was going to go tell my parents, my family guys I can’t do this anymore was kind of a stressful time, so I was chopping wood with my brother that’s what we did up there and my brother was a graphic designer at the time, he was involved in some marketing and graphic design and as we’re chopping wood I was telling him hey I am trying to get the guts up to tell mom and dad that I’m thinking about quitting and they’ve helped support me here and there and getting my career started but I’m just not doing anything with it, I’ve tried everything. So he said what have you been doing, so well the last year I have been door knocking a lot almost over a thousand homes and he said well so what are you doing when you get to the door, so I don’t do anything I just ask if they’re interested in selling. He said well you need to have something, so well the last 500 homes that have actually partnered with a lender and they had TV condolence, I don’t know if you guys remember some of you might remember kitty condo loans where a parent would cosign with their son or daughter and they would basically give them their credit to kind of piggyback on, to get into a home it’s like a FHA loan is a great offering but we were going to the wrong homes and kind of offering them that, we were targeting the right market with the right message.
So after a couple of days and being up here with my brother he said let’s give it one more shot, let me help you craft something that we can package around that because that’s a pretty good incentive and offer we just need to develop something a little bit better, so this is what we came up with the student and parent guide to home buying or making those four years a very profitable experience. Now we started with this, this was before Facebook right the Facebook ad platform came out in 2006, Facebook was already starting to exist and get around but the ad manager in the platform wasn’t there just yet, so we were leveraging social media but we were also building a small landing page and website for this, and what it was is that this was a print guy that we handed out to people that really went over what the mortgage process was. How to get into a home or how to help your kids get into home so you could build equity and appreciation and then sell it in four years or rent it out whatever it might be, pay off your student loans.
So we resist as reciprocity, as basically educational marketing and what we found out was that a lot of people responded to this type of educational marketing or reciprocity, giving them something in trade and what happened was we created a website around this and we then started getting leads, people started filling it out and trickling and where they were filling out is they’re getting more information to see all the homes that were available that qualified for this type of financing, and of course then I would email them back and say I’ve got the list, we’d love to talk to you more about what we can do. So we started off with this and we started generating leads and I took some of these prospects to condo projects not too far from the local university, and let me kind of back up a little bit here we marketed this to university that had about 26,000 students and my office was nearby, it was kind of like a no-brainer something I hadn’t tapped into yet but it was so glaring and obvious I felt really stupid for not taking advantage of it because it was there right in front of me the entire time.
So we sort of marketing to the people in the university and we found a condo project that had qualifying homes that would match this, and I brought a few buyers to it and then brought some more buyers and it ended up having about six different people come to this development and purchase, and the last one we were doing a walkthrough tour and the counter developer said you know what I’d like to be able to give you the entire project, and we did a small meeting there, the current sales team was there he fired them on the spot they weren’t so happy about that, they walked out and then he said you got four months to sell the entire building up. So I ramped up the marketing on that lead generation to the landing page, about making those four years really profitable and we got more leads and we sold the entire building out in four months.
And then from there it kind of cascaded into another development and some other developers kind of picked up on what we were doing, we would create landing pages for each development and withhold the pricing sheets and we got another one and then another one and then it just kept happening again and again, we eventually had around a hundred million in inventory of condo, townhouse and single-family properties to the point where we built a large sales team around it. We built about 31 people in our team grid of three different companies and we started then leveraging Facebook more and Facebook targeting and really being able to actually dial and specifically to certain people and drive traffic to the landing pages we were creating, so once we did that we started to get a hang of what exactly worked with Facebook marketing.
Now during this time we started to play around then also with retargeting, so I would start to show my ads and properties and all of our success to these other individuals that we were capturing using Facebook targeting, so we would retarget these leads with a combination of emails and ads and people would walk up to me and say Travis I see your billboards everywhere I said thank you that’s great I really appreciate that. Funny thing was that we didn’t have any billboards all we had were just emails and retargeting ads, so it really got us the thing there’s something more to this and so we just really started to do some real actual research on the psychology of conversion and marketing, and this was known as the frequency illusion. The frequency illusion is basically built off of the fact that if you start to see, let’s say an Audi you are shopping for a brand new Audi and you see the same make and model then and the parking lot at the movies or in the grocery store parking lot or on the street wherever it maybe, you start to really see it again and again well, and then we see an ad for like a magazine ad it becomes that much more impactful and relevant.
Same thing with the marketing, we can a still build upon this almost like an accident and then we started to develop it in certain kind of campaigns, so we built top of funnel, middle funnel bottom funnel campaign these are called full funnel campaigns, so tofu, mofu, bofu some of my favorite words there. So top of the funnel is really what you guys want to do when you’re trying to generate leads, this can be flipped and manipulated in a few different ways but your top of funnel activity should be giving some sort of reciprocity, whether it’s a list of homes or the top 10 things you should know before you buy your first home, you know the top 5 profit sucking mistakes homeowners make when they sell their home on their own, whatever it might be you want to give some sort of reciprocity and grab their attention at the very top of the funnel, typically for us that’s using Facebook lead ads which I’ll get into just a little bit for you guys.
But after that you should have some sort of retargeting sequence, if it’s just one ad of if it’s several you need to be able to use some sort of retargeting campaign to show those individuals after the fact that either you are the authority figure in a market, you can do that by using testimonials or your company’s growth and size that you have sold over 2000 homes in the past 5 years or that you’re number one in your market whatever it might be or Zillow testimonials. Positioning yourself for social proof is going to create that affirmation that you are the right choice, you are the right solution, many of you have probably gone online and bought or almost bought something like a pair of boots or whatever it might be and then you see an ad for it again and again and again afterwards and then you might see an ad for the company and other different products that they have.
Very similar kind of methodology except with this the psychology of it is really positioning you as the authority figure in your marketplace and it’s called priming and reminding, and it’s a Facebook methodology that we created, where you prime them at the top by interacting with some sort of ad or blog post or video, and then you remind them again about what they had a bad or bringing them back to your website or somewhere. Then at the bottom of the funnel really that’s geared towards an imitation to act and that could be through text messages or emails whatever it might be, so the ad retargeting formula here, yes Kevin…
Kevin: There’s a question here, so you mentioned retargeting, looks like you’re about to get into that but I guess you’re going to get into it but the question was what are you using for retargeting there’s ad works, there’s…
Travis: Yes, great question so we like to use the Facebook ad manager platform really because it’s all there right within your fingertips, instead of having to go to the third party platforms which there’s ad roll, there’s perfect audience, there’s some of those things where you can then retarget people across the web and Facebook and Twitter so those other social media platforms, but for us we really like to leverage Facebook and Instagram Messenger as far as placements to be able to really show your brand. Inside the ad manager you can create these on the fly really quickly and it gives you more opportunity, so for example let’s say you run a video campaign and you’re running a video of a nice property that is just listed, you can create a custom audience of people that watched only 3 seconds of that video or 50% of that video and then run a campaign to them based on that.
Other types of platforms really don’t allow you to get so finite and granular in terms of what are the actual things that people are looking at, and then how can you retarget them based on that. For instance there’s a part in the ad manager where you can retarget people that spend the most amount of time on your website, so if you have a basic pixel installed on your website imagine being able to targeted the people that keep going back to your property search and looking at all the $3,000,000 enough kind of properties, where we are spending time the most amount of time on that specific URL or that specific page, you can then retarget them. So we like to really go after the low-hanging fruit, you can use any of those different platforms and I suggest that you do but really get a hang of the ad manager itself there’s so many cool tools in there, and with it the ad retargeting really it positions you in this kind of formula, which is positions you as the authority in the market and Frank Kern well-known internet marketer you can reset it best which is pre framing is essentially using marketing to control their opinions and feelings about you, before they even have the chance to read your sales message or interact with you in any way.
So ideally if you’re doing a retargeting right by the time that you actually interact with that prospect on a phone call or text message whatever it is, they should be a warm lead not a cold call it should be a warm lead, it should be warm or engagement they should know who you are and what you do and what you’re all about, because you’ve really kind of indoctrinated them and reframe their mind by showing them videos of things that you do to list homes positioning the testimonials, if you have video testimonials you guys should be leveraging that with ad retargeting. Imagine how powerful it’ll be if someone were to go to a home evaluation landing page.
Fill it out then leave the next day they see a video one of one your clients that says Kevin sold my house in only one week $10,000 that we are asking, we love him one of the greatest people out there in terms of real estate, we suggest that you guys work with him too and then you have a Facebook messenger button right on the bottom that says chat with Kevin now, that’s going to make probably a much larger impact on that person’s decision of who they’re going to hire. And if you get more ads that retarget them later on and then if you have their name and email even better, you’re emailing them and retargeting them it creates that frequency illusion, the relevancy it’s pretty high.
Kevin: Can I add something to that real quick?
Travis: Please.
Kevin: So I think with the power there is if you think about the most successful brands, like let’s talk about Coca-Cola for example, so we see commercials, we see ads, we see billboards, we see Coca-Cola all the time it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to see that commercial I’m going to get up and I’m going to go get a Coca-Cola right, but the idea is that it’s in front of me all the time so that when I see it it’s recognizable and at that point it becomes like you said it’s a warm sort of engagement at that point and it’s kind of being everywhere all the time and so that’s where we need to be focusing as real estate professionals, I mean these major big huge companies are spending billions of dollars just to be seen, so there’s definitely something to be said about that and I think you’re right on the money with it.
Travis: Yes Kevin is exactly right that you need to build an Omni presence with your marketing and Facebook is one of the easiest ad platforms to be able to do that. Google and Facebook make up 80% of the Internet and there’s over 230 million people in the US that are on Facebook, they spend over I think it’s like over an hour a day, an hour and 25 minutes I believe on Facebook and Instagram, so we’re talking almost 12 hours a week that people are on this platform. So in their conversing with friends and messenger on Facebook about we’re thinking about changing school districts, we’re thinking about getting engaged or we just had a baby we’re making these decisions to move, those are the places where then you want to be hyper relevant with selling or buying whatever it might be. So that brand awareness that Kevin’s talking about of Coca-Cola being everywhere, then a good majority of their budget is spent just on brand awareness and really selling their lifestyle.
So everyone’s different on their marketing and what their message is but with ad retargeting you can control the narrative, and the narrative is your own message, your value proposition it’s your chapter book with different retargeting ads you can tell the story over time. And we suggest an acronym that we created called burst for ad retargeting and these key pillars are pretty important to have in your ad retargeting brand story or brand introduction, untapped opportunity, reciprocity, social proof and trust those are the kind of key pillars that you want to have in there. So your brand story could be a video about how you got started in real estate or what your mission is and why you love it, untapped opportunity is something more like see all the open houses that are coming up this weekend, it’s more focused on the opportunity in property centric, and then reciprocity giving them valuable information, giving them information that is on their mind, that’s relevant to their action they took at the top of the funnel.
So if they looked at let’s say a market report for all the homes that have sold in the past six months, you probably want to then follow up with some reciprocity of more information on how to sell your house for more than it’s worth or a constant update on how to increase the value of your home with spending less than a thousand dollars, whatever it might be some reciprocity you get back. Social proof that is going to be how many homes you’ve sold or testimonials, your company growth size any of those things and then trust is really build through then the core messaging of your emails and text messages that go out, and really kind of combining all of that together. So I’m going to kind of go into a brief funnel and show you guys a 30,000 foot view of some of the funnels that we built, I’m not going to get too deep into the weeds here because this is an advanced type of Facebook ad funnel.
You can see in the very far left side it says tofu buyer lead ads, that is where we ramp up eight different Facebook lead ads, generating leads in different markets, sending them to a DX page because you’re promising list of homes, and then from there goes to a custom audience and then you can see the delayed sequence of those ads. Now you don’t have to build something this robust you could just do one lead ad or one video ad whatever it might be, and then have one retargeting ad to all those individuals, just kind of follow the steps that I kind of walked you guys through a little bit here. So some of these buyer lead ads what does it look like right, well homes and condos and townhouses starting at $250,000 we have found that this type of ad copy even though it’s not really romantic and Kevin has seen some of my copywriting he knows that I like to write really kind of more emotional at coffee sometimes, my wife hates it I love it, Facebook has spoken and they like the shorter version as well, so my wife wins with that one.
So with ad targeting you can get a little bit more romantic and infant show empathy through some ad copy, but what we’ve seen through this in generating over 75,000 leads we’ve been able to really split test a lot of campaigns and figure out what works, we see a higher click-through rate when we have animated ads and I can’t animate these ones here for you right now but we kind of move around a little bit to give a brief description on what is on the other side with a call to action. Now we know there’s been studies like a consumer acquisition, is a company that did a hundred thousand Facebook ads they studied a hundred thousand ads and what they found out was that the ad image, the ad creative is responsible for up to 90 percent of the campaign’s performance. So if you’re going to have all the eyeballs on there you want to make sure that you either have some sort of call to action or hyper relevant landmark to the market area that you are in, and a brief summary of what it’s about right.
So you can see on the far right one it says realize your dreams affordable and attractive homes, download the list today, the only change there is just the background image it changes from kitchen the living room to kitchen to living room and that gets a really high click through rate, those are some kind of basic type of funnel ads for you guys.
Kevin: Quick question Travis is that done all within Facebook or third party platform that you need to create those ads?
Travis: So to create the animation our ad agency does that, we recreate those animated ads there’s some clients that we have in our Facebook coaching training program where they get access to our ad design team and they can order a limited amount of the animated ads, we have actually about 75 different variations of these ads that they can download and use. But inside the Facebook app platform you can create the Facebook lead ads yes and if you want to do it on your own there’s tools like Snap up or Canva or PicMonkey we can just create an overlay, it’s not going to animate it it’s just going to have a static image which also does work but we’ve seen higher click-through rate and basically higher engagement when we use animated ads.
Kevin: Got it.
Travis: Same thing here, can I show you some variations there and kind of funnel recap we’re not going to get too deep into it but showing you the 30-day middle funnel ad sequence, so we’ve got four ads here each one is retargeting individuals that came from the top of the funnel, so this is going to be more in a 10 day window or a 5 day window increment so just going to give you an idea here. Days looks like we don’t have days one through ten here but we got days 10 through 20, 22 to 33 to 40, so every person in that funnel is going to see one of these ads once a day every day for 10 days and then we’re going to see the next one and then the next one. I had to blankout some of the brand in here because these are actual real ads for some of our clients that we have in our advertising agency, but they gave us permission to kind of show you some of the ad copy and support what we’re doing so just a snapshot on their campaign, but can I show you that what you can do is have these ads they’re dripped out almost like a drip email campaign that are dripped out to these individuals, take them through that indoctrination process.
Same thing with here, to days 40 all the way to 70, so the goal with this is to really keep in front of them month after month every single day and most of these campaigns using lead ads are built for about a 90 day stretch, so that way in 90 days these individuals are going to see you and your brand several hundred times, you’re probably going to have several hundred impressions per lead so they should know exactly who you are when you are following up with them.
Kevin: So there’s a question here Travis, so we’re thinking about numbers and conversion and stuff like that, what kind of response are you getting on these ads?
Travis: Great question, so with that kind of response we typically see a higher conversion rate, what we’re looking at is when people start to see your ads and they see different ads, give an ad creative and messaging over and over again at the same time you’re following up with your text and email we then see about a four percent conversion rate, but every conversion rate is a little bit different. The conversion process doesn’t start in Facebook, it doesn’t start with the campaign that you’re running the conversion process really happens the moment that you receive the lead and the notification of the lead. Now you have a few different choices and opportunities there, within the first five minutes you should be sending a text message to those prospects, I hear a lot of agents say I generated 300 leads and not a single one of them talk to me or close whatever it is and we ask well what was your follow-up campaign, what does it look like.
Well about 24 hours later I kind of went through the list and I started emailing a few of them and made some phone calls and then what do you do after that, well I put them on a drip campaign that goes on for about six days and then I didn’t follow up, well that’s pretty typical we hear a lot of that. But with Facebook leads you really need to be able to convert them with long nurturing, but you need to engage with them within the first 10 days rapid fire, you really need to be in front of them a lot in this first 10 days and here’s why imagine this, so we are targeting people on their phone and they’re looking at the website they’ve been captured through a Facebook lead ad. Now just to let you guys know 90% of the leads we capture are on mobile, so they’re on your website they are looking at the list of homes and then two minutes later they get a text message, right there on home number five looking at photo number six.
They get a text message that is asking them if they found any homes that they’d like to see, and by the way there’s an open house coming up this weekend, do you want me to send you a list of open houses. That is hyper relevant in that moment if you wait two days later, they’re picking up the kids from school they’re at the dentist, they are off doing something else their mind is completely shifted, they’re in a whole different realm they don’t know who you are and they most likely are probably not going to want to engage with you. So this first five minutes is really precious because that is when it’s timely, it’s hyper relevant and you can connect with them, you get them to communicate back.
After that you’re going to have a good portion of them that are going to convert within probably the first 90 days, they’re going to communicate with you as you’re generating these leads but the first 10 days you need to be sending a text messages, emails, voice note drops, phone only call and you can automate all of this using call action, agent legend, lion desk there’s some great serums and software’s that do all this for you just got to program it. And that first ten days is precious but after that it’s pretty critical, you just got to keep this in mind. So loan depo and you guys have probably heard of them before and Quicken Loans these companies spend millions of dollars on Facebook ads and Facebook leads, they pay top dollar we’re talking several hundred dollars per lead, they pay top dollar for the leads that are six months old, eight months old, twelve months old those older leaves are what they want to buy.
They’ll pay top dollar form them because those are the leads that are ready to pop, those are the leads that are ready to harvest because they made a decision well in that timeframe for they raised their hand eight months ago by clicking on an ad and saying you know what I’m kind of interested and then that decision cycle, but they’ve been making plans, they’ve been doing changes now they’re ready. So those companies are going straight to the older leads and buying them, now kind of keep that in mind when you’re doing your nurturing that you need to really nurture these leads for a long time and build that pipeline, the leads that you are generating today are the ones, so we are in August right so the leads that you’re generating this month are the ones you are going to be closing this winter, and then the rest of them are going to be closing in the spring.
So if you don’t have any leads right now that are closing, well you just got to keep plugging away and build that pipeline for the future and we typically see that most of these leads are converting at the four to six and eight month mark. That’s where a lot of people give up, is they give up after 12 attempts those 12 attempts are typically right within the first 30 days and they go you know what these leads aren’t serious, well they are but they’re just not ready and they need to be retargeted, they need to be nurtured and Facebook is so smart that you can predict which individuals with its algorithm and it’s data that it collects online and offline, based on your behavior habits, websites that you’re looking at, apps you’re downloading, email conversations that you’re having, conversations in messenger it can predict what you’re going to purchase or do in the next six months.
So that’s why a lot of these leads are being what we call we’re fishing upstream, we’re fishing upstream based on the behavioral habits they’re taking, if you’re targeting people that looked at Zillow, Realtor.com they’re interested in buying a house, they like Joanna Gaines in HGTV they are planning, they’re planning to make some move in the next six months and you need to be there in front of them when they make that decision.
Kevin: Which is why what you said about the relevancy and being in front of them and familiarizing yourself with them and that heavy campaign in the beginning is so crucial, because down the road they’re going to remember you if you’ve been in front of them multiple times. And here’s the other thing you mentioned something I think is very important, you said most agents I don’t know what the percentage is it’s ridiculous like over 90 percent of agents according to Nara I could be off on this statistic but it’s really high, the majority of agents quit I think it’s well before 12 attempts, I think it’s like right around 1 or 2.
And it takes about 12 attempts to convert someone, to create a relationship so to me what that says to me is that is a huge opportunity for us that are willing to take those steps, those additional steps that are necessary why do most agents fail, why because they don’t take those steps they’re part of the mass, the majority of people that quit. So the difference between the person who’s going to make it and not make it is the person that’s got the will to continue to make those attempts and take those at-bats. And one last thing which I think is also very important why those deletes later on tend to convert more is because when a new lead, a person human being we call them leads but they’re actually people, make an inquiry there’s a good chance they’re probably inquiring in other places too right Travis?
Travis: Well yes right.
Kevin: So there’s a good chance there’s other agents calling them too, but since most agents quit after two or three attempts how many agents do you think are really calling them at six months, eight months out hardly any. So for the ones that are there and we’ve familiarize ourselves with them with those heavy remarketing campaign that you’re talking about it’s a warm lead at that point and there’s no competition, so I mean you’re spot-on man I just wanted to point that out.
Travis: Kevin is exactly right that when you are generating these prospects, that first 10 days is really more about breaking the ice in building that awareness, so that after that when they see an ad from you or they see an email they go oh wait that’s so-and-so with XYZ realty and I know that they tried to reach out to me when we first started, which is really important to break the ice in this first ten days so the rest of your automated follow-up and your phone call and whatever else you’re doing is impactful and that it’s relevant. And like Kevin mentioned these ads are also visiting on average four to six other websites and those four to six other websites are your competitors and Realtor.com and Zillow so who else is building these kind of retargeting campaigns that go on that long, I can tell you not a good majority of those individuals. A lot of them are not doing anything with a retargeting and it’s one of the low-hanging fruits that you guys can really leverage there.
So kind of a quick overview on how Facebook rank ads based on total value, this is Facebook’s own internal formula that they use to really estimate what ads should get ranked higher in the Facebook newsfeed to the specific audience that you’re targeting. So there’s something that’s called bear, so bear I think the big mean grizzly bear stands for bidding estimated action and relevancy, so the advertiser bid when you go into Facebook it’s a bidding an auction platform so you need to bid appropriately for that audience. Couple days ago I was auditing someone’s Facebook ad account, they reassured me before we got on the phone call they said I’ve been doing Facebook ads for a couple years now, I’m a pro at it, I know exactly what I’m doing I said all right perfect let’s take a look because they were having trouble with the campaign, well they were targeting 2.5 million people and they were spending $8 a day.
Now if you don’t know that’s not the right way to do it, we need to be spending $10 per 100,000 people that’s what Facebook really kind of looks for, so if you’re spending $8 a day and you’re targeting 2.5 million people well it’s not going to be successful campaign, you’re losing the ad auction. Because there’s way too many people in that audience and Facebook will take your money well so that’s great go ahead and spend $8 a day on 2.5 million people, but we’re not going to show your ad to the right prospects it’s not going to really feed out, there’s not going to be a lot of reach. So you’re bidding against maybe 50 or 100 other advertisers that are bidding for the same or similar audience, so if you have an audience of let’s say a hundred thousand people you should bid around ten to fifteen dollars per day to win the ad auction. Then what Facebook looks at is the estimated action rate, what does the action rate the people are going to take on that specific ad campaign, is it a Facebook lead ad or if it’s a messenger bot whatever might be.
So looking at the past data that you have on your campaigns, the past data of the people that are in your audience and then they start to look through in real time because the ad auction goes on and on and on every hour every day. So how many people are clicking on your ad do you have a high click-through rate or a low click-through rate, those are the factors that Facebook looks at and they really want you to strive for a high click-through rate because then that’s going to start to feed the ad app more and reach more people. So you got to really make sure that your ads are designed for a high click-through rate, so ad copywriting and a distinct call to action, tell people exactly what to do and have some ad imagery that gets their attention and gets them to stop and take action. Then relevancy how relevant is the ad to the actual audience, so if we have an image of baby boomers that are around a coffee table drinking coffee and reading a newspaper and we’re running that ad to 25-year olds, that’s probably not going to be really relevant they’re going to hide the ad and say that’s not for me, that’s not relevant.
So if you guys have ever experienced this, you’ve probably gone and clicked on the right side of an ad and right hand corner and says hide this ad from me, what that does is that creates a negative feedback score and it tells Facebook people are saying this ad is not relevant to them, so we’re going to say the reach of the ad we’re not going to feed the ad to more people, your cost per lead is going to go up, your costs per click is going to go up and then it’s then going to slowly have basically a slow death over time, it’s going to reach ad fatigue pretty fast. So just keep those in mind when you guys start to create those, how much should you bid in Facebook advertising this is the pacing mode kind of shows a user quality, the higher intent for purchase is the ones that are higher up in the graph here, and if we’re spending and bidding more on the actual ad campaign, we’re going to reach the prospects they have a higher intent based on the data that Facebook has on.
If we’re only spending let’s say three dollars or five dollars well then we’re only going to get the prospects that are going to fill out the form or become a lead but they’re probably not the right prospects, they’re not the best quality. You guys have already experienced that the leads that don’t call you back or they say my kid filled this out or they tell you to screw off whatever it might be those are the ones that enter in like this really nasty email and mail them to you. Yes, Mickey Mouse, those are the prospects that you’re probably bidding too low on in your bidding campaign or your audience is too big and you’re bidding too low, you need to make sure that there’s a nice match, that your audience size is appropriate and your bidding high enough to reach the right prospects in there. Couple of new features here that Facebook just came out with, this is inside of the ad manager on your app on your phone that you guys can actually whip up some quick images, throw some overlays on there like a Facebook messenger button under images, just go ahead and download the Facebook ad manager app and you see under the creative tools there coming, nice little update there.
So you guys have probably heard and the emails we sent out to you and then you guys have probably heard this floating around that Facebook is shutting down partner categories, this happened back in March and what partner categories is is third party platforms that are like Axiom and data logics, Experian these companies that Facebook was buying data from, its specifically homeowner data for the real estate industry. Now there’s over 1,500 different targeting interests that Facebook is removing from the third-party categories, and some of the big ones are well likely to move, recent home buyers, homeowners, first-time homebuyer, income all of those. Now we see this as actually a really big opportunity, not necessarily as something that you should be afraid of or abandoned, a lot of real estate agents out there don’t know that this is being removed or they do and so they’re deciding to just give up, they say I can’t do that anymore, I can’t just easily target homeowners or renters or likely to move and so they’re not going to run campaigns.
What’s going to happen is those agents are going to be left behind in the dust, those are the ones that are going to struggle with their campaigns that are going to give up or just not use it at all, and then there is the opportunity. For you they really want to invest in yourself and actually learn and educate and take that step forward and say you know what I’m going to find a way to circumvent this and actually use it as an opportunity and dominate your market because there’s going to be people that are actually going to stop because they don’t know how, so what should we do. So we need to really exactly well figure out what are the next steps, how do you create a better strategy, a better targeting strategy. So here’s a few different things that we’ve been doing and to kind of let you guys know in our advertising agency the same month that this came out, as soon as that news came out that they were removing those we stopped using them, we stopped using any third-party data.
So for all of our clients we did different targeting strategies because we knew that we had to move fast and that we had to be the leaders and know exactly what works first, so we have spent over twenty five thousand dollars in the past cold months testing out different strategies using these, so I can show you guys exactly what this looks like. So one of the gold standards for us is creating a look-alike audience, if you have passed leads or past clients that are homeowners, so what we want to do is you’re going to take a list of all of your past homeowners or view a list of current homeowners however you got that data, Kevin what’s a cold realty that you can get a list of home owners?
Kevin: Yes, cold realty there’s land voice, Volken seven.
Travis: Yes perfect, so you can get a list from those companies or a list of verified homeowners from your past client list. It’s really important that this list is quality, quality list of the people that have actually taken action if they’re verified as a homeowner.
Kevin: And how many do we need, what’s like the minimum amount of…
Travis: The minimum is 100 people in that audience; ideally you would have a thousand people so the more data you have to give Facebook the better it’s going to be. But at a minimum a hundred people gold standard for us is like having in our thousand people in there but if you only have a hundred and twenty-five that’s okay, you’re still going to get some really good data. Here’s what Facebook does we upload that into a CSV file, we upload it to a custom audience and once we have the uploads custom audience then we go and we create what’s called a look-alike audience, Facebook is then going to find two thousand different data points on these individuals.
Now I can only name maybe three or four key attributes about me but Facebook knows over two thousand different data points on each individual in that list, what it’s going to do is it’s going to scour and find all the other people in Facebook throughout the US, the entire and nation and it’s going to then make a data match and say we found other people that are very similar in like kind, that own a home, key attributes and psychographic profiles, they own a home they make this much income, they are in this life stage or they plan on whatever it might be. So think of this as an e-commerce store, let’s all pretend for a minute that we own an e-commerce store on the web, we have a necklace that we’ve been selling that is three hundred dollars and we’ve sold it to over a thousand people but we want to find more people, we want to find more people that will buy that exact necklace.
Well what we do is we upload our past customers or your list of people that bought our necklace into a custom audience, create a look-alike audience and then we’re going to find people that are just like that. Now the list is going to be about 2 million people, 1.5 million around there you then narrow that down to you geolocation area and then you have a perfect match for more people are going to buy your necklace or more people that are going to buy real estate, they’re going to sell homes, they’re targeting homeowners. Now we have until October but because it was the first two weeks of October before they remove those targeting interests, now what we’ve done is also get our clients to run video view campaigns, so run a video view campaign this a short video 15 seconds, 20 seconds whatever it might be run that to the audience of people that are likely to move and they are homeowners and it’s important that you say they must match on the include part.
So you have people on that every top detail targeting, homeowners likely to move and then below that target people that must match also homeowners are likely to move, so it’s a perfect marriage of the two, if you don’t have that bottom one you’re going to get users and other people on there. Run a video view campaign to the audience and then anyone that watched three seconds of that video create a custom audience from that, and then create any look-alike audience from that, so then you have a look-alike audience of all those people that match with that similar data. Now another tool that we’ve been using is called reach matters and reach matters is a free software that you can go in, what we did is we started to brainstorm what do homeowners use as far as apps, what do they download, so insurance we have EDT alarm company, nest camera, home advisor, Angie’s List, Lowe’s, Costco those things that homeowners usually use. You can go there and then basically shows you the users that are on there, you can download that create a custom audience and then create a look-alike audience of all those homeowners that use that on a national scale and then pare it down to your market area by geographic area.
Here’s some very basic first party data that Facebook gives you so, we suggest using all of these just pick your top five or seven don’t go overkill on it, but for whatever fits with what you’re doing so people that like HGTV, home renovations you know nine or is it eight out of ten homeowners make at least one major repair on their house before selling it, typically about four to six months before they sell. So are they going to Home Depot or true value or are they interested in shows like HDTV or HDTV remodels, fixer-upper relocation personal, Pottery Barn, mortgage calculator all of these types of things you basically build that home owner targeting list, so play around with a few of those you guys are going to find some interesting stuff. Do we have any questions I should answer?
Kevin: We had a question that I answered; it was where do we get the data from, the content for look-alike audiences. I mentioned also if you’re pulling expired data, look alike audience with expired contacts and look that’s a really great target audience right there.
Travis: Yes exactly and build a look-alike audience of that, those are people that are probably in that life stage of wanting to sell their home soon.
Kevin: Yes, and then you can start targeting them with ads that are related to why their home maybe didn’t sell.
Travis: Right exactly, that’s like a perfect messaging match to the actual targeted audience. So I’m going to run through a few different ads for you guys to kind of go over what ads have been working really well for us, this is kind of a boilerplate typical buyer list of homes under X amount, you just need to swap out the city name. We always find it is important to add the actual market name, we get a higher relative score and a higher click-through rate we actually name the actual specific market that we’re going to run this in. This is a buyer list of homes on average four dollars and thirty cents with some of those leads, marker report this is a marker report ad that we’ve run in some different markets where we’re basically offering a marker report for their local area instead of a home valuation.
Now we approach this as a macro to micro kind of thing, we know that some homeowners they don’t want to have to go through the process of a home valuation ad, go to a landing page, filter information so we decided how about we give them a marker report because if they’re interested in how the markets performing and they’re probably interested on how much their home is actually worth. For instance, I have good friends that are interested in certain stocks like Apple or Facebook and we know how they’re performing but overall they’re more interested on how the entire stock market is performing. So if you can give them an update here and pull them in and set them up on a monthly report that you can give them a great pitch when you get this is to go ahead and follow up with them and say, Hi Mr. and Mrs. seller thank you so much for downloading a marker report.
I know there’s a lot of data in there it can be a little confusing to read if you have any questions at all let me know this is what we do day in day out, by the way I’m creating about 70 custom home valuations for some past clients in mind within a market area that you’re in, would you mind if I created one for you, could you tell me if there’s any updates to your home or anything that I can do to increase the value inside of this report, that’s a great way of getting reciprocity and following up, following up with something else that you can kind of go through. We’re looking for micro conversions, a series of yes that lead to a macro conversion which is something like hey could we meet at your house and talk about when you plan on selling.
Kevin: We have a question real quick Travis and we’re almost out of time and this is actually a really good question based on the time that we have, so the question is you mentioned you have clients that you work with, how do we get a hold of you and what do we need to do to find out more about what you do?
Travis: Just go to TravisThom.com that’s the best place to get information, there’s free training videos on there, free blog articles that kind of go into how to’s. But there’s also if you go to Travisthom.com you’ll see services click on services and that’s where you’re going to see our different services we offer, our Facebook coaching and training program and then our ad agency and I’m more than happy to talk to anybody here that’s on this webinar about what we do in more depth, but you guys can definitely go there and check that out.
Kevin: And you’ve provided so much like really great knowledge and all this is done, I mean you’re not getting paid to do this you’re just offering this information absolutely 100% free just out of your generosity. I have a question for you, like where do you see Facebook going, like where do you see headed and where should we be focusing as agents with our marketing on Facebook. You covered some of it you covered a lot of it, but if you could kind of tell us as wrap up like what you think is the best thing, what do you think agents should be focusing on Facebook mainly?
Travis: You know I feel like from all the data and everything that we’ve seen and where it’s going is that Facebook is building more and more tools to give people like you and me and the everyday real estate agent the ability to look like a big publisher, and giving them the tools to really have more creative ad design, more creative posts. Recently I think it was yesterday that Facebook announced they acquired a video service that actually allows you to have live videos where you can actually have overlays and different things on it and create some really cool stuff, so they’re coming up with their own video ending kind of software.
So that tells me a few things one video is really important, they believe by 2021 that 80% of your newsfeed above the content is going to be all video, so really focusing on video really being able to actually share stories. I think more and more people can really see through if you’re thinking of buying or selling let me know, well that how the real world interacts. So for your marketing and your messaging I think it should really be about crafting your personal brand it should be about crafting your story, everyone has a story if you think, and Kevin and I were recently at a private conference where I talked about who knows the speaker said basically who knows Batman’s origin story, we all knew Batman’s origin story, every kind of superhero they all start with their origin story.
So if you can tell your story and make it relevant to the consumer through video and have a personal brand attached to it, that’s going to be key. Instagram is growing leaps and bounds right now; I believe that the younger market right the millennials that are larger than the baby boomers in size, that’s where a good majority of them are. If you have a bunch of 26 year-olds on Instagram that aren’t on Facebook and we advertise it on both and we teach both, but I really believe that you should be leveraging Instagram as well and really building a solid following there. Facebook’s organic reach has been really limited, they’ve limited it for a few reasons one to open up more room in the Facebook newsfeed, two to push people into the ad platform to really utilize the leverage of those tools but Instagram your organic reach goes really far there as well.
So I would say focus on content and in the real estate industry we’re surrounded by content, you’re showing homes, you’re in these beautiful backyards there’s these pools you’re in a high-rise looking out on the golden gate bridge whatever it might be. There’s content that you’re surrounded by and people are digital snacking right now, if you give them just a little bit of good content and insight into something, curate your brand around that so think about doing a Facebook live as you do an open house, think about creating a short little video about a community and just interviewing some of the shop owners around there. Make partnerships with some of the people that own pet stores and kind of highlight here’s Stacie’s pet store they specialize in iguanas and exotic reptiles and kind of highlight some of the heroes in your community, create the Oprah effect. If you think about it Oprah just interviewed a lot of really intelligent people and she built a billion-dollar brand around it, and then you have shows like HGTV and all of these other shows that are built around flipping houses, remodeling, all these shopping for a home.
There are multi-million and billion dollar shows and corporations that are focused on these key things and you guys are living it every single day, there’s no reason why you can’t package it, you can package it, put your brand on it and put it out there. So I mean hopefully you got some ideas brewing of what you can do and I know it might sound kind of daunting, but just choose three things three things that you can really focus and execute on. And there’s one thing I’m going to challenge my Facebook coaching and training group pretty soon on that I’ve been doing, is create one video a week and put it out there, one video a week no matter what the content is, if it’s just your thoughts, if it’s you walking and hiking down a trail, you’re going to a construction site whatever it is one video a week for well basically for six months and I want you guys to try and do the same thing if you can.
Push past any of your you know self-doubt or limited beliefs we all don’t like the sound of our voice when we play back on recordings or video, we’re not all pleased with the way we might look just get past that, you’ve got to put yourself out there. And I’ve generated more business for myself just doing one video a week in the past six months, than I have through different alternative kind of marketing things, try and do that and when you do put it on your business page, create your own business page and create one personal video but then also post that same video in your business page and then when you get people to like and comment and share on it then you can take that same post, same video and run it as an ad, run it to all your past leads, run it to your past clients. Just take that content and repurpose it and that’s going to build this more awareness about you and just make that a habit, just keep doing that.
Kevin: So good man, that’s just such a great call Travis some amazing ideas, thank you so much for being on the call but we’re out of time. The one thing I would say I would recommend to everyone check out TravisThom.com the great thing about it is like we’re so busy, we’re running around, we’re doing all these things it’s nice to have someone that I can rely on like I know you guys have done stuff for us and we’re generating thousands of leads and it’s just leverages resources, get out there, do the things that Travis is talking about he knows what he’s talking about, he’s an ultra-successful Facebook marketer. Thank you guys all for being on the call Travis, thank you buddy I learned every single time and we’ll be talking soon my friend.
Travis: Thank you Kevin and everyone at marker real estate and everyone that came to watch, I appreciate it I value each one of you, I’ve been in your shoes I spent 15 years as a real estate agent, so I totally get it and thank you Kevin for having me on I really appreciate it. In case you have any questions like Kevin said TravisThom.com please reach out to me I am happy to help.
Kevin: Thanks guys, take care everyone, bye.
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