With Dan Richardson Axis Web Agency
We all have great stories to tell and Facebook offers all sorts of opportunities to market. Dan Richardson, Director of Strategy at Axis Web Agency believes anyone in the real estate industry can generate leads, sales and momentum from Facebook’s powerful advertising platform.
There are two aspects to harnessing the power of Facebook – the content you post and using its algorithms to produce leads. Dan says that amplifying the fact that you are achieving great results all day, every day, “…is probably one of the biggest opportunities that exist for agents to really make the most of social media and social media advertising specifically.”
It’s imperative to see your posts on Facebook as starting a relationship or conversation with a potential buyer. You must:
Dan says, “It's really important to recognise that this is an opportunity for you to initiate the relationship with that prospective buyer from a point of authority and expertise.” You must be seen to provide value. Dan says, “By value, we mean literally providing some sort of value, a valuable piece of content to that audience and not asking them to buy from you straight away. That's really like any traditional advertising platform; if you think of ads that you turn off straight away or you put on mute or the ones that are screaming at you asking you to buy, buy, buy - for the same reasons they would die with the same logic on social media.”
Some value video content ideas that can start a conversation are:
Dan says, “If someone has watched a video that you've created, we don't even need them to leave the Facebook ad platform. We can create an audience of people who've watched 25 per cent of the video, 50 per cent of the video, 75 per cent of the video and then do what we call re-targeting, whereby we can get back in front of those people specifically with much more of a pointed message such as, ‘Hey, you're obviously interested in this particular content. Would you like to set up a time to chat?’.”
Dan thinks that an owner posting onto Facebook is, “…a latent opportunity to really share some of the success stories and the content that agents are creating every day, all day. It's something that's really, really relevant to people who look just like them.”
Dan says, “Create content with your ideal client and audience in mind and think about how you can potentially help them use this platform. Use the platform to essentially amplify the success stories or amplify your existing content.”
He does have a word of warning though. He adds, “I'd really recommend anyone that's looking at using Facebook within a professional context to really put that lens on everything they post. If they want a bit of distinction between personal and private, as well as personal and professional, look at creating a separate business page for their Facebook communications. If their strategy works really well, there's definitely something to be said for having one point of contact for people to come and experience you.”
With authenticity being seen as a highly marketable and regarded value, Dan recommends that creators of content make their content as authentic as possible and true to themselves. Dan says, “With that comes the caveat that you want to make sure that you're putting content out to the world that you're happy for prospective clients or prospective buyers to see. Unfortunately or fortunately, everyone takes something away from it. Social media is one of those proof points now where, as we research people that we want to do business with or take something as significant as a real estate transaction, you're going to do a little bit of research on them. You'll look at their website. You'll look at their Facebook and social media feeds.”
The other aspect of Facebook is harnessing its powerful algorithms to speed up the sales cycle. Dan says, he recently completed a campaign for a business that is traditionally a cold call business with a long sales cycle. He says, “We were able to use Facebook ads to essentially take over any sort of leg work there. The Facebook ads did the prospecting. The sales team took these inbound leads and qualified them, then converted them and took a sales process that can sometimes take up to three months, into a two-week process.”
Dan says, “You can use data from the customers or subscribers you already have and use Facebook's data matching platform to essentially find more people like that.” Recently at Real Estate Academy, Dan says, “We took a sample of data, which in this instance was existing customers, and we uploaded that into Facebook. What that allowed us to do, once Facebook had data matched with those people and their Facebook profiles, was send an ad or a message to those specific people. We were essentially telling Facebook exactly who we wanted to target. We then created a look alike audience. In Australia at the moment, a look alike audience or one per cent look alike audience, which is the closest match you can find to these people, is about 150,000 people. We then found another 150,000 people in Australia who look just like existing customers.”
What great stories have you got to tell? Who is your look alike audience? Perhaps it’s time to look at Facebook again.