Facebook is totally pay-to-play now. But that’s okay if you know how to play. When you’re looking to stay top of mind, or even build and gain new access to new potential prospects through building awareness, $1/day Facebook Ads can be an easy way to build your audience for just $30/month.
Your Facebook Ad strategy should include ads at every step of your buyer’s journey or decision process (basically a funnel diagram).
But wait, what’s a “buyer’s journey”? Let me break that down for you.
Real Estate Digital Marketing Sales Funnel – Reviewed
Basic Funnel Overview:
Awareness – Cold traffic, people who have never heard of you, becoming “aware” of your business and brand.
Lead Capture – In digital marketing, this is usually a lead magnet or freebie offered in exchange for an email (ie “Get my free report here”)
Prospect/Consideration – The potential customer is now in your email sequence. This is crucial. This is an almost free way to stay top of mind with your prospects. And as long as you are fun and engaging and bring value, they won’t unsubscribe en masse.
Marketing Qualified Lead – Typically when your marketing team reaches out to the prospect for you, or the prospect reaches out to you, to schedule a call or set up a time to talk.
Sales Qualified Lead – Sales team has verified the lead as someone who needs and can afford your services.
Opportunities Leads – There is some overlap here, but basically, the customer knows they want to make a purchase or sell their home, now they’re just trying to decide if you’re the right business to buy from. Here you want to overcome objections.
Customers – Congrats! Now they are your customer!
Remarketing – This funnel illustration doesn’t show it, but don’t forget to remarket to your existing customers. They already know, like, and trust you and you don’t want to lose them. Staying in front of your existing and previous customers is less expensive than getting new customers. Keep in front of them with top-of-mind awareness campaigns including the $1/day campaign I’m about to teach you, and email campaigns.
Why Do I Need To Stay Top Of Mind?
“I don’t want to be a nuisance to my prospects. I don’t want to be a bother. I don’t want to annoy them.”
I’ve heard it before. Here’s where emotions DO NOT EQUAL marketing that been proven.
In the book, “Successful Advertising” (published 1885), author Thomas Smith makes the case regarding the use of frequency (how many times a prospect sees your advertisement or messaging).
Staying top of mind, building your brand’s awareness and visibility is key to the conversion process.
If you offer fun, exciting, educational, entertaining content, people actually LIKE to read and engage with you.
The 1st time people look at ad, they don’t see it.
“Successful advertising”, 1885
The 2nd time, they don’t notice it.
The 3rd time, they are aware that it is there.
The 4th time, they have a fleeting sense that they’ve seen it before.
The 5th time, they actually read the ad.
The 6th time, they thumb their nose at it.
The 7th time, they get a little irritated with it.
The 8th time, they think, “Here’s that confounded ad again.”
The 9th time, they wonder if they’re missing out on something.
The 10th time, they ask their friends or neighbors if they’ve tried it.
The 11th time, they wonder how the company is paying for all these ads.
The 12th time, they start to think that it must be a good product.
The 13th time, they start to feel the product has value.
The 14th time, they start to feel like they’ve wanted a product like this for a long time.
The 15th time, they start to yearn for it because they can’t afford to buy it.
The 16th time, they accept the fact that they will buy it sometime in the future.
The 17th time, they make a commitment to buy the product.
The 18th time, they curse their poverty because they can’t buy this terrific product.
The 19th time, they count their money very carefully.
The 20th time prospects see the ad, they buy what it is offering.
$1/Day Top Of Mind Campaign
This simple strategy works wonderfully for maintaining top of mind with your current audience, and this method can also be used for getting in front of new potential prospects and warming them up to your brand and messaging.
I’ve tested this method in a few places in the digital marketing funnel, and found that it works really well when paired with amazing content in these spaces.
- Awareness Stage
- Prospect/Consideration Stage.
- Opportunities Stage
Now, let’s say you were running ads for three of these stages to your target audience.
At the minimum, you’re spending $1/per ad, per day, for a total of $3/day.
So, you have to ask, “”Am I willing to spend $90 a month to stay top of mind with my customers? Potentially hundreds of them a month? Using a channel that is trackable and delivers measurable results?”
If you answered, “Yeah. Duh,” then read on.
Building Brand Awareness for $1/Day – How To Set It Up
You know how some advertisers tell you not to use Facebook boost post? Yeah. I do it all the time with great results. It’s all in how you set it up.
You’ll want to test different content pieces, some meant to maintain top of mind with your current audience, and some meant to attract new visitors to engage with you through building brand awareness.
The “Awareness” Post – What To Share
The fun thing about Awareness campaigns is that you are entering into cold traffic. It’s like walking into a networking event. You have no idea where people are on their journey when you first meet them.
So your Awareness campaign should focus on serving a variety of short, consumable content pieces to start.
NOTE: Read this ENTIRE section before you hit “Share Now”. If you don’t, you’ll miss the gem.
I recommend:
- videos 3 minutes long
- video/photo slideshows
- blogs (500-700 words)
- native (on Facebook) typed posts (typically 200-300 words) (this depends on how awesome your copy is – works well for some teams, not as great for others)
- shareable images – industry update photos or charts, team photos, team serving in a common mission photos, etc.
Facebook Copy Suggestions For Your Post – A Few Things To Keep In Mind
As Facebook would prefer to keep users on it’s platform (they make money on selling attention, hello), videos and photos that keep the user on the Facebook platform at this stage work very well here.
If you’re considering linking out to a content piece you wrote, here are a few suggestions to keep in mind from SproutSocial in their January 2020 Facebook Update.
Ideal Length of a Facebook Update: 40-80 Characters
Posts that contain 40 characters or less earn 86% more engagement. A study from Jeff Bullas found similar results, including that Facebook posts with 80 characters or less receive 88% more engagement.
The key is to keep your posts short and concise. Longer posts also get cut off in a user’s feed, which forces them to expand the text if they want to read the full story. And as we mentioned, it’s more difficult than ever to get your audience’s attention on Facebook. The easier it is for them to see your message, the stronger your chances of getting them to bite.
Ideal Length of a Facebook Ad Headline: 5 Words
Adspresso examined over 37,000 Facebook Ads to find common trends in what brands were doing. One area they looked at was the average length of Facebook Ads headlines.”
-Sprout social
Boost Post Recommended Objective For Your First Campaign: Awareness Engagement
Work toward Engagement first. Posts that get a lot of engagement, get more shares/likes, resulting in a lower cost per click for you.
Remember that ol’ marketing saying? It takes Lower cost = more top of mind (frequency) and awareness for your campaign for a reduced cost per click, meaning your dollar goes further to reach more people.
Videos and photos get the best engagement on Facebook.
Remember, whether you create images using Canva, have your graphic designer create them for you, or post an image of yourself, images with more than 20% text in the photo will be penalized in reach – both organic and paid.
Test your images with Facebook’s Text Overlay Tool first.
Sample image for this post:
Test:
Before You Hit “Share Now”
Don’t hit that “Share Now” button! Use “Boost Post” instead.
If you use the “Boost Post” option before you hit “Share Now”, you may get access to a terrific option that becomes invisible later…..the option to target your post to “People Who Like Your Page & Their Friends”.
Why is this important?
Friends count on Facebook. It’s a “Social” platform after all.
When you’re looking to build your brand’s awareness, leverage the “social” of social platforms.
Even in a digital age, people still work with those they know, like, and trust – and remember. That’s why staying top of mind with your audience is so important.
The more your target audience sees you, sees you helping others, and offering to help them (helpful posts and content), the more they grow to know, like, and trust you – moving them from an online relationship with your brand, to an offline relationship with your brand.
Jane & Sue: Leveraging Social Channels with Top of Mind and Awareness Ads
So, if Jane’s friend, Sue, sees an article in her feed, and she sees that “Jane Likes This Page”, your company automatically has some Facebook street cred with Sue, all because her friend Jane likes you.
Therefore, Sue is more likely to click on your ad.
Which moves Sue into an audience segment on Facebook, that you can later retarget with more content.
Because Sue already has some initial trust with your brand (due to the fact that Jane likes you), you’re not starting with super-cold traffic.
And using more content to warm Sue up, will only help.
Then when Sue is ready to buy/sell a house, she remembers you. Because she sees your fun, engaging, and helpful content on Facebook all the time (content that isn’t spammy or creepy) and because she probably already signed up for your email list, and maybe even had a call with one of your inside agents.
All because of a $1/day Facebook Ad.
And Sue and your company lived happily ever after….
Find Your Happy Ending
Want a happy ending like this for your real estate team? It starts with a cup of copy, I mean coffee.
What I’m saying is, you can book a free strategy call with me to ask questions and see if you think we’d be a good fit.
I can help you increase the frequency your audience sees your content, build your brand’s awareness, and help you stay top of mind with your audience, all while your prospects have a positive experience with you and then become your customer.
All while utilizing a solid content strategy.
https://calendly.com/delicia-ivins