Facebook ads for Motivated sellers
Investor · Mckinney, TX · Member since 2016 · 26 posts · 8 votes
Has anyone used Facebook adds? I was wondering if anyone has or had any luck? Looking to find motivated sellers in an area. If its possible what would you pay to generate leads? IC runs 100 a month and takes several months to start getting leads. FB you should be able to start getting leads right away.
Boosting ads won't do anything for you guys. Motivated sellers are not following your FB page, or keeping up with all of the successes (or failures) of a real estate investor. Nobody cares about your business other than other real estate investors. Certainly not your market. So, boosting posts to your audience isn't the answer, waste of money there.
@Anthony Beckemeyer if you're only spending $100/month on Adwords with an even competent Adwords manager, it could take you 3-4 months to get even a lead, and a few years to get an actual deal out of it. Sure, you could get lucky - we had an investor on this forum do a 100k deal in just the first few thousand of Adwords spend, but that's an anomaly, not sustainable. If you want to be lucky, go to Vegas, it's a way more fun way to lose your money.
If you have any additional funds, put that into Adwords. Adwords allows you to target people searching for 'blue shoes' for a site that sells 'blue shoes' - if you're having trouble selling blue shoes to blue-shoe-shoppers, you have bigger problems than your marketing. Once you've proven you can sell blue shoes to blue-shoe-shoppers, then you can get into broader marketing objectives like Facebook interests and behaviors (Facebook retargeting Adwords traffic being the only exception here).
If you're having trouble converting the term "sell my house to an investor fast" in Adwords, then you're gonna have an even harder time with "sell my house" and an even harder time with "sell my house". In fact, if you're having trouble converting "sell my house to an investor fast" leads then you need to fire your sales person.
Adwords is much easier than Facebook for this market. If Adwords isn't working for you, you're only making things harder for yourself by advertising with Facebook.@Andrew Michael @Adrien C.
I have used FB with minimal success. I am quite sure there are better ways to utilize it but I was boosting adds and posts with key word target demographics etc. All I really got were a bunch of page likes and I question if those profiles were even legit. Some of them only had a few friends and were out of state so I am not sure why they would be popping up as prospects.
Hoping a FaceBook pro will chime in or perhaps someone who has had better success will chime in.
Side note, the new marketplace feature in my opinion seems like a better way to prospect then adds but it is likely the competition will be heavy.
Initially I was doing what @Andrew Michael was doing and getting similar responses. I tried to promote ads to specific groups of people using various tag words. I got page likes and an occasional message to some junk. It probably does work over a long enough period of time but I wasn't willing to pay it to find out. I spoke with a marketing "pro" and he agreed that it was a shot in the dark. He recommended doing retargeting. So when someone visits our website, they get a tag. When they are on Facebook, they see our ads. We spend $500 per month now on those targeted ads and $250 for the guy to manage it. We're on month 3 and don't have any tangible results although it's hard to track because the've been to our site, have our number, and now see us on Facebook. They can respond any number of ways and may not specifically mention they saw our ad on FB. I get a decent response posting ads in the local group buy/sell pages.
Boosting ads won't do anything for you guys. Motivated sellers are not following your FB page, or keeping up with all of the successes (or failures) of a real estate investor. Nobody cares about your business other than other real estate investors. Certainly not your market. So, boosting posts to your audience isn't the answer, waste of money there.
@Anthony Beckemeyer if you're only spending $100/month on Adwords with an even competent Adwords manager, it could take you 3-4 months to get even a lead, and a few years to get an actual deal out of it. Sure, you could get lucky - we had an investor on this forum do a 100k deal in just the first few thousand of Adwords spend, but that's an anomaly, not sustainable. If you want to be lucky, go to Vegas, it's a way more fun way to lose your money.
If you have any additional funds, put that into Adwords. Adwords allows you to target people searching for 'blue shoes' for a site that sells 'blue shoes' - if you're having trouble selling blue shoes to blue-shoe-shoppers, you have bigger problems than your marketing. Once you've proven you can sell blue shoes to blue-shoe-shoppers, then you can get into broader marketing objectives like Facebook interests and behaviors (Facebook retargeting Adwords traffic being the only exception here).
If you're having trouble converting the term "sell my house to an investor fast" in Adwords, then you're gonna have an even harder time with "sell my house" and an even harder time with "sell my house". In fact, if you're having trouble converting "sell my house to an investor fast" leads then you need to fire your sales person.
Adwords is much easier than Facebook for this market. If Adwords isn't working for you, you're only making things harder for yourself by advertising with Facebook.@Andrew Michael @Adrien C.
Initially I was doing what @Andrew Michael was doing and getting similar responses. I tried to promote ads to specific groups of people using various tag words. I got page likes and an occasional message to some junk. It probably does work over a long enough period of time but I wasn't willing to pay it to find out. I spoke with a marketing "pro" and he agreed that it was a shot in the dark. He recommended doing retargeting. So when someone visits our website, they get a tag. When they are on Facebook, they see our ads. We spend $500 per month now on those targeted ads and $250 for the guy to manage it. We're on month 3 and don't have any tangible results although it's hard to track because the've been to our site, have our number, and now see us on Facebook. They can respond any number of ways and may not specifically mention they saw our ad on FB. I get a decent response posting ads in the local group buy/sell pages.
"Hard to track" is only acceptable in far more complex cross-channel marketing scenarios. If they have your phone number, you can make sure the number they wrote down is unique to a specific channel. Our clients have dynamic numbers, so if they come from Facebook the number is xxx.xxx.xxx1 and if they came from Adwords, it's xxx.xxx.xxx2, and so on. If they leave and come back later, through any means, we check their cookies, and they are again shown the original phone number from the original source (Facebook, Adwords, Bing, Yahoo, Direct, Organic, etc). If you want better tracking, tell your provider that you need it.
On month 3 of $500, you should have 5-10 leads. If the leads are junk, then stop. If the leads are at least in the ballpark, then wait out the next two months. You'll want to be prepared to spend at least $5k before you pop that first deal (or before you give up on the channel) - again, assuming the lead quality is good. If the lead quality is good, and you're not closing a deal after 10-15 leads, it's not the leads, it's you (or your sales person).
I'm having success with a very narrow Adwords campaign, but because I have it so narrow - the leads are good, just not a tone of them. I'm interested in layering on Facebook Ads. I heard @Tom Cafarella on a Carrot podcast and sounds like he's cracked the code - a combination of a buyers list + Facebook ads (mobile friendly), give you all the advantages of a mailing list, while targeting a theoretically less populated "pond".
I'm going to try to track down some more info on this, because I see a lot of benefits here.
@Eric Sztanyo You're spot on man.
Launch new lead generation channels, master them, then layer on new ones.
I know on that CarrotCast episode that Tom was on with me... he's mainly using Facebook ads for his sellers right now in his market. We're going to be releasing our updated version of our Facebook Leads course this fall and will include some things from Tom in there and lots of new advanced things most investors aren't looking at.
But ya, a huge key to making FB ads work well is having a very well optimized site on mobile... and once he made that move to Carrot his leads went up in a big way.
Reach out and we can help you dial stuff in man! With that said, FB ads aren't working the same in every market. Miami was a hard market to make it ROI because a mix of low average profit per deal and high lead costs.
At the end of the day... one of the reason's Tom is crushing it is because he's able and willing to spend more to get a lead than anyone else in his market. Like he mentioned, he'll spend $1M this year in marketing in that market and he'll get more than that back in just agent commissions alone from those leads... then add on all of his profits from his flips (which his average is well north of $50k-$100k per flip) and that enables him to generate 100 leads a week with his marketing.
So it's not apples to apples. Lots of wholesalers are going out there tossing money into paid marketing and can't make it turn a profit for them... mainly because their business model doesn't allow it (low average profit per deal + they're tossing away leads that would be great listing opportunities).
Go get 'em!
Thanks @Trevor Mauch. Great points. Really looking forward to the Facebook Leads course you guys put out. I have some experience with FB, but it would be great to improve my skills. Up until now, I have been avoiding FB for all the reasons Tom likes it, ha! Instead, I've been focusing on SEO and Adwords because I know the intent.
However, if you combine a targeted list + low competition (at least for now) in this ad space, it makes a lot of sense. It would allow me to gain all of the things I like about Direct Mail (targeted area, targeted audience, etc.), but have avoided because of my background in Internet Marketing and desire to track and analyze all ad spend. I will definitely reach out in the future to you guys to get help. Great point on being different in each market and would love to talk to you guys more on that.
Yeah, his mindset on advertising and competition was fantastic. Yes, the $1M in spend jumps out at you, but like you said, his model allows him to recoup those costs through agent, brokerage commissions. I love how he's thinking about getting the most out of all of his marketing spend (listings, recycling cold leads, etc.) and has set his business up in a way to do so. Good stuff. Gives me a model to replicate down the road.
Here are some of the insights I heard from Tom:
@Eric Sztanyo Facebook offers courses for free at https://www.facebook.com/blueprint they also offer a certification (I've taken it), it's a tough test, with a proctor, but the test really motivates you to get through the course. Good luck!
Thanks @Sean Dolan, I'll check that out.
@Steve Labus Thanks for the input man!
The only perspective I can show from our end at Carrot is we can see the results his own business gets from his FB ads and can track the lead quality to close. So he's closing consistent deals from FB... but ya, I can't say how well he's been able to replicate that in other markets for people he works with. Again a big difference is... from FB lots of the leads people will get are retail sellers and not the highly motivated ones. So it's critical making sure the business model has a way of turning retail sellers into revenue on the listing side otherwise it makes it harder to ROI on the volume of leads that come in.
Those retail listings for Tom help him to recapture his FB ad cost and then the flips in his market are very high margin so it enables him to spend more and go through more "non motivated" sellers and still turn a very healthy profit.
Either way, good luck Steve and go crush it! We'll make sure to take that feedback about Tom and connect with others to see if it's a pattern or just an isolated thing. Thanks for the heads up!
Hey @Anthony Beckemeyer! One nugget that I'd recommend is using Facebook ads for retargeting. Based on the audience that you setup in Facebook, you can retarget visitors that hit your site from different marketing channels and stay in front of them using different placements (desktop, mobile, Instagram etc.). It is a great way to make sure that you continue to stay in front of your warm traffic, and to get them back to your site when they are ready to convert.
Hey @Anthony Beckemeyer, I know alot of people have answered your question, but i thought i'd share my two cents. Facebook ads can work well with the right strategy and ad spend. as others have said, boosting posts will really get you nowhere, especially with the changes to the algorithm this past year. The best way to approach the ads would be to get a FB business manager, then build your ad account in that, and start with lead form ads. you can integrate these ads directly with some CRM's or through a service like Zapier. you can then start to build a pretty nice digital funnel, where you not only retarget web traffic, but also people who have interacted or engaged with your facebook content. once you start to layer in custom audiences from your lists, or using audience builder you can begin to filter out people who have not converted, or dont fit your target audience(s)
@Trevor Mauch, thanks for the breakdown. I know your post was more directed at Eric, but I also found it helpful. I never really understood Adwords and FB marketing and how they all work. I'm always getting postcards from Google in the mail to try Adwords (and I usually just toss em out!). Now , I may look closer at them.
I'm trying to make a new "in" to wholesaling as of late to generate some capital. Historically, I've done rentals, flips, and the like, with my leads generated mostly the traditional way and certainly without much of an online presence.
PS: I'm an old student of Partrick's!
@Dave Rav Yep man, Adwords and Facebook Ads definitely aren't magic bullets but when done right they're some of the most consistent lead flow we're seeing for our clients for house sellers and buyers. The key is "when done right".
So many people send them to websites that don't perform well (especially on mobile for Facebook... since over 80% of those leads tend to be from cell phone devices... and most peoples websites are really bad on mobile... even if they're "responsive" most aren't setup to convert well on mobile phones). Or tons of people just launch ads and don't dial them in well... and end up thinking "Facebook ads don't work" etc. But our data shows a consistent growing trend in seller leads from Facebook across our platform and as Facebook improves their data and targeting more and more... the ability to generate great leads at CPL (cost per lead) that make sense keeps getting better.
go get 'em on the wholesaling side of things man!
And Patrick is awesome! One of the good guys for sure :-)
Have an amazing week and reach out if we can help with anything at all.
Google AdWords or Facebook ads if you had to choose one?
This a great thread, and our experience is that Google Adwords Ads are much more expensive per lead, approximately $200 - $300 in our market (San Diego, CA). Facebook Leads are much less expensive $30 - $50 per lead. Our definition of a lead is someone who has expressed an interest to sell their house for cash. In order to get a conversion, Google has a much higher conversion rate. A conversion is defined as someone who will sit down with you and entertain an offer.
Google is approximately $1,200 to $1,500 per conversion.
Facebook is approximately $600 to $1,000 per conversion.
In order to get a property under contract, it's about the same between FB and G - approximately $3,000 in ad spend to get a contract accepted on a property, and about 70% of those contracts close. There are a lot of factors involved that can only be converted with in-person sales skills, but that dollar amount should be about the same per conversion.
If anyone knows of a company or person converting at a very high level, I would love to mastermind, and am happy to share our current strategy. The minimum ad spend would be approximately $5k - $10k for both FB and G. If you're doing anything at that level or above, let's chat!
Thanks @Trevor Mauch, Eric Sztanyo, and all. Great information. I'm still learning. Thanks