The 3-Step Facebook Real Estate Funnel For Generating Leads

Are you looking to draw in more leads for your real estate business using Facebook? A key element of real estate Facebook marketing is the customer funnel.

In this post, I’ll share the three sections of the funnel, how to maximize your leads, and how to get a better return on investment.

Identify Your Top Of Funnel

The top of the Facebook real estate funnel is a completely cold audience of people who have just discovered you. It will also be where you get most of your engagement.

At this point of the funnel, you want to serve value to every potential home buyer or seller for free. This value should come in the form of content. In fact, you don’t even want to capture their information yet. Your goal should be to build an extensive list of people that you can provide value to.

When you start by giving people value for free, you are forming a relationship with them. You are also positioning yourself as a real estate professional with authority in the real estate market. Then down the road when they are ready for your services, they’ll be more likely to reach out to you.

A content-based strategy also takes less time and gets you more leads than outbound prospecting or cold-calling.

Using Facebook Ads To Expedite Your Top of Funnel Growth

Start your top of funnel real estate Facebook ads out as regular posts that you can share with your audience on both your business and personal pages to get organic engagement and brand awareness.

Organic engagement is important because aside from being free, it’ll also create social proof for when you start running that same post as a real estate ad. When you’re engaging in real estate Facebook marketing, social proof can mean the difference between someone deciding to engage with you or not.

Find Your Audience

You want to have a broad audience at the top of the real estate funnel, ideally anywhere between 10,000 to 50,000. Anything more means your audience is over generalized.

An essential part of real estate Facebook marketing is testing different ads and audiences to see what is most effective. The best way to do this is by A/B testing.

For example, you can run an ad that targets one group with an interest in a local business in your neighborhood. Simultaneously, you can run the same ad to a second group with a different interest, and then see which one performs better.

Facebook has limited the available options for targeting in recent updates. However, if you use radius targeting of 25 miles (the lowest Facebook allows) to target your market, along with age range and income, you can start to narrow down your top of funnel audience.

Type of Content

Content is key when it comes to real estate Facebook marketing. To determine what type of content to create, determine who your target audience is and then consider what information is most valuable to them.

Are you going after potential buyers, sellers, expireds, first-time homebuyers, FSBOs, or another group of leads? Will you go after a specific area of your neighborhood or zip code?

Remember, your only goal at the top of the funnel is to separate the people who are just scrolling from those who are more interested. Once you know who is serious, you can retarget them in the next step of the funnel to get their information.

There’s a few different types of content that you can experiment with:

• Write a helpful blog post and create an ad that directs people to visit your website to read it.
• Create a long-form post directly on Facebook so your potential leads don’t have to go to your site.
• Film a three to five-minute video ad on any topic that the lead might find valuable.

Facebook Pixel

Whenever you send people off of Facebook to any external website, you need to make sure there is a Facebook Pixel installed on that website.

A pixel sets up a link between a website and your Facebook so you can capture data such as who visits your site, what pages they view, and how much time they spend there.

Once you have this data, you can go back and retarget these people on Facebook in the next step of the funnel.

Engage With The Middle Of Funnel

At this step in the process of real estate Facebook marketing, you should continue to offer value to your leads in exchange for their information. In this step, you’re still in the process of relationship-building, but now you’re focusing on people who are interested in you.

You can ask for any information you need for your business, but keep in mind that a lead may not be willing to give out too much information. At the very least, you should be sure to get their email address.

Your middle of the funnel audience will be created by retargeting the people at the top of the funnel who interacted with your content in some way.

For example, if you create a video ad and someone watches any part of it for more than three seconds, you can go back and retarget them to be in the middle of your funnel.

While three seconds doesn’t sound like a lot, it still separates the people who just scroll past your video from those who showed a bit of interest. You can do the same with anyone who clicks on your ads or engages with your long-form posts.

Also, you can use a Facebook pixel to similarly target people if you are creating content outside of Facebook. By having that pixel installed, you can directly serve ads on Facebook to those who’ve engaged with your content on an external site. This helps to increase the size of your middle of funnel.

Facebook Lead Ad

The best type of ad you can use for your middle funnel audience is a Facebook lead ad, and there are two ways to use it.

First, you can use Facebook Lead Ads to create a lead form that asks for your lead’s information while keeping them within the platform. Once they register with their information, they will receive an automatic email with a link to the content they wanted.

The second way to use a Facebook Lead Ad is to have it direct to a specific landing page on your website, where the lead will have to fill in their information in order to access the content.

Usually, you’ll get more results when you keep people within Facebook. Also, you won’t have to worry about creating a pixel.

It’s better to show Facebook Lead Ads to your middle of the funnel because these people will be more likely to respond, which will bring your cost of lead down.

Whereas if you try a real estate Facebook ad at the top of the funnel before you’ve filtered out the people who may not be interested, your lead cost is going to be much higher and you’ll be wasting money.

Type of Content

In this part of the sales funnel, you can experiment to see what kinds of content give you a higher conversion ratio. You can do buyer’s guides, neighborhood market reports, FSBO information packages, or in-depth ten to fifteen-minute videos about a specific zip code. A popular option is to make lists of various homes such as upcoming open houses, brand new homes, homes with pools, or homes with different acreages.

For example, if your top of funnel content is a blog post about “The Number One Thing To Know When Buying a Home,” your middle funnel ad can promise a free buyer’s guide about “Everything You Need to Be Aware of When Buying a Home in [Your Market].”

You can use Facebook marketing for real estate to position yourself as the expert on your particular zip code. You can make content that talks about schools, taxes, shopping, food, average prices, and different aspects of the neighborhoods in your area.

To create a list, you can use your IDX website. For example, you can search your IDX for homes with a pool under $300,000 that have been on the market for less than 14 days. Then, you could copy the link to the results page and put it in the email that you send to the lead.

When the lead clicks on the link in the email, they get sent to your website where they can see more details on the homes. However, if your website is set up to require the lead to register if they want to look at more than one home, it can potentially irritate the lead since they have already given you their information.

So if you’re doing that type of funnel strategy, it’s best to either have forced registration turned off, or set up an account for them in your CRM system so that it counts them as registered already.

You should also be careful about creating lists that you have to update every single week because you could end up sending them properties that just sold or recently went under contract.

Convert The Bottom Of The Funnel

In real estate Facebook marketing, the bottom of the funnel is somebody who has given you their information but hasn’t purchased yet. These are people from the middle of the funnel that you have retargeted again into the last step of the sales funnel. You may not even have their full name, but you can find out their other information later as long as you have an email address.

However, even if you get an email or phone number, your lead may still not be quite warm enough to the point where they’re ready to talk to you.

For these leads, you can create a series of five to ten posts or videos that you send out through email and post on Facebook as ads.

At this point, you can start telling the lead stories about yourself and giving them testimonials from your past clients. You can provide the lead value that helps them and shows your expertise and experience as a real estate agent.

When you create posts for the middle and bottom of the funnel, you’re going to set it up as an ad immediately, rather than making it a regular post first like in the top of the funnel. This way, these posts will not be visible on your main page at all. It’s only visible as part of that ad series targeted at your bottom of the funnel audience.

Call to Action

Your bottom of the sfunnel content needs to include a call to action with the ultimate goal of getting an appointment. This can be asking your lead to contact you on social media, send you an email, give you a phone call, or use your Calendly link to book an appointment with you.

Ideally, you should keep all of your bottom of the funnel interactions within Facebook until the lead makes a move to set up an appointment with you.

At this stage, you’ve been building up so much value that if the lead messages you, you know that they are seriously interested. Now you can start to expand on the relationship you’ve created with them by finding out the specific details of their situation.

Tracking Your Leads

You shouldn’t use a CRM system to track potential leads at the top and middle of the funnel because they are more like inquiries. You should only consider them leads once they sign up to meet with you.

Just because someone fills out a form and gives you their information doesn’t mean you should consider them a buyer or seller lead just yet. Thinking like this can end up hurting you because then you’ll spend too much time trying to pursue all these people when they don’t have an interest in working with you yet.

Instead, a more effective use of your time is to add people into your CRM system once they have reached out to you. This will help you focus your efforts on the people who are genuinely interested in you.

Everybody else can just go into your email database and get put on a drip campaign where they continue to receive your emails.

Final Thoughts on Real Estate Facebook Marketing

Real estate Facebook marketing is most effective when you use a content-based strategy. This strategy allows you to focus on building immense amounts of value to as many people as possible. You’ll be getting solid leads who reach out to you with genuine interest compared to leads that you cold call.

Which Facebook marketing strategies do you use? Which ones will you try? Let me know in the comments below!