Success in real estate these days means branching out. Traditional methods of finding potential clients on either side of the sale aren’t nearly as effective as they used to be. Door tags and mailers end up in the recycling bin. Roadside billboards reach fewer people as they continue to work from home.
That is where digital advertising has come in.
Social media has become for many a way of life. We turn to it dozens of times every day, looking for what’s new and what we can daydream about. Its popularity makes it the go-to destination for advertising for real estate professionals; after all, the best way to reach your audience is to be where they are.
To catch and keep that audience’s interest, though, your message needs to stand out from the plentiful other ads that consumers see—and often tune out—every day.
Let’s explore the keys to success for digital advertising.
Social media ads need to be scroll-stopping.
Consumers see plenty of ads and gorgeous posts on their social media feeds every day. If they’ve already taken steps in their real estate journey, too, there’s a good chance they’re already being targeted by cookies—and will see more real estate–related ads than usual.
To succeed in digital advertising, you need to be able to create the sort of ads that can attract consumers’ easily distracted eyes and show the best about a listing in less than a second.
Focus on social media-worthy imagery, and highlight the features that you know will most likely interest your audience—for example, in 2023, consumers reported being most interested in features like natural light, spaces for casual entertaining, and outdoor space.
You could also experiment with running ads featuring different aspects of a listing to see which ones perform best in your market.
They also need to be clear.
Once you’ve got a consumer’s attention, you need to make the most of it. As a little fun fact, a few studies done in the last couple of years have shown that the average human attention span sits around 47 seconds. That may seem like a reasonable amount of time in the social media world, but it’s also worth remembering that one post in a sea of many may not get the full span.
Make sure that both in the images you choose and the copy you include, you’re as clear as possible about what the listing is. Keep your headlines quick and catchy, limit posts to two or three lines that focus on the key points, and try not to overdo it with emojis—they add personality, but too many can become an accessibility issue for those who need to use screen readers.
They need to be quick and easy to create.
Real estate is busy, and when things start ramping up, marketing is one of the first things to fall off the priority list. Ads sound a lot easier to run regularly than they are, especially once you get into editing images, creating copy, making sure you’ve got all the details, setting up landing pages the ad can point to, and setting it all up in your social media dashboard.
And well, if you’ve already got plenty of business on the go, it can be hard justifying the effort to find more.
Unfortunately, that’s often how real estate professionals end up with too little business once the busy part wanes.
That’s why marketing tactics, and especially digital advertising, need to be something you can do quickly without really having to think about it—an extra step in an existing process that doesn’t slow you down.
It’s time to master social media advertising.
At Lone Wolf, we know that it takes a little extra to stand out in today’s market. That’s why we put so much effort into building software that helps the people of real estate master every key to successful advertising—so they can attract new audiences, build their pipelines, and face every season with confidence.
Here’s everything you need to know about getting your social media advertising started.
