Big City Realty is a Toronto-based real estate brokerage that has been entrusting Digilite with its digital solutions for years — from social media marketing to web development. Recently, BCR wanted to upscale their online presence even further and kickstart the implementation of social ads with the goal of generating leads. Implementing social ads for real estate companies poses a few hurdles that need to be taken into account in order to come out on top. Let’s look at how we quickly achieved a substantial cost-per-lead rate and acquired high-quality leads for BCR.
The Challenge
Excelling at social ads with Facebook is a laborious task not only for businesses in general but for the real estate industry specifically. Facebook is constantly updating policies and terms of what social ads can be published (depending on the ad content and chosen demographics) and it’s necessary for businesses to keep up with them if they want to notice effective results with their investment. The word ‘rejected’ is one that is familiar to anyone creating social ads, especially within industries like real estate, mortgages and credit, employment, and social activism. Since BCR is in the real estate industry, that means our specialists had to get acquainted with all of Facebook’s policies, posting ethics, and guidelines to avoid penalizing the account and doing more harm than good for the company image. That’s where the intense research and strategizing began.
Our Approach
Here is how we put into place a social ads strategy that helped BCR have a positive return on investment:
- Testing — trial and error is a natural part of the process, but you also need to be able to correctly identify the issues and make adjustments accordingly. Otherwise, the ad budget will be utilized before you know it and the results will be underwhelming. To avoid that, we ran ads testing initially for a few days and then analyzed the metrics of each to determine how to move forward. It’s only natural that some ads will perform better than others and you don’t want to allocate significant budgeting to ads that are only costing more than their return.
- Expertise — we utilized our years of marketing experience to resolve issues before they even occurred. For example, many business owners in the real estate industry may create ads only for them to receive numerous rejections. That is often due to discrimination in terms of the target demographics and location — which Facebook is strictly monitoring in recent times. We ensured that the ads for BCR were all marked with a Special Ads Category that is a feature made specifically for businesses running ads regarding credit, housing, and employment.
- Constant maintenance — analysis and review is a vital part of creating campaigns with high ROI. What does that entail exactly? Our specialist constantly and consistently reviewed the results of the campaign and made adjustments whenever necessary. That included pausing posts that weren’t performing as well and updating visuals and info to keep the ads up-to-date.
The Results
With all of the above-mentioned strategies in place, we were able to achieve a campaign that was performing exceptionally well, especially in terms of the cost-per-lead (CPL). We were able to establish a CPL of only $5.34 which is on the lower end of the cost spectrum compared to the average CPL for Facebook ads that businesses need to strive for. The green or “good” range for CPL is anywhere from 0-20 dollars and is undoubtedly a difficult range to fall into if your campaigns are not optimized and executed with a professional’s touch. You generally don’t want the cost of a lead to be greater than the average profit they will bring upon conversion. For that reason, a high CPL can quickly become a liability instead of an advantage if not optimized and lowered as much as possible.
All in all, Big City Realty’s goals were realized through our specialist’s efforts and a custom-tailored approach to their social ads.
Want a results-driven social ads strategy in place? Then what are you waiting for? Let’s get in touch.
