One of the biggest marketing challenges real estate agents face is connecting their digital marketing strategy with their offline marketing efforts. When you have an open house, do you have a strategy for retargeting leads who attend? Do you have a system for using social media to feed you pre-qualified leads?
According to a recent study by Mediakix, an influencer marketing agency, the average person spends 50 minutes per day on Facebook’s suite of apps (Facebook, Messenger and Instagram) alone. That is a lot of time that you can capitalize on if you have the right strategy in place.
So let’s discuss the latest trends in advanced audience segmentation and how to jumpstart your 2021 sales.
What is advanced audience segmentation?
Anthony Mann | LinkedIn
Unless you’re brand new to the digital marketing world, you already know about market segmentation. At the core of market segmentation is dividing the market into approachable groups to create more targeted content.
Market segmentation creates subsets of a market. They might be based on demographics, needs, priorities, shared interests and other criteria used to understand your customers better.
But standard retargeting isn’t nearly as effective as advanced audience segmentation, according to Anthony Mann, president of a social media marketing agency called A Social Strategy and president of AM Open House, an app for Realtors.
With advanced audience segmentation, you can:
- Track, score and segment audiences into high-, medium- and low-interest retargeting groups
- Develop custom criteria and decision trees
- Automate your process, which lets you maximize your ad spend, while you stay in the driver’s seat
To make this work for you, you need to take action on the following insights.
How to use the Facebook special ads category
“We’re hearing a lot of agents saying Facebook ads don’t work for lead generation anymore,” Mann said. Although Facebook ads have indeed changed a lot over the past couple of years, it’s simply not true that they “do not work.” Far from it.
What has changed is that Facebook ads have gotten more sophisticated. And this is an excellent thing — if you understand how to use the newer features.
“The special ads category has thrown a wrench into the old Facebook ads strategy,” Mann wrote in an article on Real Trends. “Now you need to be savvier about who you are reaching with your ads.” Being savvier means you need access to more data. You need to have your follow-up systems dialed in, and you need to make sure you have trained up your whole team.
The big mistake many agents make is that they configure their ad campaign’s goal and stop there. After configuring the goal, make sure to use the various targeting options to layer on your criteria for retargeting.
For example, you can use location targeting to send ads to those who attend an open house with other nearby open house events. You could also target ads to towns or counties that tend to buy in the neighborhoods where you have listings.
Play with lookalike audiences
If you have a list of recent buyers, you can upload the list, and Facebook will create a “lookalike” custom audience for you. This audience will be a list of likely homebuyers generated by Facebook’s algorithm.
You can do the same for open house lists. Create a lookalike audience based on who shows up to your open houses in a given month or several months, and then create ads directed at that specific audience.
Common audience segmentation errors
Now that you’ve seen a lot of do’s, let’s talk about some of the don’ts:
- Avoid making your segments too specialized: Smaller segments are not always accurate or quantifiable. The smaller the sample size, the less you can trust the data.
- Large segments might not be helpful either: Your segmentation strategy might have identified a large pool, but unless these people are serious buyers, you won’t see a healthy return on your investment.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment: Audiences and circumstances evolve, and to stay on top of your real estate sales game, you need to be ahead of the trends. So be flexible, and don’t let yourself get too entrenched in any one strategy. Change things up every few months.
Audience segmentation doesn’t have to be daunting or overwhelming. Take these insights, have some fun with them, and sit back while your listings fly off the market in 2021.
Victoria Kennedy is CEO of Atman Real Estate. Connect with her via email.
