Social media advertising is a must if you wish to stand out from the competition, drive people to your site, gain more visibility to your listings and boost revenue.
Leaning on organic searches saves you money, but isn’t always reliable or sustainable. Used effectively, advertising across social media platforms can increase your conversion rate with a lower cost of acquisition.
Before we dive into four effective digital marketing campaigns and how to best put them into practice, understanding what kind of content you want to put out there should be your first step.
Here are some examples of the types of content you might want to explore:
- Promote listings—Make it easy for customers to identify brand-new or existing listings.
- Standout features—Show off what makes your business unique and different through special offers, benefits and advanced tech solutions.
- Provide helpful content and quick tips—Provide relatable and useful infographics about homeownership with calls to action.
- Set up an event—Create an ad for open houses, Zoom events and more that visitors can mark on their social calendars.
- Draw consumers to social pages—Direct traffic to your social media pages to gain more followers and improve your SEO score.
- Appeal to a lifestyle—Guide buyers who looking to experience beach living, a desirable neighborhood in their area and/or noteworthy assets toward a home that’s trendy and attractive.
- Target first-time buyers—Help first timers easily find and compare properties and find the right real estate professional to contact.
- Make a limited-time offer—Target budget-conscious customers with time-sensitive promotions.
- Cultivate a persona—Craft a unique voice, style and impression consumers can easily identify and want to work with.
While there are many ways to target new clients on social media, these four platforms have new ad features that make an investment toward your social strategy easy and affordable.
LinkedIn sponsored content ads
LinkedIn has always served a market of business professionals looking to employ, be employed or make connections within other companies and industries. Unlike Instagram or TikTok that deals in visuals, LinkedIn focuses more on the content, which makes text-driven ads most effective. With its comprehensive Lead Gen Forms model, a user clicks the call-to-action button to engage with your sponsored content or message ads. Once they click on your ad, you receive a form that’s pre-filled with accurate professional information from their LinkedIn profile—which you can then collect and accrue leads, track and measure your campaign cost per lead and turn leads into new clients.
Pro Tip: Write ad headlines that are under 150 characters. Concise headlines lead to more engagement and speak to the current, consumer attention spans.
Pinterest video ads
Pinterest has a loyal following due to its engaging and intentional layout. But it’s more than just colorful baking recipes and outfit inspiration. With a Pinterest business account, real estate professionals can utilize the best of video to help people discover and drive actions to your website. Pinterest video ads are integrated in the feed to appear alongside organic pins. The ad specs come in standard or max width sizes and begin playing automatically when they come into a user’s feed. Playing up on consumer culture, users finding inspiration for a “minimalist design scheme” can simultaneously connect with an agent who can find them the home to make it happen in.
Pro Tip: Make sure you’re targeting the audiences you want by completely filling out the “Interests” feature when you set up an ad. This will help reach the right audience based on the pins they engage with.
TikTok ads with interactive add-ons
TikTok holds a lot of power in the social arena that isn’t just meant for the millennial/Gen Z gaze. The app’s main marketing tool comes in the form of full-screen video ads that appear on a user’s “For You” page—with interactive add-ons to help drive traffic to your site. Besides user-feed ads, other ad options on TikTok include Brand Takeovers, which means that your ad will be displayed as soon as a user opens the app, or a Branded Hashtag Challenge, which encourages user-generated content through trending hashtags and video challenges.
Pro Tip: Rather than hopping on a dance trend to convey relevance, focus on organic content that might resonate with audiences instead.
New Twitter ad formats
Twitter is the digital space for breaking news, discussion and humor. In spring 2022, the app began testing three new ad formats: Interactive Text, Product Explorer and Collection. Interactive Text ads appear as a larger, bolder typeface than the standard Twitter font in the timeline. Advertisers can highlight up to three words in their ad copy that, when clicked, will drive consumers to a business’ landing pages. Product Explorer gives advertisers the chance to showcase their products and services in 3D for the first time, providing the ability to swipe and rotate for different angles (a great way to show off a 3D home tour). Lastly, Collection ads offer a unique storytelling aspect. The ad displays a primary image with up to five smaller thumbnail visuals underneath, allowing users to get the full-picture and interact with each thumbnail.
Pro Tip: Keep it mobile-friendly. Choose vertical media content that can be displayed best for user-preference.
