Video Transcription
In today’s video, I’m going to talk to you about using Facebook Ads for your property management company.
Before I get into it, my name is Stephen Fox. I am one of the admins of the Property Management Growth Hacking Club. I’m also the co-founder at Upkeep Media where we specialize in helping property management companies grow and improve their sales process as well.
So, in today’s video, what I’m going to cover is an introduction to Facebook as well as how to get started and set up your first campaign.
I’m going to go over the power of Facebook. I’ll also talk about why solely having a Facebook business page won’t cut it. It’s not actually going to produce any type of significant return on investment. You’re not going to get many leads solely through your Facebook business page.
I’m going to talk to you about how you can use Facebook to your advantage. I’ll also touch briefly on the different reasons why you should run ads as well as the advantages of using Facebook for your business. Then I’ll get into how to actually set up a campaign so that you can get started after this video.
Why Facebook Ads?
So, to get into it, one thing you absolutely need to know is Facebook is crazy powerful.
The amount of data that they have on their users, (on you and on everyone else on their platform) is a little bit scary.
So, you can see here on the right of my screen. This is just some of the information that they can target their users with. If you wanted to run an ad, say to people that only make more than $100,000 per year, you can do that. They have that type of information on their users and much, much more.
I’ll show you a little bit more of that when we actually get into setting up the campaign. But the reason why they have all this information is because they partner with third-party data sources.
Essentially let’s say that Robert is on Facebook, and then after Facebook, he exits, and he decides that he needs to buy a new pair of shoes. So, he heads on over to an e-commerce store where they sell shoes. What happens is Facebook’s actually tracking that information. So, they know that Robert is somebody that’s interested in buying a new pair of shoes. The next time he goes on Facebook there’s a very good chance that they’re going to show him ads from shoe companies.
On top of that Facebook allows for very, very specific targeting. You can literally target people down to their income, the language that they speak, their location, and their interests. So, you can target people that have an interest in real estate investing for example. That’s very, very powerful. I’ll show you more about that when we actually get into setting up the campaign.
Why You Need More Than a Facebook Business Page
A Facebook business page won’t cut it. Why do I say that?
Basically, we talk to a lot of clients and they say, “Well, we post on our Facebook business page, but we don’t really generate any new business from it.” There’s a reason for that and it’s actually new in 2018 especially.
Facebook flat-out came out and said, “We don’t want to show organic posts to our users from businesses.” So, you can see right here there’s a snippet of that post where Mark Zuckerberg said, “As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media.” So, that’s you guys.
If you have a property management company, and you have a Facebook business page and you’re busy posting on your Facebook business page, that content isn’t getting seen by many people. The only people that are seeing it are people that already follow your company. So, meaning no new leads that you can actually use to grow your business.
Reasons for Running Facebook Ads
So, how do you take advantage of Facebook?
You have to start making Facebook work for your company, and you do that by using their advertising platform. They want businesses out there to be paying for ads. They don’t want to just give organic traffic away through their Facebook business page.
So, what I have here is a typical Facebook ad. You’ve probably seen these many times. If ever you’re on Facebook this is going to be shown to you.
What a Facebook Ad looks like:
- The top will have the company logo, it’ll always say sponsored right below the company name.
- Below, there will be the ad copy.
- Then, the third section will be either a video or an image. We highly recommend using videos.
- The fourth section will be a call to action, where it basically tells the user to take some sort of action and click on their ad.
The different reasons for running Facebook ads are various, there are literally tons.
Some of the reasons to run Facebook ads would be for content marketing purposes. If you’re regularly blogging and you’re putting that blog on your website, the only people that are going to see that blog post are people that find your website generally through search engines.
Another great way to get people to find your blog posts is through using Facebook Ads. A lot of times people will sort of just use that ‘boost a post’ feature when they publish it on to their business page. That is one of the best ways to waste your money.
By using the Facebook advertising platform, and not just pressing ‘boost a post’ you’ll get much more specific with your ads and you’ll have a much better return on your ad spend.I’ll show you that at the end of this video, sort of how to set up a basic campaign.
You can also use Facebook Ads to generate owner leads.
You can use Facebook Ads to help you find tenants if ever that’s an issue that you’re having.
You can also use Facebook Ads to grow your realtor referral program.
So, they’re just some of the reasons for why you can use Facebook ads.
Advantages of Facebook Ads
I’m just going to touch quickly on some of the advantages of Facebook ads. The first advantage is the fact that your customers spend time on Facebook (over 80% of Internet users use Facebook).
Facebook also has the most targeted form of advertising. You can literally target by age, interest, their behavior, income, and location. That’s just a few of the targeting options and you’ll see some more in it in just a bit.
It’s one of the cheapest forms of advertising. So, if you compare it the cost of running Facebook ads to the cost of running a Google AdWords campaign it’s a fraction of the cost. And the reason why is because Facebook is not yet saturated. I expect the price to go up significantly within the next three-four years but at the current time, it’s a great place to take advantage of.
It also will help you increase brand awareness. I mean running ads in general help increase brand awareness.
Another great thing about Facebook ads is you can retarget visitors that have already been to your website. So, let’s say a potential property owner visit your website but they didn’t actually make contact, you can get back into their mind by retargeting those visitors with an ad regarding your company.
Another advantage is that it significantly improves your SEO rankings. The reason being is because Google loves social signals. They also love brand recognition and when people see ads, as we just touched on, it increases your brand awareness. It increases the amount of time people are actually going to Google your brand name. And also, Google loves sites that have traffic going to it. So, those are all factors that help increase your SEO rankings.
How to Start Running a Facebook Ad
Okay. So, I’m going to get into how to run a Facebook ad for your company.
The first step that you absolutely need to take is to install the Facebook pixel on your website. Facebook pixel is a small snippet of code that you install on the back end of your website. It allows you to track the data of all the users that visit your website.
Having the pick tool installed will allow you to retarget those visitors and it’ll allow you to create custom audiences. So, let’s say that you have some busy people that visit your website and they actually convert and contact you guys, you can then tell Facebook, “We want you to find more people that are very similar to the people that already contacted us.”
Basically, you can run ads specifically for those types of people.
I’m not going to get into exactly how to set up the Facebook pixel in this video. I shot a separate video showing you exactly how to set up the Facebook pixel on your website. There’s a link to that video right here. I’ll also post this in the comments below the video. It’s literal step by step what you need to do to set up the Facebook pixel on the back end of your site. It’s very simple but if you do have questions. Don’t hesitate. Just reach out and ask a question. I’m sure that we can get that set up for you.
Setting up a Campaign
Types of Campaigns
So, without further ado, I’m going to take you over to my screen where I will walk you through how to set up a basic traffic campaign.
The meaning of traffic campaign is to get people to your website.
So, I’m on my Facebook profile. You can find your ads in the top right corner. You can run ads through a place here where it says ‘create ads’. So, I’m just going to click on ‘create ads’ and it’s going to bring me to the ads manager.
Essentially once I’m in ads manager it’ll bring me to this screen, and once you’re here the first thing you need to do is choose which type of campaign you want to run.
The most common types of campaigns to run are a traffic campaign. Essentially, what a traffic campaign means is you’re trying to get people to click through on your ad to actually go to your website. So, if your goal is to get more people to your website you would want to run a traffic campaign.
Another type of a popular campaign is an engagement campaign, and the goal of an engagement campaign is to get people to actually engage with the ad. So, meaning you want them to share it with their friends. You want them to like it. You want them to comment. Facebook will show that to people that are more likely to take that type of action.
Another common type of campaign, that you might want to start out with is a lead generation campaign. How this campaign works is basically you entice them to leave you their information for some reason. So, for example, you might offer a free rental analysis and they can literally leave their info straight in the ad. So, they’ll click the ad. A pop-up form will show up and they just leave their information right there for you to contact them.
How to Run a Traffic Campaign
So, I’m going to take you through a traffic campaign. You just have to click traffic. The first thing you’re going to want to do is to name your campaign. So, I’m going to name a Growth Hacking Club, for example. Then once you’ve named it just click continue.
Then you’re going to want to name your ad set. Basically, you’re going to want to name your ad over here. So, again I’m going to type in Growth Hacking Club, for example. It’s important that you name your ad something that you can remember. You want to make sure you remember exactly which ad was for what goal because over time you’re going to want to run multiple ads. This is because you’re going to want to test which ones are working best.
So, once you do that, the next option is traffic. Choose where you want to drive traffic, in this case, we want to drive traffic to our website. Don’t worry too much about ad or messenger. That’s probably not something that you’ll need for your property management company.
Then the next thing to go to look at is the audience. This is the most important part of your ad. This is targeting who you want your ad to show up to.
So, in this case, here, you’re going to put in what city are you located in. So, let’s say that you’re located in Orlando, Florida, you would put Orlando, Florida and then you would want to put the radius of where you want your ad to show up. Say that you put serve customers within 10 miles of Orlando, you would just change this over here to 10 miles.
Then you want to choose the demographic. So, you know your customers best.
What’s your average client look like?, What age group are they in?, Is it man or woman or both?, What languages?
If you’re in Miami, for example, you might want to show this ad to people that speak Spanish. In this case, I’ll just type in English.
We’re also going to want to show it to all age groups, we’ll say 23 to 65 plus.
This is where things get interesting, the detailed targeting. So, this is where you can choose what demographics you want to show your ads to. Also, what interests the people that you want your ads to show to.
So, just to show you some of the features. You can literally type ‘real-estate investments’ and under behaviors, it says this description, “households with people who are interested in investing in real estate”. What that says is, the ads are targeting people who are likely to have real estate investments. So, you’d want to check that off.
You would also probably want to check for people that have a certain income. So, you don’t necessarily want to advertise to people that have an income and say below $50,000 because the odds of them actually owning multiple investment properties and hiring a property management company are fairly slim. You probably know that the majority of your clients make over $75,000, so you don’t want to choose that. So, again you can go type in income and you would want to select all the different income categories that fit the description of your target audience.
I’m not going to go through all the different types of targeting that you can touch on here because I can literally be here for hours. But basically, do some playing around with this and make sure that the audience you select fits the criteria of your ideal client (the type of client that you normally service).
The next thing you want to do is save this audience. So, in this case, audience name. I’ll type it in a way that I’ll understand it. So, people located in ‘Orlando- 23 to 65- real estate investing’ let’s say. That’s just for your own purposes. So, don’t worry, that’s nothing that’s going to show up in the ad, that’s just so you can keep track of what you’ve done.
Next section is placements. This is where you want your advertisement to actually show up. You can go with automatic placements, it’s the recommended feature. If you have a little bit more knowledge on this you might want to start editing the placements, but I’m not going to go into too much detail with that.
Basically, there’s a ton of different areas where ads can show up. It can show up in the newsfeed, which is basically the section that you see when you log into Facebook and you’re scrolling through your newsfeed. Then there’s also the right-hand column. On the side of your newsfeed, there’s a bunch of different options. You can look at these on your own and choose where you want these to show up. Generally, we just go with all these networks, but it really depends on the type of ad you’re running.
So, once you do that you can basically choose your daily budget. You can start with as little as $1 per day if you want. I recommend that you use at least 5 dollars per day, we kind of have a hunch that Facebook doesn’t like when people advertise with less than five dollars a day. They’ll generally show preferential treatment to your ads if you put a $5 a day budget at least. The price is basically a cup of coffee.
Once you choose your budget press continue and now you’re going to want to name your ad. Essentially, in this case, we said it’s a traffic ad and I’ll say, ‘growth hacking’, for example. The name doesn’t matter too much. Just make sure it’s something that you can remember.
Then you’re going to want to choose the name of your Facebook page. Make sure that it’s associated with your company page.
Then here you’re going to choose the format, so if you want to just use one image in your ad, you would click the single image. If you have a video that was set up to your ad, you would click single video. We recommend using videos, it’s up to you which way you want to go.
Let’s say you use a single image you would then upload your image over here. You just press upload images and make sure that you have an image that is actually suitable for your ad.
Then once you do that you’re going to write in the copy of your ad. So, write what you want your advertisement to say, and then it says website URL, which is where you want them to land when they click on your ad. So, if you want them to go straight to your website you would put in your website URL here.
So, just to show you, in the text box I would write “use our property services. Then below you would want type and say www.orlandopropertymanagement.com. So now, you see that the ad is starting to actually look like something, and the headline is this section here where it says Orlando property. This text is what’s going to show up here and then the image that you put is what will show here (or a video if you choose to go the video route). Then right here you can basically choose what you want this section to say. So, if you wanted to say send a message you just click and it’s going to say send a message.
Once you finish filling out this ad area, you can get a quick look at what the ad is going to look like on different devices. This would be how it would look on a mobile newsfeed. If you want to see how it looks on a desktop it would look something like this. You’re going to have to experiment with different Ad Copy, with different images.
We’ll come up with some training as well to help you with that stuff and feel free to ask questions if you have them. Basically, once you’re satisfied with the ad that you’ve set up you come here, and you can click confirm, which means that your ad is now going to go live and start running. That pretty much covers how to set up your ad.
End Thoughts
If you have questions ask them in the comments below the video, I’ll be happy to answer them for you. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you go to YouTube and type in “Upkeep Media” it’ll show up.
You can also follow us on Facebook. If you go to Facebook.com/upkeepmedia and check out our website. Our blog has a lot of valuable information you can use to really improve your property management company. You can find our website at upkeepmedia.com and you’ll find a link to our blog in the menu on our website.
If you have questions leave them in the comments below as I mentioned before, and I hope you enjoyed this video, and I hope you start using Facebook ads to really grow your business.
If you’re interested, we also offer this as a service. So, if this is something that you don’t see yourself doing but you would like to actually have done for you feel free to contact us. We’d be happy to talk with you. Take care.
