Send A Video To Your Sphere Of Influence Using Facebook Ads For .03¢

It is my opinion that real estate brokers today are overly focused on generating leads and do not spend enough time focusing on their Sphere of Influence or Database.

Common sense tells us that we would rather get a call from a friend of our aunts, then an alert from some software with a name and email address, and perhaps a bit of personal information.

How do we apply that principle to our Facebook Ads?

We can run ads that are only directed to our Sphere of Influence!

How To Run Adds To Our Database

The first thing we need to do is think about what kind of message we want our sphere to see.  This will be different than a typical ad because we are not trying to get them to sign up for anything… We already have their contact information.

What Content Should I Share

Ad Ideas:

1.  Gentle reminder that we are real estate agents
2. Testimonials
3. Charity work
4. Real Estate accomplishments (Awards won, designations earned, properties sold)
5. Open Houses
6. Interesting Real Estate Information

Media:

1. Video
2. Images
3. Slideshow
4. Carousel

We prefer using video.

“Videos have repeatedly shown that they have much larger organic reach and engagement than other forms of content. People are watching more than 100 million hours of video on Facebook every day, and you can tap into this market with your own videos.” (SEO.com)

If you don’t have video to share you can still get results with a single image ad, or combining multiple images into a slideshow or carousel ad.

What You Will Need

1.  A Facebook Account
2. A Facebook Business Page
3. Media
   1. A Video File or
   2. An Image or
   3. Multiple Images
4. Your Database Exported
   1. As a .CSV file
   2. Mailchimp Account Login

CREATING THE FACEBOOK AD

• Open your Facebook Account
  • Home
  • Click On Ads Manager

• Click Create

• Switch To Guided Tour
  • A Little More User Friendly

• Select Your Marketing Objective
  • Keep In Mind We Are Not Trying To Convert Leads (We already have their contact information)
• For This Example We Are Selecting Video Views
• Give Your Campaign A Name
  • Name Your Campaign Based On Your Marketing Objective

• Create A Custom Audience
• Click Create New
• Custom Audiences >> Create New
• Select Custom Audience

• Select Customer File

• Select Customer File Source
  • Add Customers From Your Own File (CSV File)
    • I will be adding from file
  • Import From Mailchimp (Mailchimp Login)

• Upload Your CSV Database

• Map Your Database Categories To The Facebook Categories
  • Map
    • First Name
    • Last Name
    • Email
    • Phone
    • City
    • State
    • Zip Code
  • Do Not Map
    • Everything Else

• Once Your File Is Uploaded
• Click Done

• Leave Your Placements On Automatic Placements
  • Facebook will probably optimize your ad better than you

• Set Your Budget & Schedule
  • Budget
    • I like to set a lifetime budget (when my budget is spent the ad stops)
    • You may want to set a daily budget
    • Facebook will have a minimum budget allowed based on your audience size, objectives, and schedule
  • Schedule
    • I like to set my schedule for 1 month
    • That gives me time to work on other things
  • Set Ad Delivery
  • Bid Strategy
    • I like to set a bid cap
  • Continue

• Identity
  • Select The Facebook Page That You Want Associated With The Ad
  • If You Have An Instagram Account You Would Like The Ad To Display On
    • Connect Your Instagram Account
• Video Format
  • Select Single Video If You Have a Video File
  • Select Slideshow If You Have Multiple Images You Would Like To Be Displayed As a Slideshow

• For A More Robust Ad (but not necessary)
• Check Add A FullScreen Experience
  • This will give your ad a “landing page” on Facebook when they click your ad.
• Select the “Showcase Your Business” template

• Add Video or Image
• Add Page Headline
• Add Second Video or IMage

• Add Images To Carousel Display
• Be sure to add links back to your website

• Add Call To Action Video Or Image
• Enter Call To Action Button Text
• Add Link To Call To Action
  • For this example I used “Get Your Homes Value”
  • With a link to a home valuation tool
• Click Done

• Upload Your Ad Video

• Choose Your Video Thumbnail or Upload A Custom Thumbnail
• Add Video Caption
  • Generate Automatically and adjust yourself
  • Let Facebook Review

• Add The Ad Text and Headline

• Review Your Ad To Check For Accuracy
• When You Are Ready “PUBLISH” Your Ad

FACEBOOK WILL REVIEW YOUR AD

Once Facebook determines that your ad meets their guidelines they will send you a Facebook Message letting you know your ad is live.

KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR STATS

The only way to truly determine if your ad will be successful is to watch the analytics.  If the ad is not performing well make some adjustments… or turn it off and try a different strategy.

If your friends start telling you that they are seeing you on Facebook all the time, just smile and say, “Huh, that is weird”.

PROOF

After running my Video to my sphere of influence using Facebook Ads for 1 week here are my results:

Highlights:

• Video Ad run only to my uploaded .CSV sphere of influence for 1 week
• Cost per video view:  .03¢
• Total cost for the week:  $9.88
• Number of times the video was watched for at least 2 seconds:  337
• Number of sphere of influence reached:  243
• I only ended up with a relevancy score of:  4 (out of 10)

Having a relevancy score of only 4 means that my audience did not respond to my ad very well.

I will be tweaking the ad to try to increase that score to at least a 7.

CHOOSING YOUR CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVE

It is important to remember in this ad example we are sending ads to our sphere of influence.  We already have their email address and contact information… so any type of lead generation would be redundant.

We are simply trying to send our sphere a message reminding them that we are a trusted, knowledgable, and active real estate point of contact.

I am choosing to send my sphere a video and will choose VIDEO VIEWS as my objective.

VIDEO VIEWS