Why you should use Facebook ads for commercial real estate

At first, you may feel reluctant about using Facebook ads for commercial real estate. But used correctly Facebook can be an incredibly powerful platform to drive revenue growth for your business.

Commercial real estate investment isn’t an easy thing to market. It’s a niche type of investment that isn’t massively well understood by people looking to grow their wealth. 

That means you have to work harder to attract audiences and educate them about the merits of commercial property investment. But Facebook can help.

The social media giant has tools to help your marketing strategy prosper in three crucial areas:

In this article we will go through each part of the process. But if you’d like to take a deep dive into best practice for PPC in the real estate sector, we highly recommend reading one of our earlier articles such as Revenue-boosting PPC for real estate investors.

If this article focuses on why you should use Facebook ads for commercial real estate lead generation, the article above explains how.

Before we start…

What if you didn’t have to pay for your ads? We are a paid media agency – and we specialise in the property investment sector, helping businesses like yours drive huge returns. We’re so confident in our ability to unlock transformative revenue that if we like the sound of your business, we may even offer to cover your ad spend. Sounds good? Complete this tiny form to find out more.

“Since working with Adbetter, our digital paid media channels have grown to be one of our most consistent generators of high-quality leads. Our lead volumes from paid media channels have increased over 1,400% whilst maintaining a low cost per lead.”

Matthew Fawl, Director, Alesco Investment Property

Raising awareness

Investing in commercial real estate can be lucrative. You know that. Your audience doesn’t. Raising awareness about the opportunity is the first step towards getting results with Facebook ads for commercial real estate. And Facebook makes it easy.

Showcase your investment opportunities

Facebook by nature is a very visual place. It lends itself well to showcasing images of your portfolio of investment opportunities. For instance with a carousel ad you can showcase up to ten images or videos within a single ad.

Deep dive into a particular property

Likewise Facebook makes it easy to take a deep dive into one particular investment that you want to promote. Let’s say it’s a retirement home, student housing or office block. You could post a video that takes your audience on a virtual tour of the property, while outlining some of the terms and potential returns of investment.

Educate about the opportunity

A picture might be able to say a thousand words. But when it comes to educating your audience about an unfamiliar investment vehicle, sometimes it’s best to let writing do the heavy lifting. 

Facebook is a great place to share micro blogs, promote content on your website and create bitesize infographics that demystify commercial real estate investment and reveal to your audience what’s possible.

Nurturing your leads

Once your ads have started gaining traction and winning leads, your mission is to further educate your audience about the opportunities that you have available – addressing audience doubts and showing how your investments could help your leads move towards their financial ambitions. 

The type of content that works well during this phase includes testimonials from previous clients, examples of returns that previous investment opportunities have produced or invitations to tour one of your upcoming projects.

Gather data

The main objective of your initial crop of Facebook ads for commercial real estate is to capture audience data – either by driving your audience to a landing page on your website or by utilising Facebook’s Lead Ads (which allow your audience to complete a lead generation form without leaving the app).

Alternatively, build fully branded interactive lead generation forms in seconds with Nerchr. It’s the software we built for optimising ROI on our clients’ pay per click campaigns and managing over £10 million worth of ad spend. Now we’ve made this platform available for everyone. Take a look.

You can incentivise your audience to give their data by offering something in return – such as a brochure about your current investment opportunities, a guide to commercial property investment or a free consultation. 

Once you have a name and an email address or phone number, you can target these leads with additional marketing – such as a sequence of marketing emails – that further educate your audience and nudge them towards conversion.

Facebook retargeting

Once someone from your pool of prospects has given you their data, you can set your campaign up to serve them a new set of adverts within Facebook. It’s called retargeting – and it’s something you should embrace. Personalisation gets results. The more you can show your audience that you understand their intentions, the more likely you are to run successful campaigns on Facebook. 

Your retargeting ads might go to a slightly deeper level in terms of offering knowledge about the nuances of commercial property investment. Or perhaps you might echo any activities you are running with email marketing.

Gathering new clients and driving revenue

Data is the enabler of success when it comes to driving revenue from your Facebook ads. Yet it’s something that many brands overlook. By getting the right tracking in place, you can get an incredibly clear picture of how your campaign is performing – with visibility into how each prospect has progressed from their first exposure to your ads through to becoming a client. And this data is your gold dust.  

Optimise your campaigns – and your company – with data

Once you have data on how your audience is behaving, you can optimise your ads. Your data will reveal the ads that are driving the best engagement – allowing you to double down on the strategies that are getting results, and ditching the stuff that isn’t. 

Over time you can continually test, iterate and optimise your campaign – letting your data guide you to lean, effective ads that are generating a steady stream of leads for your business.

This insight can help you get quicker returns if you want to expand your paid media activities to other channels like Google, TikTok or YouTube. In fact it’s no overstatement to say that the data you gather from your first forays into Facebook advertising can help to inform core tenets of your company – such as marketing strategy and growth projections.  

Feed customer data into Facebook

Facebook is clever. The more data you feed it about your existing customers, the better it gets at suggesting lookalike audiences to target with your next campaigns. 

So as your ads become more successful and get more conversions, you will likely find it easier to identify the next pool of prospects who are highly likely to be interested in your investment opportunities. It’s a virtuous circle, driven by data.

Keen to get started? Read this…

We’ve written an expansive guide that outlines how to get started with paid media for real estate. Creating your first ads, making a successful landing page, tracking your conversions. It’s all there. Read our guide to revenue-boosting PPC for real estate investors.

Or let us do the hard work for you

We know how to get big – really big – returns through paid media for real estate. So much so that we may even offer to cover your ad spend, completely derisking your financial exposure. Here’s a very quick summary of how we work with businesses like yours – and what you can expect from us.

Or if you want to take a more DIY approach to your paid ads activity, try Nerchr. It’s the platform we built for optimising our clients’ campaigns – and now we’ve made it available to everyone. Better leads, better data, better results. Take a look.

You may also be interested in:

>> A guide for getting better returns with commercial property advertising
>> A complete guide to Facebook ads for financial advisers
>> Lead generation for financial services: 16 tips for getting big results