Commercial Real Estate Agents: Learn How Facebook Can Take Your Sales Process To Hyperspeed And Sell Your Real Estate Stock Faster.

In this second article in the two-part series, I will look into Facebook/Instagram marketing for Commercial Real Estate (CRE) Agents, and especially how the CRE agent can utilize this powerful tool for both lead gen as well as for selling their existing stock by getting it in front of the right people. I will also make a case that Facebook is by far the best platform that CRE agents should be using if they want to grow their agencies.

Speaking to CRE agents over the past few weeks I am astonished at how few of them utilize Facebook marketing or even have any bearing on how powerful Facebook (which owns Instagram) has become over the years in its ability at market properties to hyper-relevant audiences as well as a tool for lead generation. In the US, it is now the norm, and even a well-known fact, that Facebook marketing is an essential part of their businesses - I think it is just a matter of time for the UK to follow this trend.

I hear time and time again that Facebook advertising does not work, but this is a massive misunderstanding about the platform. The fact of the matter is that organic (free) posting is dead, especially since 2018 when Mark Zuckerburg announced algorithm changes denoting business pages and prioritizing personal ones. Long story short, organic posts reach less than 2% of your followers on Facebook and 6% on Instagram. This is slightly depressing I know. This means if you have 1,000 followers you will reach a maximum of 60 with your post. To further complicate matters, there are still many social media managers pushing a service where they post content for businesses and in the process have zero real effect on the business themselves, thus making Facebook look like a novelty.

Another thing that again makes Facebook look like it doesn’t work is the ‘boosting’ features it offers business owners. This is mostly a huge waste of money, and Facebook seems to be very bad at communicating how this feature works. Boosting tells the Facebook algorithm that you want engagement (likes/comments/shares) which has its use, but is only one part of the sales funnel, in fact, one I rarely use when I manage people's Facebook ads. I would strongly recommend anyone putting money behind boosting to stop. 

So why is facebook amazing?

The good news is that Facebook has made paid ads incredibly powerful, and if you learn how to use Ads and Business Manager (free tools from Facebook to manage your ads) and with a small budget, you can reach highly relevant audiences, and push them to take actions which help them along your sales funnel. 

Hyper-targeted

Facebook has so much data about people, it’s kind of scary, to be honest. But this data if you know what you are doing, can be utilized for your marketing purposes. Facebook offers all of us the tools to use this data in Ads Manager where we can create ads designed to be shown to very specific audiences. For CRE agents, we can target restaurant or pub owners for example, or otherwise, if we want the right people in the mid to large leisure companies to see a specific property for sale or to lead them to your website, for example, you can show your ads to job titles such as ‘Head of Property’ or ‘Property Director’ - a couple of titles these people generally have. We can choose the basic filters such as the age, gender, income bracket, location, but also this gets more interesting when you mix these filters with targeting people who visit a specific website, say your competitors, which you can do by the way, or an aggregate commercial real estate website such as Eg Properties, or possibly someone with an interest in Restaurant Magazine for the leisure property agents out there. If we know the type of person who could be interested in a property you are trying to sell, then Facebook knows how to get it in front of them with its mountains of data. 

Install the Facebook Pixel 

The major reason why Facebook can be the no.1 platform for CRE agents is that you can retarget your web visitors by installing a Facebook pixel to your website. A Facebook pixel is code that is easy to install, and once it is there it starts collecting data on your web visitors, and we can then also create a ‘custom’ audience from these visitors and target them with ads in the following days. For example, if they view a specific property in a specific area, then we can display ads to this person in the following days of the property they saw and other properties in that area for example. I would urge you to google how to install a pixel and do it now. 

Lookalike Audiences.

An amazing part of Facebook/Instagram is that it has so much data from its 2.5 billion users that its machine learning algorithm is scarily good at going out and finding audiences that are similar to your best clients. There are numerous ways you can create lookalike audiences, but one is by uploading a list of emails of your best clients which you may already have, or for example, from your web visitors. 

So if you are looking to get your properties in front of restaurant, pub, bar or club owners, or if you are looking to sell an office for example, and your focus is start-ups or businesses which are growing and need office space, then Facebook will find the right audience to get your stock in front of them a take your buyer lead gen process into hyper speed. 

Lead Gen:

In regards to seller lead gen, Facebook has the functions to seek these out as well by targeting restaurant, pub, bar, club, office owners in a specific area with ads prompting them to see how much they can get for their lease or freehold. Or just as a tool to stay top of mind by sending these people to your website or blog which is relevant to them (kind of what I have done here). If used in conjunction with Linkedin (read the first part here:https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/leisure-property-agents-how-generate-consistent-flow-highly-ilic/) then there are ways to take your lead gen to the next level. As mentioned in part one on the subject of Linkedin, we can mine data on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram as well as Google, and create lists of your perfect client with there contact details. Once we have a hyper-focused list of your ideal client and mine their emails, we start the prospecting process by sending them an email and a follow up on Linkedin, as well as getting your service out on Facebook in front of them so they start to take notice in your company. Once this person starts having numerous touchpoints with your company, a number of them will convert into a phone call, which is when we pass them to you. 

If you would like to take your commercial real estate agency to the next level by utilizing Facebook, Linkedin and Google marketing then feel free to contact us at [email protected]. We have both Facebook and Google marketing professionals who work with you to create a custom digital marketing strategy to take your buyer and seller lead gen to the next [email protected] | www.fullybooked.agency