Tag : mailing-list

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229: Facebook’s Current Real Estate Targeting Options

In July of 2019, Facebook changed targeting options for real estate, employment, and financial product advertising to comply with federal anti-discrimination policies. (It has since added political advertising to the list of Special Ad Categories.) While that shift removed some valuable demographic and interest categories from our toolbox, the remaining options prove robust enough for the vast majority of auction properties I’ve advertised since then. Here’s a list of targeting options still available for sponsored ads and promoted posts.

Local Residents

Most real estate is purchased by local residents, and this audience does the heavy lifting—and often gets the lowest cost per click—on most of my real estate campaigns. Because targeting a small area or a specific zip code could be discriminatory, Facebook’s minimum radius for all real estate ads is currently 15 miles. We cannot target counties, and the maximum radius for all Facebook ads is 50 miles. Facebook does allow adding additional radii, but I typically don’t recommend that for this specific audience.

Current Visitors

This is a great option for vacation and recreation properties, particularly during seasons when visitors are likely. The most likely non-local people who would buy a property as an end-user or an investor are those who’ve at least visited the area. The minimum radius for the area visited is also 15 miles. 

Recent Visitors

If you missed a holiday weekend, opening day, or other critical high-traffic time, Facebook will allow you to target those who recently visited the area in question. The minimum radius for the area visited is 15 miles.

Website Traffic

If you have a Facebook Business Manager pixel installed on your website, you can serve ads and posts to people who visited your website for up to 180 days prior. You can narrow that source traffic to those who stayed on your site for a designated length of time, those who visited a specific page (like a similar property), and those who performed specific actions on that site. In order to generate a larger group from which to generate lookalikes, I usually leave this option as just those who visited the auction and/or catalog page. 

Third-party platforms like BidSpotter and Proxibid do not allow pixel installation, and I’ve only seen HiBid allow them in a couple of situations. In my experience, BidWrangler and MarkNet Alliance are the platforms that make adding a pixel easy.

Facebook Interactors

This option has more subcategories than the others shown so far. Just one of the submenus is shown below. Basically, you can target people who interacted with your Facebook content. Rather than getting in the weeds on some of these options, I generally use only one of two options: (1) “Everyone who engaged with your page” and (2) “People who engaged with any post or ad.” For my clients who don’t have a Facebook Business Manager pixel installed on their site, I use this audience as a proxy for website traffic.

Customer Lists

Facebook allows you to accept the indemnity for targeting by uploading customer lists to their black box for distribution. That list can be past buyers, past bidders, past sellers, direct mail recipients, and email subscribers. These lists comprise “warm” prospects: those familiar or at least acquainted at one time with your brand. The lists must have all pieces of information in separate columns (first name, last name, city, state, email address, etc.). The more columns of information in the CSV file, (1) the easier it is for Facebook to match the list with its database and (2) the smaller the list it needs to build an audience. We can’t know in advance how many records it will take for Facebook to find its minimum number of matches, but we can always upload a list to find out. Generally, it takes several hundred records for them to find the minimum number of matches. 

Purchased Lists

Using the customer list loophole, you can upload any list you purchase. For real estate auctions, you can purchase at least four types of lists. First, you can buy a consumer list based on demographics like income, net worth, home value, and even a few interest categories (like equestrian enthusiasts and those with hunting licenses). Second, you can buy business records with highest-ranking known employee based on an industry’s SIC code. Phone numbers and emails are often available for an extra fee and help with the match rate. Third, you can buy lists of landowners, sorted by contiguous acres owned and whether they live on that land or not. Consumers cost less per piece than businesses, which cost well less than landowners. At my list broker, the minimum list costs are $100, $100, and $250, respectively for these lists. Fourth, I’ve also had clients purchase lists of members from a state or national trade association. Those are typically more expensive, where available.

It’s important to know that neither you nor I can purchase a list of investors. We can query based on income, net worth, or acres owned but not on whether someone is a known real estate investor. We can query real estate investment trusts, property management firms, and real estate development corporations but not individuals who do this work. In fact, we can’t target anyone based on profession (like farmer or developer)—only the highest-known employees at companies from our selected designated SIC codes. I don’t recommend buying farm lists based on SIC codes. (1) Most farmers want to buy properties within 15 miles, and (2) a landowners list provides a more accurate data set.

Special Ad Audiences

If you’d like Facebook to replicate your web traffic, Facebook interactors, customer list, or purchased list, you’ll need to use the Special Ad Audience tool in Ads Manager. The process for creating this is identical to creating a Lookalike Audience for ads that aren’t designated for a Special Ad Category.

Which and how many of these audiences I recommend depends on the asset category, budget, and data resources at my client’s disposal. (I don’t give recommendations for what client budgets should be, by the way. I just anonymously show what my other clients have spent and achieved on their campaigns of similar assets.) 

Across almost $2 million of Facebook ads, I’ve seen sponsored ads outperform posts more than 99% of the time in getting people off Facebook to client websites. I’ve also found that photo ads outperform video ads, especially when using Ad Manager’s Dynamic Content tool. Facebook data shows that (1) more than 80% of video ads are played on mute and (2) ads with videos need to communicate their hook within the first 7 seconds. In fact, Facebook recommends that videos in ads be 15 seconds or shorter. 

If any or all of this seems confusing or overwhelming, you aren’t alone in that sentiment. Thankfully, you know a guy who creates almost 500 Facebook campaigns a year; and I’d be happy to take the complicated work of advertising real estate on Facebook off your hands.

Stock photo purchased from iStockPhoto.com

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215: 3 Lists Every Auctioneer Wants But Nobody Can Buy

With the rise of big data, entrepreneurs have grown to assume that just about any kind of data is available to purchase. In many cases, that valuable demographic and purchase history is more robust than most of us would ever need. The problem is that it exists in proprietary databases. Those black boxes at best are available for blindfolded lease and at worst compete against us.

Even before Facebook’s ubiquity and Amazon’s dominance, though, auctioneers asked me for the same prospect lists they still assume I can procure. When I tell you that these lists get requested often, I mean every month—sometimes weekly. I still encounter surprise and maybe even disappointment when I can’t deliver them. To save us both from an awkward conversation later, I’ll just explain them here for you.

Real Estate Investors

As of July 19, 2019, we haven’t been able use Facebook’s real estate investor interests to target real estate ads. (I assume that’s to comply with HUD anti-discrimination regulations.) Even before that, we couldn’t target actual investors—only people whose Facebook habits showed an interest in investing. As of right now, we can’t purchase a list of individual people who invest in real estate. We can target companies whose standard industrial classification (SIC) falls under real estate development, management, or brokerage. We can ask for highest-known executives in those firms and phone numbers and legal/opt-in emails where available. In certain databases, we can pull people who own homes but don’t live in them. A list broker can sort that by net worth and/or annual household income. It’s a long shot, but that’s currently our best option.

Land (or Any Asset Category) Buyers

There isn’t a commercial source for those records. Landowners, yes. Land buyers, no. Independent auction companies should have a list of past bidders and buyers from auctions—hopefully sortable by asset category. Those lists should be queryable in order to pull only past buyers and/or bidders. Until you have critical mass, you can use that list only for direct mail. Once you do get several hundred buyers and/or bidders, you can use Facebook’s lookalike audience tool to find similar prospects. Until then, one option would be to partner with a joint venture company who does have a list large enough for lookalike audience potential. If you drive the Facebook traffic to your website, you can then start using your Facebook pixel data to create a prospect base. Using information sign-up forms and bidder registrations on those joint-venture auctions, those who do respond can become seeds to start or accelerate your own list. 

People Who Want [fill in the blank]

This is the one that makes me audibly laugh, when I open the email. Men have joked my entire life that they never know what the women in their life want. If that’s true, that takes out 50% of the people whose wants we can capture and query. Even if it’s not true, we would need a Minority Report-style system to mine this desire data. Do we really want companies to know our private thoughts? We can hit this goal obliquely through a list of past bidders or buyers on similar items, assuming their need or want wasn’t satiated since that last auction. We can purchase lists of some interests and purchase history, and we can target non-real estate ads to even more interests on Facebook directly. But the best we can do is get adjacent to wants and let artificial intelligence engines do their magic. There’s no list for people who want a mower or a Coca Cola sign or 20 acres.

That said, not having these lists and even not being able to acquire these lists doesn’t mean our advertising has to be ineffective or inefficient. It just means we need to do more homework, more experimenting, more tracking, more data analysis. Yes, that’s more work. Yes, that’s a completely different skill set than a silky auction chant or a well-executed sales pitch. Yes, it’s not the way your dad did it.

Over the next two decades, conglomerates and aggregate sites are going to put hundreds of bid callers and even auction marketers out of business. They’re going to pay people to do this data curation work. Instead of trying to buy data, they’re going to mine their own. Those of us who follow their example will most likely be the ones in 2035 who are still advertising auctions at all. 

Because I don’t manage websites, host online bidding, or run auction software for my clients, I will be dependent on auction professionals like you to procure, store, and query this data. Thankfully, most current auction software and platforms make this doable, if not easy. That gives me hope, and I’m glad to be in your good hands.

Stock images purchased from iStockPhoto.com

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213: Your Mailing List is Too Big

Almost a decade ago, I ordered a series of uniquely-sized boxes from ULINE. If you’re not familiar with the company, it sells an incredible variety of shipping and industrial supplies. Their catalog holds 788 pages and weighs 2.2 pounds.

And I’m still getting them, even though I haven’t purchased anything from them since then.

When I went to FedEx Office to weigh the catalog, the manager told me something like, “Tell ‘em I get six or seven copies of these at a time. A complete waste.”

I can’t imagine the expense of mailing these catalogs, but it doesn’t surprise me that they haven’t weeded me or the five extra FedEx Office managers from their list. I’ve worked for auctioneers using lists they started in the 90’s and “cleaned up” a decade ago. You know—because people who bought something during the Clinton or Bush administrations are still on the hunt.

I get it: those past customers were hard to acquire. You built that list ten or twenty bidders at a time. You pitch that list in your proposals—that you’ve got thousands of bidders at your disposal. But you and I both know that few on your mailing list register for each auction. So, why pay $.80 to $3.00 per person to reach people who aren’t coming to your auction? When you consider that you can upload that list to Facebook and reach that same audience for a penny apiece and then email them for no pennies apiece, it doesn’t make sense to make a huge impression to uninterested people.

That doesn’t mean you necessarily throw direct mail out altogether. You just have to be smart about it—efficient at it. Here are several suggestions for making the most out of your mailing list.

Don’t mail to anyone who hasn’t registered to bid in the last 18 months.

There are exceptions, but most people who were searching for an asset 18 months ago—but not recently—either have satiated that need or now want something different. There are exceptions like specific collectible categories or commercial equipment. On occasion, even some real estate categories have people who repeatedly buy the same type of property on irregular cycles. You can cover these exceptions with email blasts and Facebook ads or both.

Mail to runner-up bidders first.

The people with the greatest desire for what you sell are the people who didn’t get what they wanted last time. Also, they’ve already proven comfort with the auction method. Think of it in terms of a restaurant: the hungriest people order the most food.

Mail only to big hitters and/or frequent bidders.

MVPs want to feel like MVPs. The cost of advertising inefficiently is offset by purchase history. You can also pull just those who’ve registered at multiple auctions, spent a certain dollar threshold, or bought more than once. This list requires semi-annual analysis to discover new MVPs and retire former ones. If that sounds tedious, consider outsourcing the spreadsheet comparison to a gig work site like Fiverr or PeoplePerHour.

Mail a postcard to your big list and the brochure or catalog only to your best prospects.

I know auctioneers who still mail more than 10,000 copies of 6-, 8-, or 12-page brochures per auction. With the budget required for that, I could reach half a million prospects on Facebook and still have budget for a decent postcard campaign. An alternative compromise is to mail the full brochure or catalog to your repeat buyers, big-spend buyers, or potential sellers and then a high-impact postcard to the balance of your full database.

I’ve been subscribing to a local auction company’s mailing list for more than a decade and still get every sale bill—even though I’ve never bought anything in any of their auctions. I laugh because they obtained that list from one of my clients and forgot to change the unique file name of the list, which shows in the list-name code above my address. I relish the fact that they’ve spent hundreds of dollars marketing to someone who has worked for their competitor (and that the inside of every single piece has been printed upside down). I’m thankful they still mail to me, because that junk mail has continued to remind me to finish this article that I started almost two years ago. It’s safe to assume they won’t stop wasting their sellers’ money anytime soon. Hopefully, I don’t have to assume the same of you.

PS: While writing this article, I received all five of these on the same day from the same advertiser with the same contents.

Stock image purchased from iStockPhoto.com

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208: Get More Wealth-Qualified Bidders to Your Real Estate Auction

Just about every week, I get a humorous answer to the question, “Who would you like to target with the auction advertising?” 

The answer goes something like, “Someone thinking of buying a vacation home” or “Someone interested in 40 acres” or “Someone who wants a hobby farm.”

Rich Real Estate Prospects

Those answers are funny because we can’t buy a list of people who have wants, wishes, and dreams. Even Facebook with all of its big brotherness and artificial intelligence doesn’t have a category for people thinking about buying real estate. Even as an advertiser, I’m cool with that. I mean—I don’t know about you—but I’m glad our thoughts aren’t harvested, cataloged, and sold to advertisers.

We can advertise where people search for these kinds of properties—both search engines like Google and asset sites like LoopNet.com, LakeHouse.com, or LandAndFarm.com. One of the downsides of that approach, though, is that in most cases your auction property can be found only when the prospect is actively searching or subscribing to emails. While those searchers are highly qualified prospects, not every potential buyer is searching during an auction’s short marketing timeframe. And some dreamers and wishers and wanters haven’t started digitally searching yet.

So, we’re left with disruptive advertising methods, aimed at people who are qualified to bid but more obliquely interested. The primary qualification we as an industry have typically leveraged is income or net worth. That’s because interest in a property without the financial ability to purchase is of no value to us or our sellers. We don’t want a lot of unqualified web traffic, especially since it can negatively interfere with our remarketing efforts.

Well then, how do we reach wealth-qualified prospects? Here are the four ways my clients and I find them.

Buy some secret sauce.

On August 2, 2018, Facebook withdrew third party data from our advertiser options. This included the valuable credit bureau criteria like net worth, income, home value, and mortgage applications. Those third party sources like AccuData, Acxiom, Equifax, Experian, and InfoUSA still have that data available for purchase. (One list I’ve found very valuable is the absentee acreage owners list, which can be sorted by county and even by various acreage thresholds.) We can use the lists we purchase for direct mail, Facebook, and Google audiences. Facebook and Google allow us to create lookalikes of the uploaded list. So, we don’t have to purchase huge lists to advertise to huge audiences. What’s been amazing to me over the years is how much more effective those lookalike audiences are than the original lists.

Use a time machine.

If you do a lot of auctions in a particular real estate segment, one of the best ways to find new buyers is to generate lookalikes of your bidders from past auctions. Several data companies can match your in-house list to their database and find lookalike profiles to the people they could match. You can then purchase that list for mailing and in some cases even emailing. If you’re not looking for an email or direct mail list, I’d go the free route. You can also upload you past bidder list to Facebook and Google to create lookalike audiences for your digital advertising. You don’t pay for that service, just the ads targeting the final audience.

Change the headline instead of the audience.

When we don’t have budget or access to the above audiences, I have tried Facebook’s real estate investor categories. “But this isn’t an investment property,” my clients have emailed me. They’re not wrong. But what do real estate investors have? Capital. Or access to financing. The headlines change from “Buy more cash flow” to “Own the home you deserve” and from “Make money with this unit” to “Luxury living on your budget.” In our flip-this-house culture, not all real estate investors are liquid; and not all are looking for their long-term home. But a subset is in our target audience; and we’re almost always chasing a subset of whatever audience we’re targeting anyway.

Exploit the power of cloning.

Once you’ve deployed any or all of the three options above, finding wealth-qualified prospects gets easier. Using the (free) Facebook and Google pixels on your website, you can have the world’s largest marketing engines find people who look just like those who investigated your auction’s page on your site. If you’ve attracted the right people in the early stages of your campaign, the artificial intelligence will multiply your best prospects. For advertising to sellers, this Google option can be valuable. For short-term auction campaigns, I recommend the Facebook platform—again, for the disruptive nature of its ads. Like Google, Facebook ads show on other news and pop culture sites; so, your prospect doesn’t have to be checking their Facebook app or newsfeed to see your ads.

For all of these audiences, you can sort them further on Facebook by interest categories. So, you can take any of these lists and sift them by people who like horses or hunting or boating or whatever pastime connects with your property. All of these lists can be sorted by age, though Facebook will soon be doing away with age sorting on real estate ads

Never in human history has targeting thousands of wealthy people been so easy or inexpensive. Thankfully, that means we can get better results for our sellers in shorter time frames and on smaller budgets. And now more of us small business professionals can look like marketing geniuses to our sellers.

Stock photos purchased from iStockPhoto.com

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202: Two (Misguided) Questions Auctioneers Ask About Facebook Advertising

At the end of July, a Wall Street selloff knocked $119,400,000 off Facebook’s market capitalization. Over two days, the Silicon Valley giant lost almost 20% of its estimated value (though only back to its stock price as of April). Hunted by European litigators and questioned by the United States senate, the company has spent the summer rebuilding its brand.

Facebook stock price

With the largest social media platform in the news almost every day this summer, I’ve seen auctioneers asking two questions:
• What are you doing to ensure you don’t have all your eggs in the Facebook basket?
• Where will you advertise if/when Facebook goes away?

Facebook Market Cap

As someone who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on Facebook advertising and makes a third of my income from Facebook marketing services, you’d think I’d be asking these questions, too. I’m not. Here’s why.

Facebook isn’t going away any time soon.

Even with the big drop, Facebook is still one of the wealthiest, most profitable companies on the planet. This isn’t a MySpace situation. For one thing, even a fraction of Facebook’s market share would make it the most robust platform on which to pursue clients. LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Reddit, and Twitter combined have only as many users as Instagram, Facebook’s secondary platform. 1 Almost one out of every three people on Earth have a Facebook account. That’s amazing by itself but even moreso when you consider that only 54% of the world’s population uses the Internet. 2 In the United States, more adults check Facebook each day than read all American newspapers—combined—during the course of a week.

Facebook comparison

The next thing will be easy to spot.

There’s a case to be made that social media as a media category might decline someday when people grow tired of the comparison game it represents. Facebook, being the biggest player, would probably take the biggest hit. Nothing happens in a vacuum, though. If you remove social media from daily practice, something new will grow to fill that space. What won’t occupy that space is traditional media. It definitely won’t be newspaper, as the American attention span continues to shrink. Nobody confidently knows what’s next or when it will get here, but it will require at least as much adaptation and intuition to operate there as Facebook demands now. Whatever moves into that space will approach with lots of buzz and probably fanfare much like Facebook did more than a decade ago.

Facebook isn’t monolithic.

Facebook isn’t just Facebook. It’s not just Instagram and WhatsApp and Messenger, either. Facebook’s Audience Network spans scores of the prominent news and entertainment sites on the Internet. Like Google’s display ad network, Facebook ads appear all over the web to visitors with Facebook accounts. So, even if someone deletes the Facebook and Instagram apps from their phone or just never uses them, they can still be targeted by Facebook’s ads. In fact, on a per-ad basis, Facebook daily analyzes from which of its platforms people are most efficiently coming to your website and adjusts your daily spend proportionally. If you’re eggs are all in one Facebook basket, it’s a lot bigger basket than you might realize.

Facebook isn’t the only go-to pitch now, anyway.

There are some rare auctions where I advise a campaign to have at least 90% of the budget allocated to Facebook, but those represent the exception and not the rule. What you’re selling, where you’re selling it, and how you’re selling it influence the media mix. This is also true of the resources available to you like (1) email subscribers and (2) past bidder registrations for the same asset category being advertised. Sometimes, a public relations campaign does your heavy lifting on a truly unique auction. Sometimes, a purchased mailing list is the most targeted tool available. There are even a handful of newsprint outlets I still recommend. Often, media choices aren’t based on efficiency or efficacy but on assumptions and perceptions the seller has to feel like you covered all of your bases. If you are avidly tracking all media individually in Google Analytics for every auction, you’ll know what media you use for buyers & sellers and which ones you use for branding or showmanship. You’ll also be able to see trends as they happen.

When I look at the Facebook accounts of the auctioneers asking these questions, I typically find people who aren’t well-versed in Facebook advertising. I wonder if they are hoping for the seemingly-complicated reality of Facebook’s paid advertising to go away so they can get back to the set-it-and-forget-it nature of traditional media. If they got the efficient results my clients do on Facebook, I’m not sure they’d wish for this strike-out pitch to disappear. Even if their wish came true, though, it would be a long, slow decline.

The more important questions to ask are:
• How am I adapting to the changing buying culture?
• What have my experimentation and analytics shown me recently?

Marketers who don’t continually ask themselves those questions will eventually be replaced by those in companies who do. That should worry every auctioneer far more than the future of Facebook.

1 “Top 15 Most Popular Social Media Sites and Apps [August 2018]” by Priit Kallas, Dreamgrow.com, August 2018.

2 “Internet Users in the World by Regions” by Internet World Stats.com, December 21, 2017.

Stock image purchased from iStockPhoto.com. All other images linked to their respective sources.

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174: How to Get National Advertising on a Local Budget

Have you ever been asked to market anything that had a national appeal, but the asset value didn’t allow a national advertising campaign? It happens to my clients on a regular basis. My advice for that situation has recently changed, as a burgeoning technology helps solves part of that problem.

Let me give you an example.

One of my high-volume clients just booked a deal to sell the furniture, fixtures, and equipment from a two-year-old frozen yogurt shop near Buffalo, NY. Having limited experience with this niche asset category, John called me for ideas on how to attract the most amount of bidders to assets that together were worth only about as much as a new pickup truck. (I had zero experience with this asset type; so, I actually had more questions for him than he had for me.)

Before John called me, he had reached out to our mailing list guy and found a list of thousands of frozen yogurt stores in the country. National List Research was able to split the list into chains and independent operators and even provide the name of an executive for many of them. The bad news: a mailing even just to the independent operators would break his budget.

After a couple phone calls, we hatched a plan.

First, John bought the full mailing list of just the independent frozen yogurt shops along with their phone numbers. At 13 cents per person, that was a small expenditure.

Next, John uploaded that direct mail list to Facebook to create ads to those independent operators. Facebook matched about two thirds of those prospects. John could reach that complete national list of matches for about $20 per ad. So, we planned for a series of ads with different photos and headlines.

Then, John created a lookalike audience of Facebook users who demographically looked exactly like those independent operators.

Using a free Facebook pixel, he also created a list of Facebook users who visited that auction’s page on his website. Then, he had Facebook build a lookalike audience of people who looked just like the people who came to that page on his site. All three of these additional audiences got Facebook ads served to them—again for a small outlay. (John creates these three audiences for almost every auction.)

This YoBerry shop was in a Buffalo suburb; but the Northeast doesn’t have anywhere near as many frozen yogurt shops as the South does. Texas, especially, is chock full of them. John’s budget didn’t allow him to mail to the whole national list, but he didn’t know where the biggest demand would be. So, I recommended he run the first round of Facebook ads and then use Facebook’s and Google Analytics’ geographic reporting tools to see the aggregate data for those who visited the auction’s page on his website. That would tell him which states to select from his list for direct mail reinforcement.

The plan worked. John ended up mailing the postcard I designed to 253 of the 3,000 or so purchased names, saving thousands of dollars in printing and postage. Hundreds of people visited the auction’s page. Grafe Auction found scores of registered bidders from multiple states.

So, here were our takeaways from this low-budget experiment:

• Skip newsprint, unless it’s an asset only with local value.

• Use Facebook to help you sort your direct mail list.

• Leverage lookalike audiences to find the people that list brokers don’t have in their database.

• Implement a Facebook pixel to re-market assets to the original prospects and/or to serve ads to people who look just like your early investigators.

• Follow the data, not your instincts or industry status quo.

This complete process may not work for you, if you don’t offer online bidding of some sort. The individual tools we leveraged, though, are tools we use every day for live and online auctions. In concert, they solve a problem auctioneers regularly face.

Stock image purchased from iStockPhoto.com

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165: Get Better Results From Your Facebook Advertising

I talk to auctioneers who don’t see Facebook as a vital marketing tool, because it hasn’t worked for them. After asking a few questions, it’s clear why their Facebook campaigns have reaped subpar results: they’re advertising to the wrong people.

“I posted the auction on my Facebook.”

While it probably doesn’t hurt for you to share your auction with your Facebook friends, few people on your friends list are potential buyers or even referrers to potential buyers. Also, Facebook doesn’t show your posts to all of your friends, anyway—only the ones who interact most with your content.

“I did a Facebook post on my business page.”

This is a baby step forward, but it makes several incorrect assumptions.

  1. Those who like your Facebook page are likely buyers.
  2. People who liked your page in the past because of a specific auction or asset are interested in others.
  3. Facebook shows your business post to more than 10% of your page likes.

For more successful campaigns, you will most likely need to post multiple paid ads. Each will have its own headline and copy, its own photo(s) or video, and it’s own audience. Here are some audiences my auction clients use to see fantastic results from their Facebook ads.

Locals (general public nearest the auction or asset location)

Most real estate—especially farm real estate—sells to someone local. The same holds true for estate sale assets. Facebook allows you to circle your advertising around a specific address. If you know the neighbors or locals won’t be buyers, Facebook also allows you to exclude specific geography.

Current or recent visitors

If you’re selling something to tourists—vacation real estate or boats, for instance—you can target people in a geographic area that don’t live there but are currently visiting. You can also target those who just left that area.

Demographic selectors

Facebook gives you scores of options from net worth and household income to pastimes and priorities. You can pull people who like specific brands, who work in specific trades, who speak specific languages, or who collect specific items. You can also exclude any of the selectors, like recent home buyers (who probably won’t respond to your real estate ad).

Fans of publications

Don’t want to pay to advertise in expensive publications? Can’t make an early deadline? Does the magazine publish after the auction? Does the publisher allow only the advertisers who use their online bidding platform? Then target people who have liked or mentioned the publication. That won’t equal the total circulation, but it’s a lot better than nothing. Not all publications are available, but the current selection comes in handy for a number of asset categories.

Business executives

Whether you’re selling commercial real estate or business liquidations, you can target people based on their executive status. That goes for positions like president, vice president, CEO and others; but it also works for business owners and founders. You can also target executive and management positions in educational institutions and government offices. Facebook won’t grant you 100% saturation, but even a fraction is a good start.

Brokers, investors, and management professionals

Because you can target specific job titles, you can appeal to those who would benefit by bringing you real estate buyers. You can also select Facebook users who attach to the national associations for REALTORS, home builders, and mortgage lenders. For you commercial real estate pros, yes: you can select CCIM members, too. You can also target the investor class to supplement your end-user campaign.

Past bidders and lookalikes

Upload your list of past bidders’s email addresses or mobile numbers, and Facebook will allow you to serve ads to those it can match. You can take that one step further, and let Facebook find you people who look demographically just like your past bidders. This is a free service from Facebook. You pay only for the ads, not the matching.

Email subscribers and lookalikes

Likewise, you can match up to 50% of your email subscribers and direct ads to them. This allows you to reinforce your email and/or direct mail campaign with Facebook promotion, giving potential buyers more interactions with the asset and its headlines. Facebook can build a lookalike audience from these folks, too—again at no charge for the matching, just the ads.

Website visitors and lookalikes

After you install a free bit of code on your website, you can advertise to people who visited any page of your website. So, if you’re selling an asset similar to one you’ve recently sold; you can advertise to people who visited that former auction’s page. Using the lookalike audience tool, you can serve ads to people who look demographically like the people who visited that page. Taking that one step further, you can run (1) reminder ads for the auction at hand to people who already investigated it and/or (2) ads to a lookalike audience of people who’ve already visited this auction’s page.

Combinations

Finally, you can segment almost all of these lists by any of the other lists. You can also take any of these lists and sort it further by age, wealth, gender, geography, language, and much more. And you can save the lists for future use.

While there are groups or lists of people you can’t find on Facebook, there are a lot of specific audiences readily available to make your auction advertising more effective and efficient. Not all buyers are on Facebook; but there are more buyers there on any given day than in newsprint, magazines, or any TV channel. The specificity to which you can market on Facebook is unprecedented and unparalleled.

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