Finding Hordes of Buyers on Facebook - Expert Interview

Ok, with the whole talks of Coronavirus and whether or not it'll be hard to assign your deals... I decided to post up an Interview I did on my "Deals Today" Podcast. I think it's relevant for today.

So, If you’re curious about using Facebook to enhance your business and attract cash buyers, then you might want to tune.

Facebook expert Chris Saunders explains how Facebook advertising can be used to effectively reach motivated buyers and sellers. His biggest client is New Western Acquisitions where he regularly finds investors on Facebook to quickly sell their contracts to on a daily basis… and in this interview he’ll unpack the basics of Facebook advertising for you next campaign and help you increase lead generation within a streamlined budget.

You’ll learn what it takes to start a Facebook ad campaign and IF you should even do one.

You’ll Also Read…

• What’s the minimum to budget for FB
• The most important factor to a successful ad campaign: It’s a component that only Facebook has.
• What “retargeting” is and how you can increase your conversion by 40% using it
• Why FB works the best for immediate leads
• The benefits of Facebook advertising versus Google Adwords and SEO
• How to use the targeting system for ONLY people interested in selling, your direct mail list, and people who’ve visited your website
• The price points within Facebook advertising campaigns
• Tips on tracking metrics for digital campaigns
• How to set up an account
• Low cost ways to jumpstart your Facebook advertising campaign
• The importance of building a target audience
• Tips for writing effective ad copy
• and much more

Alright, so the following is the interview transcript from my podcast "Deals Today" and you can find the audio of it and more like this, including related articles and interviews at RealEstateAudios . com

Interview Transcript

PD: How long have you been working with investors?

CS: About a year-and-a-half, a little over a year-and-a-half.

PD: How did you get hooked up with them, you just decided it would be a good niche to get into?

CS: No it was actually when I first got into digital marketing. The group I was in, they gave us tools and stuff (that) we needed to get started in the business and it was actually one of the niches that they suggested going after was real estate investors. They had a couple of campaigns built out that we could use. So I actually knew someone local, one of my friends actually works for New Western Acquisitions, he’s a branch manager, so I just reached out to him and was like, “Hey, I’m doing this new”...I just called it like Facebook stuff at the time probably, I was brand new into it and really didn’t know what I was doing. I said, “Hey, I’m doing this, do you want to try it out? Can I try it out with you?” He was like, “Yeah, sure,” I told him about it and was like, “Hey, I can get you motivated buyers or sellers.” He was like, “Ah, if you can get me some people in to sell their properties...investment properties, we’re good to try it out,” so we tried it out for a month and yeah never stopped, never looked back from there.

PD: So it worked out pretty well for them?

CS: Yeah it’s worked out great.

PD: And they’re generating buyers and what about sellers?

CS: So we started with sellers for them and he decided it was easy for him to get properties. He’d rather have a steady stream of investors coming in to buy them. So we only did sellers for about a month-and-a-half, two months, and then we switched over to buyers or investors and we’ve been doing that ever since. I’ve done sellers for a few other clients and some other areas.

PD: Ok for those who are real estate investors brand new to Facebook advertising, can you explain how that works?

CS: So, brand new, I mean it’s a fairly simple process. What gets you bogged down is if you don’t know exactly how everything works and who to target, but as long as you have your basic Facebook business page set up, there are some simple videos you can actually watch where Facebook will tell you to go in (and) you’ll have to create a Business Manager. Or if it’s just you getting started, you can use your Personal Ad account and just link it to your business page.

PD: What do you mean by Personal Ad account?

CS: Facebook automatically gives you an ad account, they call it your personal because it’s just attached to your personal page, but then they also give you the option to create a Business Manager account. Now with a Business Manager, what that does differently is it gives you one place to manage. Say you have more than one Facebook page. You have your personal page, you’ve got your business page, and then say you’re doing something else with e-commerce or whatever and you’ve got another Facebook page. And then you’ve got your ad account. Well in the Business Manager, you can manage all those things from one area. And it’s super simple to set up. Actually, if you google Facebook Business Manager, they actually have some really good training videos on how to set that up. It’s just another tool to give you more access to be able to customize ads better on Facebook.

PD: And these are all paid ads we’re talking about here, right?

CS: Yeah I deal with paid Facebook ads. You can’t advertise for free on Facebook.

PD: You can or you can’t, you said?

CS: Can not, no.

PD: Oh, ok. Unless you are in the marketplace, I suppose. Marketplace you can do it.

CS: Yeah true if you want to post it in the marketplace you can do that, yeah. But as far as what I do for lead generation it’s all paid.

PD: What are some of the advantages for Facebook advertising cause I’ve experimented with it and the targeting is probably the coolest thing, I think. So that’s what separates Facebook from say Google AdWords or just SEO? The targeting?

CS: The targeting and the fact that everybody’s on Facebook. Everybody is always on Facebook, scrolling through. Especially for the real estate niche, Facebook versus Google and SEO is going to trump them all day long. Just because you don’t get the visual from Google. Say you’re an investor and you’re trying to sell some properties. If you’re doing SEO how long is it going to take you on your website to get your website ranked up into Google and then somebody’s got to be looking for it in Google, versus I can spend 10 bucks on Facebook ads today and I know my ads gonna get seen by probably a couple (of) hundred people.

PD: Right yeah, it’s immediate traffic, immediate advertising. SEO takes a while.

CS: Yeah and then with Google, there’s just, I haven’t had any success with Google in this niche. Now being in marketing I have run some other campaigns for some non-real estate areas as well that actually do very well on Google but I haven’t heard or seen anybody doing well with real estate advertising through Google anyways.

PD: Yeah, I think, same with me. I haven’t met many people – or actually met anyone – that’s been very successful, or (had) any type of success with AdWords. I’ve heard you gotta have a 24-7 call center cause they’re just gonna go on to the next ad and that can be pretty expensive to run that type of ad. In Southern California, I’ve heard people spend about 10 grand a month on Google AdWords. So with Facebook how much are these guys spending with you on ads alone?

CS: Daily, it’ll range from $20 to $45 a day so, I mean, anywhere from $600 to $1300 a month on ad spend.

PD: What’s the least amount that you would recommend somebody to spend a day?

CS: 10 bucks a day is probably as low as you can go.

PD: And get some results with that?

CS: Yeah, I mean you’re not gonna get a lot. I mean you will...actually, I can’t say that because it definitely depends on the area. Because like what you said, running it in Southern California could be different than running it up in Michigan. You know what I mean? And I’ve run into that running campaigns as well like, I could have one that runs in Oklahoma City and my average cost per lead is 12 bucks and then I run the same thing over in Florida and it can be upwards (of) 17 bucks per lead just because of the way the market is.

PD: Do you see it working with seller leads too?

CS: Yeah, I’m actually running, well, I actually set up an agent of New Western with a seller campaign and he’s done ok with it. The cost per lead in there is a lot higher so their average cost per lead right now is like $33 per lead for sellers versus buyers. So it’s about 3 times the cost.

PD: That’s in the same market?

CS: No, I have one running in Ohio right now that’s getting about $22 to $23 per lead for sellers. So the cost per lead just varies.

PD: Who are these ads being displayed to and how do you control that?

CS: So when we actually set up the ad campaign in Business Manager, and Facebook’s actually made a lot of changes with this recently, actually just last month, we had to fight for a while to get things back on track after they made changes. They made real estate into a special housing category which means they took away a lot of the targeting that we could do before. But, that’s ok, it slowed me down for a good two weeks and then (I) figured it out and was like, ok, now we’re back on track. But yeah, so what we can do is, essentially, we used to be able to target specific age ranges and genders. Right? So I could do like 25-45, males, right? Now, we have to do male, female, 18-65+. So we can’t pick gender or age. However, we can pick some interests. They did leave a lot of specific interests that you can pick. Say I’m running it here and I’m setting up my interests. What we can do to kind of narrow down who sees the ads because say you run it in a city that’s got two million-plus people, you don’t want all two million of those people to see it, right? Because they’re not all gonna want to buy your investment properties or sell you one of theirs. So, for the investors I have here I’ve put in just creative real estate investing, realtychat.com, real estate investing, real estate entrepreneur, stuff like that so people whose interests match any of those and who live within my target area within the age range will get to see the ad.

PD: If I have a direct mail list of addresses, of people, hey, I think these are some motivated sellers here, and I skim trades, get their phone numbers, then can I potentially create that list on Facebook and target to them?

CS: To create a list on Facebook, you need name and email. Phone number is great too, they may or may not have it attached to their Facebook. But so what that will do, ok, (we’ll) talk about that. So if you upload a list, say you got a list of 500 name(s), email(s), phone number(s), investors or whatever your list is, so when you upload that to Facebook, that becomes a custom audience. And so you can either run based on just that custom audience and what they’ll do is if those people in that audience, if their email addresses or phone numbers are associated with their Facebook accounts, it’ll actually show them the ads. What the other thing you can do that is just as powerful, if not even more powerful, is from that audience you can create a lookalike. So say you have a list of, you know, it doesn’t even have to be much, say it’s 50 to 100 investors, or sellers, people that have previously sold you homes or investors that have invested with you or whatever. You can upload that list and create the custom audience and then create a lookalike and what that does, that tells Facebook, “Hey, I’ve got this list of 100 people, this is what the people that buy from me or work with me look like. I want you to find more of these people and show them my ad.”

PD: If I have a list of past sellers, how many do I need to create a lookalike?

CS: I think you only need like 20 or 30.

PD: Wow, ok.

CS: The more the better, obviously.

PD: So say in the past I’ve done 50 deals altogether, and I have their email addresses and I have their names, I could just plug that in and there should be some kind of...I wonder what the likelihood of them creating another list of highly motivated people is? What would be your guess on that? Because motivational situations are kind of, um, I guess everywhere. I guess it works more for buyers rather than seller leads, I guess?

CS: I agree with you, I think it would make more sense for buyer leads versus seller leads because a seller is...once they’ve sold you their house they’re most likely done. There’s not really a habit with people like that versus, you know, investors. There (are) habits related to those people (investors). They’re going to go to the same places, they’re going to invest more than once, they’re gonna keep doing it.

PD: Ok so definitely for buyers it works great. For sellers it’s kind of, it’s expensive, so if I have a direct mail list, (am) tracing their phone, their email, and plugging that into Facebook to kind of have a multiple-layer campaign, what about retargeting with Facebook? Have you done that and does it work well?

CS: Yeah. Yeah, retargeting works awesome. Most of the stuff that I do with investors, either way, buying or selling, is typically I just use Facebook lead ads and if you’ve ever seen one pop up it’s, you know, you click “learn more” and it pops up this little form right there on your screen (on) Facebook to fill in name, email, phone number, and maybe answer a question. What it does is it keeps people (on) Facebook. So with using lead forms, you don’t have to build a fancy landing page, you don’t have to have a website, all you have to have is a Facebook page and an Ad Account. You can set up a lead form so they submit it and they stay right there (on) Facebook. So Facebook is more likely to show that to people because Facebook loves Facebook and if you’re keeping people on Facebook, they don’t have to go anywhere else once they see your ad and click on it. Facebook’s a lot more likely to show it to people and you’re gonna get cheaper leads versus if you’re taking them away from Facebook.

PD: So you don’t have to (have a) website or anything, just keep them on Facebook, keep them there to fill out the form. On your buyer lead ads, what are you displaying there, what are they seeing?

CS: What I do is, I get images about once a month, once every two months, just depends on how well the ads do. But I get new images from New Western, I have them send me images of their houses that they have, the properties that they’re trying to get rid of right now and I just send single image ads. You know the little posts that come up that say, “sponsored”? That’s an ad. Someone’s paying for that to be there on your newsfeed. And so that’s what happens. So they’re scrolling through their newsfeed, they see their friends posts, mom’s posts, and then, “Sally Buys Houses Fast,” or whatever. Sponsored. It says, “Do you know anyone looking to invest in real estate? We’ll provide a free list of investment properties in and around your area that match(es) your preferred type, locations, timeline, and budget.” And then, that’s it: “Learn more to get your list.” And it takes them to Facebook lead format. They click “learn more”, they fill in their information, and then as soon as they fill in their information I’ve got it set up to where, for this particular client, (he) gets notified as soon as the lead comes in. He gets the lead information and he gets a text saying he’s got a lead, he dishes them out to his people internally.

PD: That’s awesome, and they probably have a follow-up system within their–

CS: Yeah, yeah they have their own drip campaigns and everything.

PD: So you can put phone number and all that within the lead form, you can put whatever you want in lead form, right?

CS: Yeah, yeah you can put whatever you want on there. What I actually do, once they submit their information on the Thank You page, I’ve got the phone number so that they can go ahead and call if they want to. For me, from my standpoint, I want them to go through the lead process unless I’ve put a call tracking number on there, not just their general phone number. Because I want to be able to tell my client at the end of the month, if I’ve got his phone number on there I want to be like, “Hey we got 80 leads through lead form but you also got 20 calls to my call tracking number.”

PD: Why would that be important? I’m not following that.

CS: So for tracking, for your metrics. So if I just put their office number on the ad, people see it, they just call the office. There’s no way for them to know that that came from money that they’re spending on advertising. Versus if I have the call tracking number on there then they know oh, ok, that call came from here. So sweet, so we got the 80 leads and we also got these extra phone calls as well. That’s just for tracking purposes so they know their ROI.

PD: What’s your metrics for this?

CS: All I really worry about with them is how many leads they’re getting a day and the quality actually, so I have them set up in a spreadsheet. All the leads go into an Excel spreadsheet, which I do for all my clients, all my leads. That way there’s a central place to keep track of them. But the metrics, cost per lead and how many leads are coming in are really the only ones that matter. It doesn’t matter how many people are seeing it, doesn’t matter reach, impressions, quality. What matters at the end of the day is if it’s working or not. But as far as metrics for them, for their concern, they want to know how many leads they got, how much they spent, what their total cost per lead was, and then internally they keep track of conversions.

PD: Alright, so if one’s brand new to this, how can they find out if something will work? Is there a way to kind of figure out, hey, there’s already some advertising for this, there (are) people advertising for seller leads or is there like a small amount of money I can put in to figure out if this is gonna work without putting a ton of money into it?

CS: Yeah, there’s definitely low-cost ways to start and go about it, kind of test the waters. An easy way you can do it is, if you google Facebook ads library that’ll pull up a page where you can actually search for pages who are running paid advertisements. And you can search by page name and categories. So say you’re in a specific area and you know the competition in your area or you know a few of the guys in your area, you can put their Facebook pages in there and check if they’re running ads. I see one here: “Joanna Buys Houses Fast,” and I see a sign, “Mike Buys Houses For Cash.” You know, I see those signs and stuff all over the place and I can get on Facebook and actually look, ok are they running ads? Ah no, ok, Mike’s not running ads, Joanna’s not running ads.

PD: Can you see how long they’ve been running ads for?

CS: Yup. You can see how long, you can see what the ads are, they don’t show you any metrics on them, but yeah you can see when they were created.

PD: Length in itself is a metric, if they’ve been running it for three, four, or five months they’ve got to spend the money on that so it’s a good sign it’s working.

CS: And as far as a low-cost way to go about it, I’m looking to offer an actual little small starter package, like a little intro training video with a quick set-up. There’s really not a good, cheap way to get started with it if you don’t already know something that’s working. Because the campaigns that I have access to, other people have spent millions and millions of dollars on to prove that they work. So I take them and I duplicate them into different areas. I already have a good idea that it’s gonna work, I just don’t know exactly how much it’s gonna cost to work in that area yet, right, so cost per lead. But if you really want to find a cheap way to do it, find someone else in your area that’s running ads and see how long they’ve been doing it. Like I said you can go to the ads library if you come across one that’s running ads, or chances are they’ve probably seen one scrolling through their Facebook feed and don’t know it. Especially since the new Facebook rules have come into effect with Housing ads and stuff like that, you pretty much have to show them to everybody within your certain interest set that you’ve set up.

PD: So no age and gender anymore.

CS: Right and so if someone’s new and investing I guarantee they’re gonna have some real estate interest or investing interest and if they’re in any kind of area there’s gonna be someone trying to run ads. And there just is. I used to not see them all the time, actually, (I) didn’t know how many people in the local area were running ads trying to find sellers until this new ad category came into play. If you don’t know what copy works that’s the hardest part, is testing and testing and testing. And if you’re especially just new to it, you don’t want to test and test and test. You don’t have the time, you don’t have the money, you don’t have the patience.

PD: Are you tweaking copy?

CS: Copy, no. Copy hasn’t changed in a year-and-a-half.

PD: The metrics stay the same, huh?

CS: Yup, the only thing that changes is the images. And the audience. Actually, audience has changed several different times over the year-and-a-half. But that’s probably the part I’ve tweaked with the most is the audience and then images obviously.

PD: Ok, so audience is gonna be more important than copy?

CS: Yeah because if you’re going to the wrong people no one’s gonna care what you’re saying. So yeah, orders would be, I mean: audience, copy, and then image. Because you gotta get your audience and then you’ve gotta get your copy. The image is what’s gonna stop people.

PD: And that’s true for any marketing medium. Audience list is more important than anything else.

CS: Right.

PD: And I’ve heard that Facebook favors videos, you get cheaper cost-per-lead with videos?

CS: You know I haven’t messed with videos. I just, actually I’ll be launching a new ad set Wednesday for a new client (and) we’re testing out slideshows. So scrolling, we’ve got scrolling three or four images versus doing...I typically do single image ads. When I launch for a new client I launch – let’s see, three, six, nine – nine ads at a time. Because you gotta play with Facebook if you want Facebook to play with you. There’s a lot of different tips and tricks. I’ve got some strategies that I use on the backend to kind of force Facebook to play.

PD: And what do you mean by play? Just by having them get your ads shown more often?

CS: Say you launch three ads, right? Same copy, three different images. Facebook’s gonna be like, sweet, I like that first ad. I’m gonna show it to 250 people and I’m gonna show those other two to five people each. Just out of the bat. Facebook’s gonna pick one and go with it. The way I launch and the way I set it up (in) the beginning is that I give Facebook nine different chances to pick different images to go with. So they all get a chance. Which you want to happen, it doesn’t always happen that way, but you want each image to get a chance to be shown as much as the other ones. Otherwise, you don’t know if it’s really working or not.

PD: How many leads can an individual get using paid Facebook ads?

CS: It’s dependent on budget and audience.

PD: And location too, I would imagine.

CS: Yeah, that’s where audience plays in. Small location, small audience. Big location, bigger audience.

PD: Can somebody create an audience around, say, a mobile home park?

CS: Used to be the smallest radius I could go would be a mile around an address, right, so I could pick your house or my house and drop a radius of a mile around that. You can still do that but with the real estate, with the new housing category, the smallest radius you can do now is 15 miles. So if I’m doing Oklahoma City the smallest area I can do is Oklahoma City plus 15 miles.

PD: Have they taken out interests? So they’ve taken out financial problems, situations people might have?

CS: They took out lots of interests, yeah. You can’t do financial status anymore which you used to be able to do. I don’t know what all they took out. They did leave a lot, which was nice, so you can still do like, First Time Home Buyer, you can still do Creative Real Estate Investing, those categories I listed earlier, you can still do all those within the new housing category. Before I would pick, I think I had the top 25% of income. So (on) Facebook, you used to be able to pick the top five and then you could pick the top five to ten, and (the) top ten to fifteen. You can’t do that anymore. But, it honestly only slowed down my ads for a couple (of) weeks. Once I figured it out, got back and I think New Western only got 80 leads that month instead of their typical 100 plus. Wasn’t too bad, it was just, I was sweating more than they were. I’m like, “no, no no, slow them down, no I’m not used to this, no, no, what am I going to do? Ok, test, test, test, ok, we’re back, we’re back! Alright, good to go, let it run!”

PD: When you tested it, what’d you figure out to get you back on track?

CS: I figured out that I had made a lot of audience changes over the past year-and-a-half and when I created new ad sets I was just keeping them. And some of those changes were not so smart back then. Decisions I had made then that now didn’t seem to be so smart. So, I messed with the audience a little bit, I never changed the ad copy, it was just the audience. Audience and images. Ad copy’s been the same for a year-and-a-half now. Changed the audience a little bit and then I went through two different launches because I launched and let it run for a few days (and) made sure it really wasn’t going to work before I turned it off and tried another one. (I) had to turn it off after a few days, tried another one, nothing. And last one, turned it on, Day 1, leads were two, Day 2, got like three leads, and Day 3 I got seven. I was like, “Alright, we’re back guys.”

PD: Is there a way to tell if your market has a lot of competition? And is that competition going to affect your ads and your audience?

CS: For this side there’s not a lot of competition. The going after investors side. I mean here in Oklahoma City. For sellers side, yeah there’s a lot of competition here. What I do is I go to the ads library and you can look (up), “sell fast” or “buy fast” or “buy for cash.” And any of those kind of phrases you’re gonna find someone in your area who’s running some kind of ad that’s something to do with that. And usually they’re not that great either. I mean I’ve seen some of the responses and it’s like, one sentence like, “Hey we’ll buy your house for cash quickly, no fees.” Something short like that, and you’ve got to put some meat into it. You don’t want to make it like a whole long-form post but you want to give them a little bit more than, “Hey we’ll pay you cash for your house, now.” You want to try to hit a pain point: “Don’t want to pay for costly repairs?” or “Don’t want to pay closing costs?” or “Avoid cost repairs!”“Avoid closing cots!” “Close in as little as 10 days!” If you’re setting up an ad you want to hit a pain point and you want to like, quickly hit how you’re gonna solve it.

PD: Then with a highly competitive market, you’re gonna have to tweak more of the copy. I mean, audience is important but this is where copy’s gotta be real tight.

CS: Yup. I’ve actually started putting more emojis in my copy.

PD: Really, does it work?

CS: Yeah it does actually, it does.

PD: What does it do? Bring the cost a little bit down?

CS: Yeah not a whole lot but maybe like a dollar per lead. If I’m getting them 100, 100 plus leads a month it’s an extra 100 bucks a month, that’s an extra ten leads.

PD: I would imagine it works just because it’s a little different from what they’re seeing?

CS: Yeah, you want them to stop. And now the top three lines are all that they’re going to see in mobile. 95% of the people that are gonna be seeing your ads are gonna be seeing it on their cell phone. Because they’re gonna be at work scrolling or sitting on the toilet scrolling or on the bus, they’re not really gonna be sitting in front of their computer at home scrolling through Facebook typically. So if you’re gonna put some emojis you put them in the top line, your heading, your attention-grabbing (line): “Know anyone interested in investing in real estate? Tired of being a landlord? Sell us your rental property. We’ll pay you cash on the spot.” Put the emojis right up there and encase your top headline. Maybe put a couple (of) houses beside it, a couple (of) exclamation points. A real quick, easy trick, if you’re on a PC, if you hold windows key and period, it will pull up the emoji keyboard.

PD: How can people reach out to you if they want to know more about this?

CS: [email protected]. and you can check out what we have to offer at realestateaudios.com

PD: You’re always taking new clients?

CS: Yes!

PD: Alright Chris, I appreciate the info man

CS: Paul thanks, nice talking to you as well, appreciate the interview.

PD: Of course man, talk to you later.

CS: Alright, have a good night.