How I generated $2 real estate leads and automated 80% of this real estate agent’s workload

Quick background, this client has been in the real estate sector for 20 years, and like most real estate agents, he struggles to find leads.

He tried a couple of stuff like paying 3k to advertise on Carousell which got no results at all.

Cold calling and door knocking isn’t exactly the most effective use of time.

While social media marketing is highly praised, these real estate agents are constantly bombarded with all kinds of fads and latest strategies which only causes them to be more confused.

While some tech-savvy agents would try out Facebook advertising or google PPC after watching some tutorials on youtube …

And if they are lucky they might get 1 or 2 leads, but most of the time … none.

So what happens then? They cast it aside, saying social media marketing doesn’t work and continue doing what they were doing before hoping something will change.

The problem lies in the fact that these agents (applies to most businesses as well) fail to realize that they lack the skills to get the results they want.

A successful campaign is more than just launching ads mindlessly, it is having the right foundation and a system in place.

Foundation is understanding what the market wants and creating an offer that resonates with them. While a system is having a procedure or steps to guide your customer through the purchase journey.

In this post, I’ll be breaking down the anatomy of a successful campaign. 

You’ll get to learn:

– How to create a strong marketing message that sets the foundation of a successful campaign

– The bottlenecks we ran into and how you can avoid them

– How we run a minimum viable campaign effectively ads and scale them without breaking the bank

– Our exact backend follow up system that reduced my client’s workload by more than 80%

Context

The initial idea was to capitalize on the COVID-19 lockdown period.

As this was a period of uncertainty, many businesses have cut back or shut down their advertisement activities …

Coupled with the majority of the people stuck at home, bored and glued to their phones, this meant that there were fewer competitions, more attention, and cheaper traffic courses.

This was a huge opportunity in the midst of chaos!

The foundation

The most important foundation is planning the marketing message or what we call it the “angle”.

When the message is right and strikes a nerve, you’re going to get a response.

Unlike most real estate agents who promote it from an angle of the real estate, we decided to go with the personal branding angle. 

The first step is simply to walk a mile in the ideal prospects’ shoes and really understand what problems, uncertainties they face, or what their aspirations are.

This is called creating a customer avatar. 

I typically like to ask these questions to get a good idea of the ideal prospects:

1. Their age?
2. Their gender?
3. What does a day in their life look like?
4. What are they frustrated with?
5. What are their biggest fears?
6. Where do they desire to be?

The Gap

Once the customer avatar has been created it’s a lot easier to identify the “gap” between their current and desired situation.

The next step is to create an offer that bridges the “gap” for the customer. Your offer needs to show that you can bring your customer closer to where they desire to be.

In this case, we’re taking a play on the economic uncertainties and offering a report on the crisis investment … which garnered lots of interest.

The Angle

One of our angles used

“In the midst of chaos, there’s always an opportunity.

Singapore property investment sales have dropped by a whopping 37% due to the Coronavirus hit. 

An intelligent investor will know that this is a fantastic opportunity to buy. 

However, many locals still feel that it’s not the RIGHT time because they think that the price will still go down … only to regret that they missed the opportunity 5 – 10 years later.

Want to make a more informed decision? Click learn more to get your FREE property forecast report.”

Description: How low will Singapore Property Prices go?

Click learn more to get your FREE property forecast report

(please don’t copy)

Our Strategy – Pilot Campaign $30/day

We run our ads a little differently. Most people would run 1 campaign with 1 ad which isn’t very effective as you don’t have anything to measure your success with.

The more effective way is to run a few campaigns with multiple variations of the ads so that you can come to an accurate conclusion of what works and whatnot.

We decided to test out 3 different angles and various creatives:

2 personal branding angles and 1 real estate angle at a $10/day per campaign angle.

Letting the campaign run for 4 days before we decide to make any changes.

Judgment day 

As a result, the 2 personal angle campaign outperformed the real estate angle at $2.69 and $9.51 as compared to $16.49 per lead. The results were fantastic given that the industry standard of cost per lead is $20.

3 key metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your ads are:

1. Click-through rate – Determines whether your ads are attractive enough for people to click in
2. CPC – Try to keep it below $1.5 cost per click
3. CPM – Cost per 1,000 impressions, the lower the cost means the more people you can reach

The backend process

Instead of downloading the leads manually every day, we push the leads to the Facebook lead center which a CRM platform. This enables him to track and follow up with the leads in real-time.

Once the leads come in, he will call each lead and send them the free report manually. 

This process helps open up a short conversation where we can gauge the purchase readiness of the leads, and build comfort and rapport at the same time.

We would move the leads along with the CRM per conversation. From raw leads -> In-progress -> Interested -> Converted, we would also tag the follow-up activities on each lead to facilitate tracking.

Scaling the operations

After the initial 2 weeks, we decided to scale by doubling down on the winning ad set.

We would duplicate the winning campaign, up the budget by 100%, and double down on similar creatives that got us favorable results. While cutting the losing campaigns, that way we’re actually spending less than the initial pilot test daily budget. 

By doubling down on the winning campaign, we had days with 12 leads costing less than $2.

These were fantastic results but more than what he  could handle. With the large influx of leads, we ran into many issues, some of it includes:

1. Not following up with the leads fast enough that they turned cold
2. Sending the wrong information to the wrong person (Human error)
3. Taking up 4-5 hours per day just on manual sending work

This isn’t efficient at all. We needed a back end system to follow-up with the leads and funnel them to an email list (for long term marketing effort).

Introducing Zapier, an API tool. 

1. We had it connected to the Facebook Lead Ads form which automatically delivers the free report to the inbox of the leads establishing the first touchpoint without having to call them. This also ensures that the leads stay warm even if we call them at a later time. 

2. The leads are also then pushed to our email list which sends them another “welcome” sequence email informing them that we’ll be sending them periodic email updates on the property market. Establishing more touchpoints. 

3. We also had zapier push the lead info straight to the client’s phone. In that way, he’s instantly notified about the new leads and could follow-up as soon as possible without having to log into the CRM on his computer.

This our current process which is only a small back end process

What issue did we run to at this point?

We can get the leads but we didn’t have the next step to follow up with the leads. We could call the leads but didn’t know how we angled the conversation and qualify them.

So what we did, I reused the script

Killing the losers and scaling the winners

What issue did we run into when we scale?

Too many leads influx, we had 10 leads on one of the days. The client was having lots of trouble following up with them as he had other meetings and matters to tend to. So calling each lead and sending them the free report was out of the question, we have to automate the process and touchpoint.

So what we did do about it?

We automate the lead magnet distribution through zapier api intigration.

We integrated the lead for ads to push the leads to the email list to send to automate the sending of reports. We also send the emails of the leads to an email list.

Sending notification to the phone to notify the user of leads and information without having to constantly logging into the facebook crm.

Interested in learning more? Feel free to contact me.