How Does Video Retargeting Work?
Video Retargeting ads (also referred to as remarketing ads) use a strategy to constantly get your brokerage in front of interested buyers and sellers once they have engaged or interacted with your brand online. Used heavily to boost retail and real estate business, this type of ad nurtures a target audience by reminding them of the product or property that previously caught their interest. Retargeting are display ads which target users who have interacted with your Facebook content or website in certain ways you have preset.
Once that happens a cookie is set in their browser and you can use this data to “retarget” them for your video ads. And because video content is highly engaging for shoppers, it isn’t surprisingly that it can also be highly effective when retargeting them.
You can run a Facebook or Instagram video retargeting advertising campaign to entice interest in your real estate brokerage by using video to tell your story. The first step is to create some video content, such as a walk-thru of one of your listings. The video should be long enough to maintain viewers’ attention but short enough to leave them wanting more.
Then use that video as your creative in a Facebook ad and set your marketing objective to video views. This will allow Facebook and Instagram to target an audience that is most likely to view a video based on their past behavior on the platform. You would then also target your audience based on the location and other interests that align with your service area and interests of your target market.
Select “Video Views” as campaign type
The next step after running your listing video ad is to create a new custom audience for a video retargeting campaign that displays an ad to users who saved or engaged with your previous ad. To do this, create a custom audience based on users who viewed at least a 25% of your first video, as they likely have solid interest in your offerings. This targeting option is located by clicking on “Engagement” when creating a custom audience, and then choosing “video.”
Select the level of engagement with your video content that captures the level of intent for your customers
The next video ad to serve them should contain similar footage to that in the original video, but with a bit more detail. For example, you may want to retarget with a video promoting the benefits of the neighborhood , showing restaurants and other attractions of the area, your retargeted audience where they have already expressed an interest.
Website visitors who are retargeted are more likely to convert by 43%
Retarget contacts in your CRM
Marketing databases are a very powerful tool that can influence retargeting efforts. You can use the data stored in your CRM to create custom audiences and even have facebook create a look-a-like audience based on what types of properties the leads captured in your CRM have viewed and what types of amenities or neighborhoods they have expressed an interest in viewing. For example, you may have segmented your leads into people who have viewed a property or requested information about a property in Boston’s North End.
You could format your list data to include data that Facebook accepts including a field for email, then export that segment of leads from your CRM into a CSV delimited file (fancy name for a text file specially formatted to be exported and imported into other software), and then import that list in your Facebook Ad Manager to create a custom audience.
Once your list is uploaded and your custom audience has been defined, you would then create a new ad retargeting that list with a video tour of the North End showing all the great restaurants and amenities that neighborhood offers with a link or button at the bottom of your ad to view properties located in the North End on your IDX website.
One thing to keep in mind, for Facebook to match a user to your CRM data there must be some unique identifying field. You need to make sure the column formatting matches the identifier type that Facebook accepts. The most common field is an email address that a lead also used to create his or her Facebook profile. For example, if you had a column header that’s for Email addresses, you would rename the column header to email (this is cap sensitive) so it can be mapped properly. When vetting your list, make sure to confirm every record has a corresponding email address. The more data you have, the better your chances of Facebook finding a match. Facebook also accepts the following data to match a user:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Phone Number
- Zip Code
- City
- State/Providence
- Country
- Date of Birth
- Year of Birth
- Gender
Retarget with Facebook Dynamic Ads
A dynamic ad campaign is an excellent example of an evergreen campaign that you can continue running as long as the metrics are good and the campaigns are profitable because the creative will change for each user. The first step is to setup dynamic Facebook ads by uploading your Multiple Listing Service (MLS) catalog of homes through Ad Manager and ensure your Facebook pixel is setup on your IDX website. Generally your IDX provider will have already intergraded with the Facebook API, to make this easy.
Whenever someone views a listing on your website from Facebook, a cookie will be setup to track them for a set period of time and their Facebook information will be added to a custom audience list of visitors to retarget. Dynamic real estate ad campaigns, which by nature will feel exceptionally personalized to the user even though it’s nothing more than an auto-generated template can then serve an ad to those homebuyers on your website listings exactly matching or similar to what they had previously looked at on the website or your Facebook MLS search tab, through ads in carousel format, you can show multiple homes in one ad.
How much of your marketing budget should you spend on retargeting?
It can be difficult to decide how much of your marketing budget should be allocated to PPC and social media ads, let alone once you decide on social media advertising, what portion should go to retargeting vs. the initial ads to generate the custom audience. As a point of reference, according to a recent study from Marin software, the majority of marketers are spending less than 10% of their ad budget on retargeting. However, this is not a hard and fast rule, as you do want to keep an eye on your metrics and analytics to see if you are getting enough impressions to generate the results you are seeking. This might require you to adjust the frequency your ads are being displayed and that could require a higher percent of your budget.
Conclusion:
The strategy of video retargeting those who have already viewed your ads can be a great way to build your brand, as potential home buyers and sellers will see your content once and if they show an interest you know they are more likely to be receptive to what you have to offer. This technique combined with the use of video rather then static images can make a big difference in generating new real estate leads and nurturing those leads to become clients.