Real Estate Lead Generation on Social Media: Custom Forms
How to use custom forms to generate real estate leads on social media
Social media is a great medium for generating real estate leads. With over 1 billion active users on Instagram and Facebook, and ways to fine-tune the advertising to demographics of likely buyers, it’s a cost effective and efficient way to generate real estate leads for your upcoming new development project.
And because the real estate form itself is key to your sales team outreach, we generally recommend using custom lead capture forms on social media. That’s forms that are built out on Spark, Unbounce, or other landing page builders, and then disseminated out through the social media platform.
When using social media ads, there are several reasons to use a custom lead capture form. They’re more tailored to your needs because they’re industry specific, don’t have any restrictive guidelines, and can send traffic directly to your website.
The key to successfully using custom lead generation forms is making sure that you still get all the leads. You want people who fill them out on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram to get properly synced into your CRM database.
Here’s how to set up your real estate forms on Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram.
Create a Landing Page for your Registration Form
Essentially, your real estate form needs to live on a landing page. This is a single web page where the form lives, and it’s common to use multiple forms so that you can track the different ways that a buyer initially found out about the project.
There are a few ways to create landing pages for your real estate forms.
Use a form builder, like on Spark, to first create the form itself. This means identifying and then including the information fields that you’ll need to get from each buyer registration.
With more customizable form builders, you can drag and drop options including text and images, and customize colour, font, and spacing, to essentially build out the form into a full landing page. Typically, best practice suggests making sure that the general look and feel of the landing page invokes the ad, to help visitors make the connection visually.
If your company uses a website platform like Wordpress, or you have a marketer/developer working on the website, you can also create a webpage page with all your branding and the right content. After the page has been created, simply copy the form embed code from Spark or whichever form builder you are using, and paste the embed code onto the page. Make note of the URL so you can use it when setting up the ads!
If you don’t want to create a landing page at all for the form, you might be able to use a link to the form itself. By default, Spark’s email and form editor, Carpenter, hosts each form on its own page — essentially a very simple landing page with only the real estate form on it. Simply copy the link from Embed Options > Link to Form sidebar, and use it where you need.
Set Up Your Form for Real Estate Lead Generation on Facebook
First, create an ad. Remember you have to have the right permission on the company page to do so.
Facebook will redirect you to AdsManager. Here, you want to set up the ad so that Facebook knows what kind of algorithm to use to get the best results. Your objective is lead generation, but if you select that on Facebook’s ad creation tool, you’ll be forced to use Facebook’s forms.
For most CRMs, this means that you’ll have to download your leads as a CSV file and sync them separately. Alternatively, you can set up a manual integration using Zapier and an available API like Spark has.
To use your own real estate forms on Facebook, simply set the objective to Conversions.
This will allow you to set your own destination link for the ad, while still asking Facebook to optimize the ad for people most likely to convert. Paste your landing page link or form URL when prompted. This sets your custom form as the destination for your ad.
Finish setting up your Facebook ad as usual.
Set Up Your Instagram Ad for Lead Generation on a Custom Form
To run your real estate ads on Instagram, you must be an administrator for the Facebook business page. If you are, make sure to go into your Instagram profile to give permission to link to the page.
You can promote an existing post by going into the post itself, or in the Insights section of your Instagram profile. Run through the promotion creator as prompted. When setting the Destination, just use the Website option and paste your landing page URL as before.
Using your own URL is the key to making sure that any leads generated through social ads will sync directly with your CRM!
Another way to set up an Instagram ad is to go through the Facebook AdsManager, as above. You can use all the same settings. The benefit of using Facebook to set up your Instagram ad is that you can create a new post instead of promoting one that has already been posted.
To set the ad to run on Instagram only, edit the Placement section. Just uncheck the Facebook, Audience Network, and Messenger options.
Remember to use the ‘Conversion’ ad setting instead of Lead Generation if you want to use your own real estate forms on the Instagram ad.
Set Up Your LinkedIn Ad for Lead Generation on a Custom Form
The ad creator/manager for Linkedin is under Admin Tools > Sponsor your updates on the Admin version of the company page. You’ll be redirected to the campaign account manager, where you can follow the prompts to go through the process of creating an ad.
Either Content Syndication or Text Ad styles can be used for lead generation — it depends what you want your ads to look like.
Like with Facebook, if you selected Lead Generation as the objective of the campaign, you won’t get the option to use your own form. Instead, select Send people to your website or content to control the destination URL.
Again, remember to use the link to your registration form to make sure your leads are properly synced.
Using Custom Real Estate Forms on Social Media Ads
When you’re finding potential buyers with lead capture or registration forms for your new development project, putting a few budget dollars towards social media advertising can do a lot for successful lead generation.
Social media ads are relatively new in the advertising and marketing scene, but it’s hard to deny how efficient they are at lead generation and nuture. Social ads are cheaper and more effective than direct mail or traditional advertising. E-commerce industries have been taking advantage of them for years—and real estate is catching up quickly.
Using custom forms on social media ads are a great way to capture leads without sacrificing flexibility and fit to your business objectives. With an all-in-one sales and marketing platform like Spark, you can create custom registration forms without worrying about data getting lost in the sync.
To learn more about how Spark can help you manage and market your upcoming new development project, sign up for a demo at Spark.re/sign-up.
As always, feel free to reach out to us at info@spark.re!
