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Win With Paid Ads
#61: What Real Estate Agents Can & Can’t Do with Paid Ads
00:25:40
During this episode of the Marketing Matters™ Podcast, Ashley shares what is working for realtors, real estate agents, and anyone in the housing or financial industry. She talks about limitations on Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram Ads) as well as...
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Welcome to the Marketing Matters podcast for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and really anyone who has anything that you want more people to find. Because you being the best kept secret helps no one, right? And that's because you can be so great at what you do. But if you aren't great at advertising what you do, then no one can find you, right? That's why in every single episode, I'm going to show you how you can use paid ads to hit your goals 10 times sooner. It's time you finally learn how to win with paid ads. I'll show you how to score and be known by more. Let's get started. All right, so today's episode is going to be for realtors, real estate agents. You're going to love this episode. Now, if you didn't watch the last one, we talked all about the book launch party and how that went, how we launched the book, the strategy, the results, all of that, and how we became a number one Amazon bestseller in the category of advertising. So let's talk about real estate agents and realtors. We're going to talk about what ads can you run, what can't you? Where are there some limitations? Because honestly, if you're like many of the real estate agents that I've worked with, you've been scarred either by running ads yourself or by what other people have said about ads. And it's like, oh, no, you can't do that. There's limitations. And I'm gonna be honest with you. I'm gonna list out what those limitations are so we can set the record straight. And I'm gonna tell you not only what you can't do, but what you also can do. So you can get excited because I have some real estate agents that are freaking winning and you can too, but not if you go off of what everybody else is saying on is or isn't working. And so I'm going to guide you through exactly what matters for you as a real estate agent. And if you're not a real estate agent and you have a service, if you are a service provider, you're still going to get some benefit out of this episode because I'm going to help you think through just that strategy of what can happen with your ads on Google versus Meta. So you'll love this episode too. And then before we get started, if you want to really win with paid ads and you would love some personalized live feedback, I would love to meet you on on the Win with Paid Ads challenge. So below this podcast episode or below this video, if you're watching on YouTube or you can go to ashleybrock.comchallenge. we can meet for five days every day and you can get to learn from these other business owners on what they're doing with their ads. And every single day, you learn a new framework and a new method that I've developed from doing ads for over a decade. So would love to see you at the Win with Paid Ads challenge. Now let's jump into today's episode. So I'm gonna be really honest with you about something and I'm kind of embarrassed to share this story, but I already told myself that I was gonna do it anyway and this is gonna matter because if you're listening and you're resistant to ads, like, if you feel a little bit of resistance in your being of like, ugh, I don't know if I wanna do ads or you find yourself selling yourself on why you shouldn't do ads, why it's not the right solution, why you might should just look at something else. But, like, deep down, you know that if more people knew about your business, they could buy from you. You're gonna love this. And I'm going to tell the example of how I have experienced this very same sense of resistance with my coffee maker. Are you ready? So I got this coffee maker and it is a bougie coffee maker. All right? I've been doing the Keurigame for years. All right? So we started with the McCafe, you know, like the McDonald's version of the coffee. The like drip coffee. So we did McCafe for a while because it was like $25 at Walmart. Like that was on budget, right? So you get that. And so we use that for a while. And then I was like, dang, what if we could make a coffee faster? Okay. So then we upgraded to like a $69 Keurig. Okay. So we had this Keurig and I've been totally cool with drinking coffee from this like plastic container where that water fuses through. Like, it is really not terrible. But have you ever had like a Starbucks coffee or a high quality local coffee bean and you drink it and you're like, something is just hitting differently. Like, it is like the best coffee. Maybe it tastes better, maybe it smells better, and maybe you're actually more energetic after, like the caffeine. Something about that caffeine is just different, right? Like, you know that there is a difference, right, between cheap coffee and quality coffee. Would you agree? And if you don't drink coffee, like, pick any other substance that you Drink besides water or any food where you're like, gosh, I've had a crappy steak. Or I've had a good steak, okay? And I bought this nice coffee maker, okay? And you know what? It just sat there. It just sat there in my pantry and in this little. Like, I have a cute coffee display. Like, I've dreamt of this coffee setup that we have today. And I hadn't made a coffee with it, and it had been two weeks. And I'm sitting here thinking, you waited your whole life for this moment with this nice coffee maker to have nice freshly ground espresso beans, a frother. And I'll link. You know what? I'll link to the coffee maker below, because there's a story for this, and it is the best coffee maker. It's the Brayville. A certain brand. I'll link to it. But I sat there and I was like, ashley, why are you still choosing to make this Keurig coffee? And I'll tell you why. I resisted making coffee out of this nice coffee machine because I did not understand it. And embarrassingly enough, I actually tried to use it. And I had two little toddlers. It was Saturday morning, and they were like, mommy, I'm pulling over here. And there's noises. One. You know that. You know when you get, like, a toy and it's like, making that noise, and you're like, I can't handle that with the stimulus of the pulling and this. And then the coffee maker's not working. And I'm like, I just. I'd rather have plastic. Like, I tried it. And then I even later came back during nap time. I was like, I'm gonna try and make a cup of coffee now. Well, I watched a YouTube video on it, and it was still confusing. I'm like, is this my right model? Like, I couldn't tell. It was just not well done. It was like 27 minutes in. I'm like, what am I doing? I was putting it on 2x speed. Could not figure out how to use this coffee maker. And bless my friend had tried to show me how to use it, but we were kind of in a rush going out the door, and my brain was like, in so work mode. I couldn't even process how to use this Dadgun coffee machine. Okay, so let's get this straight. I paid the money for the coffee machine, and yet it still required work. Have you ever paid for something and, like, you kind of, like, deep down hope that you can just pay the money and get the result? You don't actually have to do the work. You're like, I paid the money. Where's my result? And maybe you try, like, you're like, but I watched a video and I tried, and I set it up, and it just messed up. Like, I don't think it works. False. My friend Hannah, cfo, when she came to stay at my house, she walked right up to that coffee maker. She wasn't stressed. She was, like, living her best life. Got the cup and was like, do, do, do, do. Clicked a few buttons, did this whole magic thing, and was sipping her coffee, and it was like a breeze for her. Why? Because she had more skill with the coffee maker than I did. She embraced the discomfort because she knew that on the other side of this fancy coffee maker is a freaking delicious latte. And so, so many of us, even you, you may feel resistance towards doing something, and you actually know on the other side, it's gonna taste so good. It's gonna be so good. And yet in the middle of it stinks when you try to froth with the frother, and it spews milk all over the inside of your cabinets and on your nice leggings, and there's kids everywhere crying, and you're like, I can't make the coffee. Maybe life is better with Keurig. You're not the only one that resistance is your body resisting homeo, like, resisting change because it wants to be in home. You want to do the familiar just because it's comfortable, right? So finally, this Sunday morning, I said, I am going to figure this out no matter what it takes. I don't care if I have to stay here for two hours. I'm gonna stand here, I'm gonna get the most use out of this coffee maker because I know it's gonna taste good. I know it's gonna be worth it. And then once I actually figure it out over and over and over and over and over again, I will be able to make the most delicious coffee. I told myself that. And so I embraced the discomfort. I didn't know what I was doing. I watched a couple videos. Thank God, Hannah sent me a video that was helpful, and I made coffee out of that thing, and it was absolutely delicious. And do you know what my biggest regret was? Of course it was, why didn't you do this sooner? Why didn't you figure this out? This is absolutely, positively, scientifically, mathematically, way better tasting than the original coffee. What this means for you is the thing that you're resisting is the thing you should persist. What you Resist, you should persist. And I was writing this down when I was thinking about my notes for this episode. And I wrote, you're resilient to what's unfamiliar so you can have an excuse, or. Sorry, you're resistant to what's unfamiliar so that you can have an excuse to be persistent with what is familiar, which is preventing you from being consistent with the thing that could grow your business, with the thing that could change your life. And so I want you to think about what is the thing you don't want to do that you know you should be doing. And I'll give you one more example for me before I jump into this Realtor specific stuff. I promise I'm coming with it. The reason I wanted to share this now is because I find a lot of Realtors resistant to ads, resistant to anything other than, like, what everybody else is doing. And I just. The Realtors that are winning are the ones that are like, you know what? I know that people have been selling houses for a long time, but I'm going to do something completely different. And I find a lot of Realtors, if I'm being honest, that are stressed to the max because they think that the only way, only, only, only the one way that they are going to get new listings and new buyers is from posting on Instagram. And I'm watching them grow to hate their businesses because they hate having to feel like they're posting and posting and posting and posting and not getting traction. And so if you're resistant, like, think about how much time and energy you're spending posting. What if you just channeled that into actually learning so that you could progress, so that you could do something different, so that you could have a different result? That's why I just see this for you as a real estate agent. And I'm gonna share some real estate specific examples, two of which are just very recent with you. And I'm gonna tell you what you can and can't do. But I just, I want you, when you're listening to think, what am I resisting that is preventing you from elevating and getting a different result. All right, so because, and the reason I said that is because I don't want you to look back and actually start getting the results that these Realtors I'm about to share with you are getting and be like, dang, I wish I'd done it sooner because, like, I want to think about math for just a minute. If you're a real estate agent, so what are the average commissions for Realtors? It's saying, I'm looking this up. Yeah. So like that 5 to 6% commission, Mark, man. So that can be, I mean, gosh, that could be on a $300,000 home. If you pretend you split that and so you get 3% commission, that's $9,000 on a $300,000 home. That's $18,000 on a $600,000 home. And that's $36,000 on a, let's see, 3, 900. I mean it just starts. The math. Starts mathing, right. And so if you can make 9,000 or 18,000 or 36,000 or 62,000 or 100 something,000 or $300,000 on a sale, wouldn't you agree it's in your best interest to figure out how you could have that happen? Even if it was a little uncomfortable now, even if you had to slow down and actually lose commissions for a little while to be able to have a skill that could allow you to have that type of commission automatically. That's really cool, right? So two things that prevent Realtors from being successful. Actually, one thing, sorry. Is the belief that everybody already has an agent. I can guarantee you that is not the case. And there are over, I think it's like a billion searches on Google per day. I need to go back and look at it. A billion and there's 300 something million people here in the US even if 1% of those people don't have a real estate agent and they're looking for you, could you imagine, could you imagine if it was you right there when they're like, how do I change real estate agents? Or how do I find a new real estate agent? Or best Keller William agent XYZ place. Like, what if you could be there when they're looking? So I'm going to give you a Google example and a meta example of two clients that I've had that are real estate agents that are winning. And I'm going to be, I'm going to share like the exact details about their story. But before I do that, I want to share with you what you can and can't do as a real estate agent. Because this is where people get like, they're like, I don't understand it. All I know is there's limitations. It's not good. People say, don't do it. I'm not going to do ads. Like that's kind of the summary. And so I want to like hone in for just a second. And let's talk about what you can't do on meta as A real estate agent. Okay, so number one, you have limited targeting. So there are certain audiences you simply can't target. Like they're just not available in your ad account when you select housing as the category. So there. So it's called the housing special ad category and this applies to housing, homeowners insurance, mortgage loans and property hunting services. You have to specify housing. What does that mean? Because of the equal housing law, I think that's the right way to say it or what it's called. Basically you have certain audiences you can't target. Number two, you can't target people based on specific ages. So you can't say I only want 34 to 54 year olds typically because they're more established. You can't do that. So you can't target by age. You have certain audiences you can't target. And again, this is just on meta. You can't target by gender or postal code, so you can't say I only want men or women and you can't say I only want this zip code. What you can do is target a radius and the minimum radius for realtors is 15 miles. So you can still target people locally to you. All right. You just can't do postal codes. And I'm going to be honest, there's not a single business owner. This is like an Ashley hack that don't typically share stuff like this. But like I never recommend doing postal code targeting anyway. I like Radius is better for a few different reasons. And so the good news is you're doing the thing that's better so you can target locally. You just have to have a 15 mile radius minimum. And then you can't do exclusions or audience expansion. So exclusions means you can't negate certain people. Like you can't negate certain specific audiences. And you can't use Facebook's third party tools to expand as it stands right now. Which means you can't use lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences are audience of people that look, act and behave like your original audience. So you can't do that. You can use custom audiences, so you can do retargeting. You can say people that have engaged with my account and been in my world, you can send them another message with ads. So with retargeting, what's really cool is anyone who found you, no matter how they found you, you can be in front of them again. That is absolutely possible. And so I want you to think about as you're sitting here and you're like, oh, okay, like there's Some audiences I can't target. I have to stick to a certain radius, and I can't do gender. Here is the good news. There's so much you can do. Let's not dwell on what we can't. Let's propel with what we can. All right, so remember this. You are the manager of the circumstances in your life. You have these circumstances that say there's some limitations. And so you get to decide, am I gonna pity party or am I gonna figure this thing out and be one of the most known realtors in my area and have listings on, listings on, listings. Open up your own brokerage, all your employees are full, everybody's selling everything, and it's exactly what you want. You can do that, but you can't. If you're like, well, the odds are never in my favor versus the odds are ever in my favor, you can. So let's talk about what you can do. You ready? I'm excited. So I'm going to share a story to start this off. So one of my clients, I have many realtor clients. And people ask me often, Ashley, like, what clients do ads not work for? And I say, like, only the people that stop advertising. Because there's people that kind of test the waters. They run a little bit of ads, spend a little bit of money, and then they're like, nope, not. I'm. I'm not. I'm not an instant millionaire. I am definitely out. And so for those people, it doesn't work. But for the people that hang around, man, it's so special. Let me read a testimony that I got from one of my clients. They own a real estate brokerage in Dallas, Fort Worth, Texas. Okay? It's a mother and daughter duo. And if you are looking for an agent in Dallas, Fort Worth, I am sure the McDonald group would love to help you. Love you so much, gals. So Macy sent me this message. She said, and I'll let y'all share this. So this group has been working with me for almost a year. Okay? So they did not get instant results. In fact, they got the opposite. They spent a couple thousand dollars and hadn't gotten a lead yet. But Macy, her attitude was like, this will work. It will work. We will spend the money and it will pay off. Like, she was not like a. I've spent $93 and we haven't gotten a lead. It was like, what can we do? What can we do? What can we do? How can we fix it? How can we fix it? How can we optim. And her and her teammate Rose have been relentless and they got a million dollar listing from someone who had other properties. And I don't know where they're at with that one, if that one officially closed, but I know that that came pretty soon after they had spent a couple thousand dollars. And then, then she got, she sent me this message this past Tuesday, actually. She said, In 2025, we have spent $3,700 on ads, signed four clients, resulting in over 56,000 in commissions. And there are multiples that have not signed yet. Our organic, our local service, our Google Ads. Can all the conversions have gone up as well. Everything is working together like a well or sorry. Everything is working together like a smooth machine. I am so happy that we stuck it out when we were hitting walls in 2024 because we finally broke through the wall and it is so worth it. That is my realtor client from Dallas, Fort Worth, Texas. And that return on ad spend, let's see, 56,000, $56,000 divided by 3, 700 on ad spend. So 56,000 commission, 3,700 on ads. That is a 15 to 1 return. Every dollar that she spends on ads, she's getting $15 back. And it is March. So that is where you take your spend and it becomes a snowball because you spend more and you spend more and you spend more and you spend more and you get more. I was talking to one of my clients today. She is working with a therapist. And we were, she was talking to me, she was like, I just feel like, like the, the therapist is like, hey, I'd really like to get some more leads. And she's like, hey, looking at the data like this. And so let's just pretend, let's just pretend $50 cost per lead. And the therapist is like, gosh, I really wish I could get more leads. And mind you, she's closed a certain percentage of these. So let's just say that the therapist is closing one in four leads. So one in every four people who come to her and say, I'm looking for a therapist, she closes. So it's a $50 cost per lead. And she's like, gosh, we might have to just stop ads because I need more leads. And it's like, well, we can back into that math. If you're getting $50 a lead, if you spend $50 a day on average, you will get a lead a day and sometimes 2, sometimes 0, sometimes 3. It varies and it's just, it's a volume game sometimes, like if it's the right people and you're getting leads. Like you have to be willing as a business owner to pay for leads. And my realtors and real estate agents, you have the potential to have 10,000, 50,500, I mean, depending on what, how many. So you have an opportunity to have a six figure commission or at least multiple five figure commission. You need to be willing to spend more on ads. What if you get one client? You wouldn't have got otherwise because you weren't findable. You have to become findable for the people that are already searching for you. And it's so easy because they're literally raising their hand. And I just shared a lot of limitations on Metta. But what you can also do is run ads on Google. What you can also do is run ads on YouTube. Did you know if someone's on YouTube and they're searching like, should I move to Dallas Fort Worth, Texas? You could have a video on all the, you could say, hey, I want my videos to show when someone's searching that. And so they're going to look up a video about the Dallas Fort Worth area. And it's like, hey, it's so great to meet you. I noticed you're probably watching a video about moving to Dallas, Fort Worth. And if you are, do you have a real estate agent by chance? Because there's four things that are really special about working with us at the McDonald Group. And then she can go into that and it's like, oh, that person actually was looking for a real estate agent. And if you tell yourself that not everybody has an agent, because they don't, then you might have an opportunity to say, hey, you know what, they were interested, they were looking for this. What a great opportunity for you to be there. You can be there on so many other platforms. And so just don't put, put your eggs in one basket. And also the meta basket is still a basket for you. You don't have to be scared just because there's limitations. There are still ways you can target your audience. And here's something else, here's a hack, by the way, on meta, do you know how when you post something organically on Instagram, the algorithm crawls the image and the text? Like, the algorithm is like, what is this ad about? Right? So when you put keywords in your caption or on your ad, the algorithm crawls it organically. Right. Did you know it does the same thing for ads too? So I had a real estate agent in Cape San Blas, Florida, and the agent kind of stood there with her hands outside of a home and was like, if you're looking to list or sell your home in Cape San Blas, here are three reasons why working with us is great. And someone reached out and they got a $750,000 listing. It's so simple. You can target and you can still run your ads. Yes, there's some limitations and that's okay. You can still get results. So I hope this was helpful. Let me look and see if that covered everything. Yep, you can target, you can retarget, you can be there on YouTube and oh, last, last few things for my real estate agents, just a little Ashley ads tip. So there's really two ways, the way I see it that you can use ads for your real estate business. You can use ads strategically in a way to get into conversation where people like just like, yep, I want to send you a message and talk to you. Or you can use ads to get people to your website. And my father in law is a real estate agent. And gosh, I think it was like two or three years ago, I was like, pappy, he loves, he was like, I'll just door knock. And I'm like, you don't have to do that. Like they can knock on your door. Like I want you as a real estate agent to have door knocking literally where people are like knock, knock, are you the best real estate agent? And so I was like, can I just make you like a three page website? And I did, I made him a three page website and he spent about $3,500 on Google Ads and got three listings. So like you, I'll say it once, I'll say it again. Your strategy doesn't have to be complicated for your revenue to be elevated. A three page website and $3,000 on ads got a real estate agent, three listings. So what that means is you can be simple as long as you can track. As long as you have the right strategy, as long as you have the right method, you can learn ads. And the investment of learning ads can pay for itself in the very first month when you know what you're doing. Now what I can't do is guarantee it happens in the first month because Macy and her team, it took months and now they have a skill that generated a 15 to 1 return in less than a year that they can do over and over and over and over and over again. The math starts to math out on learning ads and I hope that's helpful for you as you think about how you can use ads to speed up how quickly the people searching for a home and even, gosh, you start talking about luxury homes. I'll tell you, people are on Google and on Meta looking for someone that they really trust with their multimillion dollar listing or home sale and for you to be there speaking to them and saying, hey, I'm so it's so great to meet you. If you are really looking for someone you can trust to help you sell your multimillion dollar home and invest in the right one, I know how important it is to have a real estate agent in your back pocket that you can trust. They can advocate on your behalf, they can find you that dream home. And that's why I'm so glad that we met. Like, there's a way you can craft that messaging, which is why one of the things I teach in my programs are messaging. And actually that is why in the Win with Paid Ads challenge, the very first day of the challenge is about messaging. We talk about messaging the whole day. Day one is messaging. Day two is setting. So messaging is what you say. Setting is where you say it. Day three is targeting, which is who you say it to. Day four is testing, which is how do you know what how to test and optimize. And number five is scaling and profiting every single day in the Win with Paid Ads Challenge. That's what we dive into. So if you are a real estate agent or a local service provider and you have not joined the Win with Paid Ad Challenge, you I offer a 10 times your money back guarantee when you join the challenge. What that means is if you don't feel like those five days of training and feedback is worth 10 times the price you pay, then you get your money back. So I would love to see you real estate agents, local service providers to really talk about this and dive into even more of this in the Win with Paid Ads Challenge. So click the link below or go to ashleybrock.com challenge, get your ticket and I can't wait to see you soon.