Tristen is a certified Facebook digital marketer who is also a consultant for Facebook. He teaches businesses how to effectively use Facebook and Instagram ads. In this episode, he shares many different strategies to increase your leads and how to correctly target the higher conversion client.
Tristen Sutton Real Estate Background:
- A consultant for Facebook and a certified Facebook Digital Marketer
- Teaches businesses how to effectively use Facebook and Instagram ads
- Based in Houston, TX
- Say hi to him at:https://tristensuttonconsulting.com/speaks/
- Best Ever Book: Millionaire Next Door
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Best Ever Tweet:
“Make sure you know who your target market is and always put a call to action in your ads.” – Tristen Sutton
TRANSCRIPTION
Theo Hicks: Hello, Best Ever listeners. Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. My name is Theo Hicks, the host today. Today we are speaking with Tristen Sutton. Tristan, how are you doing today?
Tristen Sutton: I’m doing good. I’m staying safe, sane and sanitized.
Theo Hicks: The three S’es, there you go. Well, today we are going to be talking about marketing, and more specifically we are gonna talk about the things you should be doing from a marketing perspective on Facebook, Instagram, social media, during the Coronavirus pandemic. That’s gonna be the topic of discussion today.
Before we get into that, a little bit about Tristan – he is a consultant for Facebook, and he’s a certified Facebook digital marketer. He teaches businesses how to effectively use Facebook and Instagram ads. He is based in Houston, Texas, and you can say hi to him at TristanSuttonConsulting.com.
Tristan, before we start talking about marketing during the Coronavirus, do you mind telling us a little bit more about your background and what you’re focused on today?
Tristen Sutton: Absolutely. I’m a marketing strategist, like you said, based out of Houston, Texas, and I work with small business owners, and specifically real estate agents, and teach them how to use Facebook advertising to expand their brand, generate leads and increase open house attendance. I’m a licensed [unintelligible [00:04:18].10] instructor, so the course I teach, Ads University, provides real estate agents five hours of [unintelligible [00:04:24].29] along with an actual training, so they learn how to market for themselves. I’m really passionate about helping this niche out.
Theo Hicks: Perfect. Do you work with specifically real estate agents? Do you work with investors as well, or is it specific to the agents?
Tristen Sutton: Actually, yes, in some of my classes I’ve had several investors attend the course, and they said the things that I’ve taught them in that course has helped them get more leads to some of the properties they’re selling and investing in.
Theo Hicks: Perfect. Obviously, the Coronavirus has impacted real estate in general… Let’s maybe focus on real estate agents first, and then we can talk about investors second… Unless you think that the lessons apply to both. I’ll leave that up to you. So let’s start with agents. Maybe first tell us some of the biggest things that are changing right now, or maybe the most important things that agents should be changing when it comes to the way they’re advertising on Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms.
Tristen Sutton: Great question. Really what I want agents to understand right now is that it’s a pay-to-play strategy. Posting and hoping on your profile or your business page isn’t gonna get you the leads you need to get to the transactions that you want. We’ve gotta stop using a blockbuster strategy in a Netflix reality, and realize that Facebook suppresses your posts, so you need to put money in some advertising if you wanna reach your target audience.
The second thing would be understanding that Facebook changed the rules. So a lot of the targeting that used to be available for agents is no longer there. That doesn’t mean the platform is obsolete now, you just have to be strategic with your retargeting. So getting people to watch your videos or click on your links, regardless if you’re a buyer or a seller agent, and then retargeting those people… Just like when you click on a website and then all of a sudden she follows you around on Instagram and Facebook – that’s what we need to be able to do to make sure we get our transactions for the year.
Theo Hicks: So agents can’t just have their Facebook page that they have and just post free content to people, and hope to get leads that way? They need to actually create a paid advertising campaign on Facebook?
Tristen Sutton: Right. So if anyone’s listening right now, look to your Facebook business page, and look at your last 5-10 posts. You’ll see that, regardless of how many likes/followers you have, less than 5% of those people ever saw your posts. It’ll be at the bottom left, and it’ll say “Page Views” or “Content Views”, and then you’ll realize that “Hey, if I have 1,000 followers but only 20 people saw my post, I can’t grow a business or sustain a business with that kind of reach.” So if you wanna use this platform, you have to adapt with it and realize that to reach the people you want or need, you’re gonna have to put some behind it now.
Theo Hicks: I know that Facebook has different types of paid campaigns… One’s pay-per-click, and then there’s a different one. Is there one that you advise people to use over the other? Is pay-per-click better than just paying per campaign?
Tristen Sutton: No, there are several different objectives. There’s approximately 9 or 10. The four that I recommend for realtors is the reach objective, traffic, which drives people to your website, video objective, which gets people to watch more of your content, and then the last one would be Event RSVP – so if you have open houses, seminars, workshops, anything where you need bodies in a room, run that type of ad. That goes for the agents and the investors as well for the workshops they do.
Theo Hicks: Okay, so you said Reach Ad, Traffic Ad, Video Ad, and RSVP Ad. So I think that Event RSVP and Video are pretty self-explanatory… What is Reach Ad and what is Traffic Ad?
Tristen Sutton: So Reach Ad is more of like a digital direct mail campaign. This is gonna show your content, your face, your brand to as many people as possible in your market or your farm, but it’s not optimized for clicks or cost. So there’s none of that going in. This is more of an advertising play versus a marketing play… Marketing is lead generation, and things like that.
So you can spend at the time of this reporting maybe $5 a day and reach maybe 3,000 a day on their phones, tablets and computers, as long as they have a Facebook or Instagram account.
The Traffic one is optimized to show your ads first to the people most likely to see your ad and then click on your website. So those are the two that a lot of agents use because they wanna get their brand out there. But then they wanna drive traffic to their listings, or the lead capture sites, things like that.
Theo Hicks: Perfect. And the Video is just a video ad. And then RSVP is advertisement for a specific deal?
Tristen Sutton: Right. So with Video Ad most people don’t know the strategy – you use the video ad to warm up a cold audience. People do business with who they know, like and trust, so the easiest way to do that right now is with video on social media. So you get someone to watch maybe a 30-second video and then on the back-end you can go on Facebook and say “Hey, everybody that watched this video that I’ve just sent out on their phone, retarget everyone that watched at least 50% or more.” Because if they watched half of it, they’re halfway interested, they’re halfway familiar with your brand, and you’re gonna get a much more higher conversion with people that are already familiar with your brand than a cold audience.
Theo Hicks: Yeah. And then the RSVP?
Tristen Sutton: I encourage everyone, whether you’re an investor and you’re hosting workshops, or an agent hosting open houses, seminars, things like that – create a Facebook event page (it’s free). It’s kind of like the Facebook’s version of Eventbrite. You put your information, your picture, a registration link in there… But you can run ads to drive traffic to that event page, and spend maybe $3 to $5 a day and reach hundreds if not thousands of people. It encourages people to RSVP, and you can use that event page as an incubator to put testimonials, keep content in there… And really, that event page now – you’re using it as your way to do a virtual open house.
So if you can go to your house, social distance, do a video of it professionally on your phone, put the video in that Facebook event page, and now as you’re driving traffic to it, people get to virtually tour the home from the comfort of their home, and then they may schedule an appointment and say “Hey, once this is over…” or “Hey, can I schedule a tour in-person?”
Theo Hicks: What about the actual content of these ads? How has that changed during the Coronavirus?
Tristen Sutton: Hopefully people are doing more video, but unfortunately, people aren’t able to go to the barbershop or the salon, so they may be a little apprehensive about putting their face out there…
Theo Hicks: Seriously…
Tristen Sutton: Right now my beard is out of control. But right now video is still king/queen on social media, and it’s the best way to connect with your audience and the best way to get in front of them. And you don’t have to do long video. You can do something along 15 seconds, 30 seconds, never longer than a minute for an ad. Now, if you just wanna post videos, Facebook favors three minutes. But for ads, I recommend 15-30 seconds. And it doesn’t take long. Introduce yourself, identify your audience, identify a pain point to provide a solution, and then give them a call to action, “Click call or send a message”. That’s it, that’s all it takes.
Theo Hicks: So from these four types of ads, is this something where you wanna have one Reach ad, one Traffic ad, and then one Video ad, and then just continually push those? Or is this something that you refresh every day, every week, every month…?
Tristen Sutton: Great question. I wanna preface that with everyone’s situation is gonna be a little different… But a Reach ad – that’s more branding, so that’s something you just keep on going, and maybe just change your image maybe every 30 days. That way, people in your market area are gonna be familiar with you because they’re gonna see you all the time.
Traffic – that’s gonna be depending on what you’re driving traffic to. Are you driving traffic straight to your listing? Obviously, you’re gonna move those properties, so you don’t need to keep those up if you don’t have the inventory. Or if you just have a general lead capture form, you can always drive traffic to that open house, obviously only when you have a property to tour. So you may not have those going at all times.
And then the Video ads – that’s another branding strategy, so you can always have that going. I recommend leaving ads running for 30 days once you optimize them, to make sure that you’re getting the traffic and the clicks that you want.
Theo Hicks: Perfect. And then – I guess this applies to both agents and investors, but is there anything that applies to investors as it relates to marketing on Facebook during the Coronavirus that we haven’t talked about already?
Tristen Sutton: 99% of the people I work with are agents, so I don’t have the full aspect of what the investor needs… But regardless, everyone is at home right now, staring at a phone, tablet or computer. So if you know that you have an opportunity, you can reach them right now. And ads are cheaper, because a lot of the large corporations have kind of backed away. Facebook is saying “Hey, we need to still keep this revenue going”, so your money goes a lot further. You spend $5/day and you may reach 800 people now, and on some variables you can reach maybe 1,200 to 1,800 people from the same $5. So now is the time, because you have the access to their attention, it’s where everywhere’s spending time right now, and it’s inexpensive.
Theo Hicks: So basically, everything we’ve talked about so far is what people should be doing… On the flipside, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making right now? And this could be as it relates to actual paid ads, or it could just be content that people are pushing out on Facebook or social media in general.
Tristen Sutton: Oh, man… A handful of things. Get quality graphics. It doesn’t have to be a $500 or $1,000 flier image, but use something like Canva.com and just make — crisp, quality graphics are gonna represent your brand. If that’s not your ministry, you can user Fiverr (fiverr.com) and just spend maybe $20 to get a nice, professional-looking graphic.
Videos – people are using videos that are too long. Like I said, you wanna be between a 15 and 30-second timeframe. If it goes longer than that, people’s attention span isn’t there and they’ll scroll past it.
Always put a call-to-action. I always see something like an ad that says “Hey, we have this beautiful 4-bedroom house for sale.” Okay, now what do you want me to do? Do you want me to call you to talk about it? Do you want me to email you? Do you want me to go to the website? Always put a call-to-action, and then just be very concise with your messaging and your advertising, too. Make sure that you know who your target market is, and you stick with that.
Theo Hicks: Perfect. Okay, Tristen, what is your — typically we say “best real estate investing advice”, but we’ll just go with “What is your best ever marketing advice?” And something that you obviously haven’t talked about already.
Tristen Sutton: Stop boosting. Stop hitting that little blue Boost button. Because typically what happens is people don’t typically have a strategy. So my top marketing advice is before you launch any kind of advertising or marketing campaign, write your strategy down. Who do you want to see that ad? What do you want them to see when they see that ad? When they click on the ad, where do you want them to go with it? What do you want to happen?
Most people just say “Hey, I just did a live video tour of this home I have listed. Let me just spend $50 on a boost” and just shoot it out there. And then it’s like “Okay, well who did you send it to?” “I don’t know, I just hit the blue button.” So have a strategy before you spend any money.
Theo Hicks: Would you say Facebook is the best platform for marketing for real estate professionals? I know in your bio it said Instagram as well. Is Instagram just not as good as Facebook?
Tristen Sutton: I’ve actually seen better results with Facebook between my advertising and my clients’ results. Instagram is more of a show and tell, Facebook is more of an engaging opportunity. Plus, Facebook is Instagram’s daddy; they own them. Facebook has 1.6 billion people logging in every day, versus 600 million with Instagram, at the time of this recording, of course.
Theo Hicks: Okay, Tristen, are you ready for the Best Ever Lightning Round?
Tristen Sutton: Let’s go!
Theo Hicks: Alright. First, a quick word from our sponsor.
Break: [00:15:48].14] to [00:16:35].09]
Theo Hicks: Okay, what is the best ever book you’ve recently read?
Tristen Sutton: I’ve recently re-read The Millionaire Next Door. It just kind of puts everything in perspective about how to live below your means and invest in your opportunities that are going to yield you money, like real estate.
Theo Hicks: If your business were to collapse today, what would you do next?
Tristen Sutton: I’d probably go get my real estate license and [unintelligible [00:16:53].05] since I know how to market it. [laughs]
Theo Hicks: So I usually ask “What’s the best ever deal or the worst ever deal you’ve done?”, but I’m gonna change it up a little bit. I know that you give talks on marketing… What is the most unique group of people you’ve spoken to?
Tristen Sutton: I would say it was probably one of my first trainings; it wasn’t real estate related, it was just general business owners… And it was just a lot of individuals that didn’t even know how to use Facebook. Some of them didn’t even have a Facebook business page. So where I’m coming in expecting just to train them “Hey, this is how you generate leads”, it’s like “Well, hey, let’s set up a Facebook Ad account, or a Facebook business page for you, and upload your picture.”
So I would say my first training to general business owners who did not know much about social media.
Theo Hicks: Yeah, it is interesting that we’re living in an era right now where the younger people have always had the internet, and the older generation didn’t. [unintelligible [00:17:44].20] massive disconnect between — you give an iPad to a 5-year old and he can do everything. If you give it to a 7-year old, they can’t do as much as the 5-year-old. It is interesting.
Tristen Sutton: Very much so.
Theo Hicks: What is the best ever way you like to give back?
Tristen Sutton: Of course, I’m a speaker and trainer, but when this pandemic came, I just started reaching out to business organizations, real estate organizations, and started just offering free resources, and training. I did a Facebook Live and shared it with a bunch of business owners and agents, that “Here’s the tools I’ve used to still market my business. Here’s my lighting setup, my camera setup, all the above.”
When I heard that restaurants were crashing, I did a free training for restaurants where I was saying “Hey, here’s a 30-minute crash course how you can make sure you stay in front of your audience and still get those to-go orders or pick-up orders, so you can still keep your doors open through and after this.” So just giving some free advice and training to those in need.
Theo Hicks: Yeah, there’s actually a bread vendor that just rented a van and just drive around the different hot spots for half an hour increments, and people will still drive up there to do their bread. I thought that was interesting. Kind of like that for restaurants, too.
Tristen Sutton: You know, one of my phrases is “Pivot or perish.”
Theo Hicks: Exactly. Alright, and then lastly, what is the best ever place to reach you?
Tristen Sutton: I wanna do a 2 for 1. So they can text to get a free Facebook Ads workbook to teach them how to set up their own. They can text “freeguide” to the number 31996. That would give them access to the website. It’s a workbook, and we all win.
Theo Hicks: Perfect, Tristen. Well, thanks for joining us today and thanks for giving us your advice and wisdom on Facebook marketing and how it relates to real estate agents and real estate professionals in general during the Coronavirus pandemic.
We talked about how it’s transitioning from — I like your little sayings… “Posting and hoping”, to the “Pay to play” strategy. If you go to your Facebook business page, you can see that if you aren’t doing paid ads, then you’re getting very low engagement on your posts… And it’s because of the fact that Facebook has kind of changed their rules on that.
We talked about the four different types of ads – the Reach ads, the Traffic ads, the Video ads and the Event RSVP ads.
Something you also mentioned is that when you’re making advertisements for videos, you wanna make sure that they are between 15 and 30 seconds, never longer than a minute. Then when you’re making content, you want that to be 3 minutes. That’s kind of the sweet spot. And when you’re making these ads, once they’re optimized for 30 days, you mentioned that some of the biggest mistakes people are making for advertising is poor graphics, so make sure you get high-quality graphics. Videos that are too long, as I already mentioned. Not having a call-to-action, and then not having concise messaging and concise targeting of an audience.
And then your best ever advice was to 1) stop hitting the Boost button, and then also make sure that before you start a strategy, you write it out. Who do you want to see the ad, what do you want them to see, and then what do you want them to do once they’ve actually engaged with the ad.
Again, Tristen, thank you for all that advice and thanks for joining us. Best Ever listeners, as always, thank you for listening. Stay safe, have a best ever day, and we will talk to you tomorrow.
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