Facebook has created some issues in ad targeting in 2019. Facebook recently stopped ad targeting for zipcodes, age and sex for the housing, employment and credit businesses. This is an effort by Facebook to aid in discrimination in those industries. Though as a good deed for society as a whole, how does this affect your initial advertising strategy?

Well an easy way to generate viable leads in your local area was to target age ranges in your zipcodes looking to buy or sell a home. This worked but it will not work any longer. As a digital marketer you need to take a deeper approach into advertising to this group. There are two workarounds that are actually more beneficial than the easy strategy before. First one being Custom Audiences and the second Lookalike Audiences.

Custom Audiences

A custom audience is an audience created in facebook using data from your personal data. This can mean many things but for example you can take the audience of people who follow your facebook page and run ads to those people. That group of people is called a custom audience. A custom audience can also be derived from your website, video views and even an email list. The email list is where you will get the quickest fix. Using an email list from an open house, or from a list aggregated over time or in your CRM will allow you to run ads to those people specifically. This is great for Hyper Targeting messages or properties.

Lookalike Audiences

A lookalike audience is a brand new set of prospects that have the same behavioral patterns and demographics from the audience you create it from. That might of been a mouthful, but simply using that custom audience with your email list before. Once you create a lookalike audience from that custom audience Facebook will find the same number of people that are like those people in your email list. This is a powerful tool can take your marketing game up to the next level.

These two key strategies will save you from the “real estate facebooking marketing Armageddon” and actually step up your marketing game a few notches. It is important to know that you need to have a custom audience before you make a lookalike audience.