Blog: Real Estate Online Farming | Canadian Postal Code Targeting

Real Estate Online Farming is a fancy word we came up with to describe the powerful combination of Real Estate traditional offline farming and power of postal code geo-targeting on Google Ads and Facebook advertising.

We can target over 1,500 Canadian Postal Code FSAs (the first 3 digits of the postal code). This is the best way to hyper-local geo-target, your Real Estate Farm online.

So what does this mean for Realtors? The vast majority of Real Estate Agents and Brokers invest on their farm in one way or another, by sending newsletters, buying space on bus shelters, etc. by defining your targeting by postal code on Search Engines and Social Media you’re enhancing the connection between online & offline media advertising.

Digital advertising has a significant impact for most businesses, and for Real Estate agents it can mean taking an important advantage over their competitors, helping them dominate specific areas, many of which are defined by postal codes, rather than city limits.

Let’s take an example a Real Estate Brokerage that takes a city like Toronto and divides it up into 4 separate geographic areas. For the local agent in Etobicoke, setting his/her geo-targeting as ‘ Toronto’ would be too broad and result in them advertising for their fellow Toronto-based agents. On the other hand, setting their geo-targeting as Etobicoke still results in a ‘limited reach’ warning from Google Ads, which will result in your ads receiving little exposure – only to users who specify the name of the city in their search, or users with GPS-enabled mobile devices where their exact location can be identified.

Now with postal code targeting, real estate agents no longer have to worry about this problem. Google has a quality threshold in place, so they will only offer postal codes for targeting where they are confident enough to correctly locate the user’s IP address. If they are not confident in assigning IP addresses for a given postal code, they will show a ‘limited targeting’ badge next to the location.

Integrating Your Online & Offline Advertising

Direct mail advertising is generally targeted by postal code, so targeting your farm on Google and Facebook allows for all kinds of interesting options in terms of taking your offline direct mail campaigns, reflecting that same message online, and the beauty of digital advertising is that it shows KPIs like clicks, impressions & conversion by postal code.

We all know that repetition in marketing matters, and when you include digital ads to your farming efforts, you would receive a substantially greater return on your direct mail investment if you set up Ad campaigns that are targeted the same postal codes, and contained Ads with the same kind of messaging used in your print campaign.

You’d want to run your campaigns before and after the delivery of the direct mail to increase the chances that your target audience will be exposed to your message multiple times within a relatively short period of time. You should be using a dedicated PPC landing page, you could even go to the extent of showing the actual flyer/direct mail piece right on the landing page.

Important Recommendation

Your website should be collecting data, so you can generate reports and make ‘data-driven decisions’ – that is, you should make decisions about your business and your marketing based on real data, not based on a hunch or a gut feeling. How to interpret the data is another story.

That’s where we can help, you can learn more about our Real Estate Online Farming strategy here? http://bit.ly/2Qj7uRJ