The Fundamentals of Facebook Ads for Multifamily: Which Ad Type Works Best?

Diving Into Your Property’s Facebook Ad Audience and Ad Types

We all know Facebook ads can significantly boost your property’s visibility, but navigating how to use Facebook ads manager and successfully launch ads is another story. 

If your Facebook ads are not delivering as expected, it might be time to revisit the fundamentals.

Understanding Your Audience: Laying the Foundation

The bedrock of a successful Facebook ad campaign is reaching the right people. If apartment reviews are favorable, the last thing you’d want is for potential residents to miss them. Hence, understanding and creating a renter persona is paramount. 

This persona, representing your ideal renter, can guide your targeting. For a multifamily marketing perspective, use our multifamily persona worksheet to help shape this persona.

You can access the “Audiences” section when navigating Facebook’s business tools. Here, Facebook allows you to create various audience types for your multifamily marketing ads, including:

• Custom Audiences: Focuses on those already familiar with your property, like website visitors. This audience is excellent for retargeting, creating those essential touchpoints to convert leads.
• Lookalike Audiences: Targets individuals similar to your existing residents. This model lets Facebook identify and target users who share attributes with your defined custom audience.
• Saved Audiences: Curated based on demographics and interests. While versatile, multifamily marketers must be wary of targeting restrictions due to housing regulations.
• Special Category Audiences: Specific to businesses in Special Ad Categories like housing. These audiences have distinct limitations, so be sure you’re compliant.

Understanding these audiences can aid in creating targeted multifamily marketing campaigns that resonate, especially when seeking to highlight positive apartment reviews.

Diving Into Ad Types: Crafting the Perfect Message

Determining the ad type is pivotal when deploying Facebook marketing for property management. Facebook offers several ad objectives, and then you can choose the ad format within those.

Ad Objectives

• Awareness: This is your chance to make a first impression. Use this objective when you’re aiming to put your property on the radar of potential residents. Think of it as your digital elevator pitch — succinct, compelling, and memorable. Perfect for showcasing the exterior of your property, community amenities, or even the surrounding neighborhood to entice potential residents.
• Consideration: Now that your audience is familiar with your property, it’s time to deepen that relationship. Engage those who have shown preliminary interest in your property but are still unsure about committing. Share content that paints a holistic picture of life at your property — perhaps a virtual tour, resident testimonials, or spotlighting features that make your property unique. Highlighting apartment reviews during this phase can be particularly effective, giving prospects a peer-based perspective on the resident experience.
• Conversion: This is the closing phase. Here, your objective is clear and direct action. Whether it’s encouraging potential residents to schedule a property tour, sign up for a newsletter, or even start leasing. The ads in this phase should be crafted with a strong call to action, directing the audience exactly where you want them to go. Offer incentives, showcase limited-time deals, or emphasize the urgency to act.

Choosing the right objective can optimize your ad’s effectiveness, whether you’re highlighting amenities or showcasing glowing apartment reviews. These categories are basically the three main stages of any marketing funnel, and it is the first selection you make when creating a new ad campaign. Once you choose, every ad you launch within that specific campaign has that same objective. 

Now, within each Ad Objective, there are multiple options from which you can choose to optimize ad delivery. These options slightly change the way your ad looks to viewers. 

For the Awareness Objective, you have Brand Awareness and Reach. These objectives are designed to show your ad to the largest number of people in your target audience within your budget. 

For consideration, there are:

• Traffic
• Engagement 
• App Installs 
• Video Views
• Lead Generation
• Messages

These optimize your ad for a specific action step, such as visiting your website, watching a video, filling out a form, or sending your property a message. 

Lastly, there are Conversions, Catalog Sales, and Store Traffic for the Conversion Objective. However, you might find that these options don’t really line up with your goals. 

Based on our experience with multifamily ads, you can easily create conversions with the Consideration ad objectives. Traffic and Lead Generation are the top two ad objectives you will use and find successful. 

Overall, don’t get too caught up in the minute details of each category; just choose the one that best matches the action you want a prospect to take when they see your ad. 

Ad Formats

Now that we’ve covered all the ad objectives let’s talk about ad formats, which dictate how your ad will appear.

• Image Ads: Simple, straightforward, and ideal for quick, clear messages. For multifamily properties, these can highlight specific amenities or limited-time leasing offers. You can upload three different ad sizes for each image ad: Facebook News Feed, Instagram Feed, and Instagram Story.
  • Facebook News Feed ad specs are 1080 x 628 pixels.
  • Instagram Feed ad specs are 1080 x 1080 pixels.
  • Story ad specs are 1080 x 1920 pixels. 
• Video Ads: Engaging and dynamic, offering a chance to tell a more detailed story. Whether showcasing a resident testimonial or a property walkthrough, videos can enhance the resident experience. You can have a video ad running in these three sizes:
  • Horizontal Video Ads should be 600 x 315 pixels. 
  • Square Ads should be 600 x 600 pixels. 
  • Story Ads should be 1080 x 1920 pixels. It’s also important to know that Story Ads can only be 15 seconds long max. 
• Carousel Ads: Interactive ads allow viewers to swipe through multiple images. Perfect for showing various unit types or amenities. There is only one ad size available for this type: a 1:1 ratio with 1080 x 1080 pixels. 

The correct mix of ad objective and format can differentiate between an ad that resonates and one that falls flat. And with the potential for driving down costs (like achieving link clicks for as little as 22 cents), it’s worth the effort to get it right. 

Launching Your Ad: The Culmination

Once your audience is set, and your ad type is chosen, it’s time to launch. Integrating the strategies highlighted above — especially with the support of Facebook marketing agencies — can ensure your ad reaches potential residents and resonates with them. Aim to highlight positive apartment reviews, emphasize the quality of resident experience, and use effective multifamily marketing techniques.
Whether you’re just getting started or seeking to optimize your existing efforts, understanding these fundamentals is the first step toward Facebook marketing success. If ever in doubt, remember that many Facebook marketing agencies like Criterion.B specialize in multifamily marketing and can offer tailored guidance and support.