To stand out in today’s competitive property landscape, estate agents need to reach the right audience, generate meaningful leads, and build brand awareness online. While many turn to ‘boosted’ posts on Facebook and Instagram as a quick and easy way to expand their reach, the real question is whether this approach truly delivers results. Estate agents want more than just visibility—they’re looking to engage serious buyers, sellers, and investors, not just increase likes or comments. Boosted posts may provide some short-term exposure, but are they the most efficient way to meet your goals?
That’s where Rex Reach comes in. Unlike generic boosted posts, Rex Reach is a platform engineered specifically for the property industry, designed to drive targeted traffic, generate qualified leads, and amplify your brand with precision. And with recent increases in the cost of boosting posts, agents must now weigh the benefits of sticking with Meta’s offering or adopting a more cost-effective, results-driven solution. Let’s dive deeper and explore how Rex Reach outshines boosted posts in achieving your estate agency marketing goals.
What is a boosted post?
Boosted Posts are a form of paid advertisement on Facebook and Instagram, allowing content to reach a broader audience beyond organic followers. They're known for their simplicity and immediate increased visibility, although they operate within the confines of Facebook's algorithms and audience restrictions.
How to boost a post on Facebook or Instagram?
At the most basic level, here are the steps you can follow to boost a post on Facebook or Instagram:
- Choose a post to boost: Go to your Facebook page or Instagram account and find the post you want to boost. Click the blue “Boost Post” button below the post.
- Set your objective: Depending on the type of result you want to generate from the post, choose the appropriate goal, such as “Get more engagement” or “Get more website visitors”.
- Select your audience: Choose a custom audience based on location, age, gender and interests. Alternatively, you can let the platform automatically target people similar to your current followers, which in most cases may not be accurate.
- Set your budget and duration: Decide how much you want to spend and how long the promotion should last.
- Add payment method: If you haven’t already, you will need to add a payment method before your campaign can start.
- Review and boost: Once you have reviewed all settings, hit “Boost” or “Promote” to start the campaign.
Ads vs boosted posts for estate agents: what are the differences?
In the simplest of terms, boosted posts are an easy way to promote a single post and get more engagement, while paid ads give you more control and options for targeting and tracking your marketing goals, such as lead generation. Other key differences are:
- Setup and customisation: Boosted posts have limited customisation options, while ads offer more advanced options including detailed audience targeting and various ad formats.
- Audience targeting: Targeting options for boosted posts are simpler, usually based on location, interests, age and gender; paid ads allow for more precise targeting, using custom audiences, lookalike audiences or detailed demographic, interest and behaviour targeting.
- Objectives and goals: Boosted posts generally aim at increasing engagement (likes, shares, comments), while ads can help drive website traffic, generate leads or drive enquiries.
- Ad placement: Boosted posts are typically shown in users’ feeds as promoted versions of the original post, while ads offer a variety of placements, including feeds, stories, in-stream videos and more.
- Analytics and reporting: Boosted posts provide basic performance metrics like reach, engagement and clicks; paid ads offer detailed analytics and reporting options with advanced insights that help you optimise your ads for better performance.
- Budget and bidding: Options are simpler for boosted posts, usually set on a daily or lifetime budget; paid ads offer more flexibility in bidding strategies so you can achieve the best results for your budget.
How to create paid ads on Facebook or Instagram?
Option 1: Create ads directly on Facebook
If you know your way around Meta Business Suite, you can create your ad campaigns direct in the Ads Manager. Before starting a Facebook ad campaign, doing some research and settings things up properly can make a big difference. Here’s what you should do:
- Define your goals: decide on what you want to achieve and identify several key performance indicators you would like to use to measure success.
- Know your audience: find out who your ideal customers are; consider their age, gender, location, interests and behaviour; create detailed profiles of your audience segments to better tailor your ads.
- Also know your competitors: look at what they are doing with their Facebook ads; note their ad formats, messaging and target audiences; determine how your offering stands out from the competition.
- Set a budget: decide how much you want to spend daily or for the entire campaign; choose between manual or automatic bidding based on your level of expertise, budget and goals.
- Choose ad placements: determine where you want your ads to appear (e.g., feeds, stories, Messenger); decide whether to use automatic placements or select specific ones.
- Prepare creative assets: decide on the format (e.g., single image, video, carousel); create high-quality images, videos, and write compelling ad copy; decide on an effective call-to-action.
- Set up tracking: install the Facebook pixel on your website to track conversions and optimise ads; set up specific events to track actions users take on your site.
- Create and review your ad: write clear and engaging copy that aligns with your goals; use Facebook’s preview tools to see how your ad will look on different devices.
- Test and optimise: plan to test different versions of your ads (e.g., headlines, images) to see what performs best; set up how you’ll monitor and analyse ad performance to make adjustments as needed.
Running a Facebook ad campaign takes regular upkeep because you need to keep an eye on how it's doing, tweak your audience and ad content, manage your budget, and adjust to any changes on the platform or in the market. You’ll need to check performance often, test different ad ideas, and make sure everything stays on track and compliant with Facebook’s rules to keep your campaign working well and hitting your goals.
For busy agents like you, however, this level of maintenance may not be ideal, in which case, you may consider option 2 for creating and running ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.
Option 2. Create ads through Rex Reach
Rex Reach is a sophisticated ad platform designed specifically for estate agency professionals. It leverages detailed audience data to target individuals at different stages of their property journey, spreading advertisements across Facebook, Instagram and the Google Display Network which covers about 90% of the internet.
Rex Reach allows you to whip up ads for Facebook, Instagram, and tons of websites with just a few clicks. It offers over 27 ad formats made just for real estate, so you can easily show off your properties and boost your brand without spending too much time or effort.
Benefits of choosing Rex Reach over boosted posts
Apart from the benefits of paid ads compared to boosted posts, there are some key differences that could really impact your estate agency marketing if you choose Rex Reach for your paid ad campaigns.
Tailored for estate agents:
- Boosted Posts: Are not specifically tailored out-of-the-box. They require a degree of expertise to know how to target the right audience, create eye-catching content, and keep an eye on performance to make sure your ads work their best.
- Rex Reach: Designed with the estate agent/property professional in mind, Reach has been engineered to address the specific/particular challenges of estate agency advertising. It requires no prior knowledge and ads are auto-optimised for performance, eliminating any guesswork and ensuring you are targeting the right audience to meet your objectives.
Audience Reach:
- Boosted Posts: Primarily appear in the social feeds of your followers and those you target. They may not have as broad a reach as a platform like Rex Reach that taps into the most relevant audiences across multiple networks.
- Rex Reach: Provides a vast outreach by advertising listings across Facebook, Instagram while also tapping into the expansive Google Display Network. This ensures that a property is not just seen by social media users but also by those browsing millions of websites accessible across the Google network.
Targeting and Objectives:
- Boosted Posts: Their main purpose is to generate likes, comments, and overall brand awareness. They might not be as effective in converting audiences into tangible leads or actions.
- Rex Reach: Employs precise audience targeting, focusing on individuals actively interested in buying, selling, investing or renting properties. Targeting prospects more efficiently and economically, ensuring the right people see the ads at the optimal times. Choose from a range of different campaign types including brand awareness, lead generation and resource downloads to support all your marketing objectives.
Ease of use:
- Boosted Posts: While easy to use, you will need to manually create the content to boost and they don’t offer the same level of detailed targeting or customisation as specialised platforms.
- Rex Reach: Designed to be powerful yet user-friendly. Rex Reach automates content creation, deploying up to 27 different ad formats across multiple networks. Integrating directly with your CRM system, Rex Reach pulls in all the prospect's details for you, giving you more time to focus on building relationships and closing more deals.
Marketing performance:
- Boosted posts: straightforward in generating immediate visibility but lack the depth and strategic components necessary for nurturing leads and converting them into tangible sales opportunities.
- Rex Reach: supports the estate agency marketing funnel by offering tried and tested ad formats for market reports, property listings, and home selling guides. Reach’s tailored design assists agents in generating more leads, integrating these new prospects into your CRM system and providing a better return on investment.
Cost:
- Boosted Posts: Recently, Meta has increased the cost of boosted posts by 30% via the mobile app, passing on Apple’s 30% digital purchase fee to advertisers. According to eBoost, “with the introduction of this fee, it’s essential to weigh the cost-benefit of boosting posts on these platforms versus seeking alternative advertising avenues.” Similarly, The Digital Exchange warns, “This new charge won’t provide you with any additional value; it’s simply an extra cost for the same service, further eating into your Meta Ads budget.”
- Rex Reach: In contrast, Rex Reach channels your entire ad spend directly into your campaigns. When using the Meta ad network (including Facebook and Instagram), your ads are placed without incurring this extra fee. This effectively gives you 30% more budget to reach your target audience, maximising your return on investment without the added cost burden.
If you’re a estate agency professional seeking robust, efficient, and effective online marketing, Rex Reach presents itself as a clear frontrunner. Its tailored functionalities outshine the generic nature of boosted posts, providing industry-specific marketing solutions to reach the right audience, optimise ad spend, and ultimately, secure more leads.
Ready to take your estate agency marketing to the next level? Book a Rex Reach demo today and start optimising your ad spend for better results!
