You’ve followed our blog posts religiously.

You’ve built out a seriously stellar Inbound Marketing program from scratch.

Your Facebook Ads are getting RESULTS, and you feel like you’re on top of the world.

And then… it happens.

You get lazy. You let your daily success rituals start to slide, and you rest on your laurels for just a wee bit too long.

One day turns into a couple, a couple days turn into a week, and weeks turn into months, until you finally realize that the marketing systems you’ve set up aren’t producing the results they once were.How to make sure your real estate ads are always working

In fact, while they may have been doing pretty well at one point, something just doesn’t feel right anymore. Or even worse: you might be completely in the dark, if you’re not actively checking up on your most important marketing metrics, and watching your analytics like a hawk (or better yet, a Falcon).

If you need a refresher on marketing analytics, read this blog post first.

Now, on to the importance of testing and staying alert.

Whether it’s a change in something technical, like Facebook’s algorithm, or just a shift in the market, you NEED to continually be checking up on your marketing efforts, your ad targeting, and the overall performance of your ads, emails, and sales funnels.

While in some areas of Inbound Marketing, certain marketing materials, like a blog post, or a lead magnet can be “one and done” (as in, once you’ve got it right, you can just let it be for quite some time). That’s not the case with real estate marketing as a whole, nor is it the case with Facebook ads (unless you love dumping money down the drain!)

The reality is – you need to continually be testing and checking up on the performance of your ads. (Come to think of it, this rule applies to all your marketing efforts.)

Why A/B Testing Is Essential In Real Estate Marketing (And Marketing In General)

We can all go around preaching as if we know what the market will respond to… but with advertising, there is only ONE surefire way to know what works, and what doesn’t: let the market decide.

That’s why you need to be testing different versions of your ads continually. If you haven’t heard of A/B testing, that’s the best strategy around.

To set up a simple A/B test on an ad, create a duplicate of your Facebook ad. Then, change just ONE of these things at a time:

• Headline
• Image, video, or carousel of images
• Ad type (switching from a carousel to a static image, for example)
• Copy
• Call to action
• Targeting (and within that, your demographic, location, employer, and more!)
• Placement

Even playing around with your ad’s device type can help you figure out where your customers are viewing your ad (whether it’s on their smartphone, or desktop).

The point is, you can THINK you know, even if you get your a copy straight from your audience, but you never really know what’s going to work at a larger scale if you don’t test.

So stop throwing money down the drain, and start testing – your business (and your bank account) will thank you!