Instagram Story Ads: No One’s Using Them and That’s Exactly Why You Should
- Published on
- 30 min listen
- Matt McGee Editor, Agent Resource CenterCloseMatt McGee Editor, Agent Resource Center
Matt McGee is HomeLight's Agent Resource Center managing editor. He hosts HomeLight's weekly podcast, The Walkthrough, which delivers actionable, no-hype advice from the best real estate agents and top industry experts in the country. He previously served as Editor-In-Chief for three Third Door Media digital publications: Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, and MarTech Today. Matt's a Pepperdine University grad who's been surrounded by real estate his entire life: his wife and sister are active agents, as was his dad for almost 50 years.
If I told you there’s a super-popular place online where you can advertise your business and your listings, get more leads without spending a lot of money, and do it all without a lot of other real estate agents doing the same thing … you’d be all over it, right?
Welcome to Instagram Story Ads.
In today’s episode of The Walkthrough, social media ads expert Susan Wenograd says Story Ads are an untapped opportunity for real estate agents, and shows how you can be the first agent (or one of the first) in your market to capitalize on it.
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to get future episodes delivered automatically: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | YouTube
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to get future episodes delivered automatically: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | YouTube
Free Download
Susan Wenograd is offering Walkthrough listeners a free worksheet you can use to increase Instagram engagement, which in turn then makes for better remarketing ad campaigns and opportunities. You can download that worksheet (PDF) by clicking here.
Join our new Facebook Community
As mentioned at the end of this episode, we’ve just launched a new Facebook community just for listeners of The Walkthrough. Come join us to connect with other listeners, connect with the guests that you hear on the show, get exclusive content, influence future episodes and more. You can find the group here: HomeLight Agent Community – The Walkthrough.
Links and Show Notes
- SusanWenograd.com
- Connect with Susan on: Twitter | LinkedIn
- (Susan Wenograd video) How to Make Your First Instagram Stories Ad: A Full Walkthrough
- (Susan Wenograd video) How to Analyze Instagram Stories Ads
- NEW: Join our Facebook community for The Walkthrough listeners
- HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center
- Subscribe and listen to The Walkthrough: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTube
Full Transcript
(SPEAKER: Matt McGee, Host) You’ve heard that Wayne Gretzky quote, “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.”
If we apply that to online ads in real estate, I’d say that the puck has been at Google and Facebook for a while now. If you’re going to advertise yourself or your listings on either of those, you know you’re in for a lot of competition.
But where’s the puck going to be?
I have an idea. Instagram Stories. Not the main Instagram feed of photos and videos with text underneath, but Stories, the full-screen video content you see up top. Usage is skyrocketing, Instagram is all in on stories, but there’s almost no local advertising there.
Today, we are talking to an Instagram story ads expert who says this is a huge opportunity for real estate agents. And she’s going to show you how to take advantage of it before anyone else in your market. So grab your marketing person, and let’s skate to where the puck is going.
This is “The Walkthrough.”
(INTRO MUSIC)
Hey, everyone. I’m Matt McGee, editor of HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center, and your host every week right here on “The Walkthrough.” On this show, you’ll learn what’s working right now, from the best real estate agents and industry experts in the country. At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. That’s why we created “The Walkthrough.” We’re on a journey to find out how great real estate agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable. You can get involved in the show in a couple different ways. Number one, leave me a voicemail at 415-322-3328. Or you can send an email to walkthrough [at] homelight.com.
If I told you that there’s a super-popular place online where you can advertise your business and your listings without spending a lot of money, and without a lot of other Realtors doing the same, you’d be all over it, right?
Well, that’s Instagram Stories.
I just opened up Instagram Stories, and here’s what I saw: Stories from about 20 friends, with an ad mixed in maybe every three or four stories. And all the advertisers were big national brands: HBO, NordicTrack, Masterclass, stuff like that.
Where are all the local advertisers? Where are all the real estate agents?
You guys, that’s what opportunity looks like.
My guest today is Susan Wenograd, a digital marketing veteran of almost 20 years. Today is actually her first day on the job doing paid media with a company called Nextiva. Before this new gig, she worked with some of the top marketing agencies in the country. She has helped clients ranging from local businesses all the way up to the Fortune 100. She’s a regular speaker at big events like Social Media Marketing World, she does training for Social Media Examiner, I could go on and on and on. But here’s the thing. About a year or so ago, I watched Susan start to study Instagram story ads like nobody else’s business, and she has really become the top expert around on this subject.
So, on today’s show, I asked Susan
- What’s the opportunity for real estate agents with Instagram story ads?
- What should the ads look like? Good news, they don’t have to be super polished.
- And, is it really possible to sell a home or find leads this way?
Susan has created a downloadable worksheet for “Walkthrough” listeners to help you get more engagement on Instagram, and that in turn makes your advertising more effective. I’ll tell you where to find that worksheet before we wrap up today.
But enough of all this preview stuff. If you are ready to learn about a great opportunity that probably no one or almost no one else in your market is using, here’s my conversation with Susan Wenograd about Instagram story ads.
(BEGIN CONVERSATION)
Matt: I am a latecomer to Instagram Stories, Susan. I, for the longest time, out of stubbornness, just avoided them altogether.
Susan: I did too. Don’t feel bad.
Matt: I didn’t want to click on that stuff up the top. I just wanted to thumb and scroll my feed. So, give me, and give listeners some background on just sort of where they fit in the landscape, like, do we have, like, viewership numbers, how popular they are?
Susan: Stories are actually, if you look at the growth rates, and I don’t have the numbers right in front of me, but if you look at the daily active usage of Stories, it is growing far faster than any feed ever has. So, it is one of the fastest-growing formats for social media, and interestingly, Snapchat was the one that started it. They were the ones that actually started the story format, and then Instagram took it and just kind of blew it up, and now it’s really what it’s known for.
Matt: Quick interruption. I also didn’t have any numbers handy when Susan and I spoke. I was hoping that Facebook would share something on its July 30th earnings call, but that didn’t happen. So, the most recent official number is that Instagram Stories has 500 million daily users. Five hundred million. Now, that number is about 18 months old, so you can bet it’s actually higher than that now. All right. Let’s get back to the conversation.
I’m curious to know what your experience is when you are looking through Instagram Stories, because here’s mine. I will start swiping through and see, you know, friends, yourself, others as well, and watch their stories. And when I see an ad, it’s usually from a large brand, right? It’s a Toyota, or a Reese’s, or, like, I don’t know how much targeting’s going on, but for me, it’s always these, you know, big national stuff. I almost never see a local advertiser in Stories. And so, when I think of that, I’m like, okay, my gosh, if I’m a real estate agent and I want to start doing Instagram Story ads, like, that to me seems to scream opportunity.
Susan: It does. And there’s a reason. So, one of the things that is nice about Story ads is you will typically find that their cost is less than it is in the feed. And it’s because of that lack of competition. So, one of the reasons why I’m so bullish on story ads right now is because they are severely underutilized, but I don’t think it’s because they don’t work. What I typically find in accounts that I take over is that they wound up disabling that as a placement. And when I ask why they’re not showing their ads there, they’re like, “Oh, well, they didn’t work.” And then I look at the creative that they ran, and I’m like, well, that’s why they didn’t work. It had nothing to do with stories, and everything to do with the creative that was in them.
So, it’s difficult because people just kind of see it as, like, this subsidiary of Instagram advertising, so they’re like, “Whatever. I’ll check the box.” But as a user, and this is part of the reason why I think people like you and I resisted adopting it, is it’s a very different user experience. Like, it’s not at all like a feed, so it almost feels like a different platform. Like, it is a completely different user experience, and everything about it is different. It’s not just the fact that it’s a full screen. It’s not just the fact that it’s captive and you have to swipe back and forth. Also very different in that I call it, the Instagram feed is like your stage, and stories, they’re like your spotlight. So, on stories, you can’t see, unless it’s, like, you know, a poll and it just shows you, you know, percentages or something, you can’t see how many people have commented. You can’t see how many likes there have been. You can’t see the reactions.
So, it feels like this very oddly one-on-one experience, because, especially if it’s a video from a brand, there’s nothing there to distract you. All you are seeing is what they are telling you, and there’s nothing else to distract from that. So, it’s a very oddly kind of one-on-one user experience. And a lot of times I see that that’s where brands struggle, is they’re still thinking about it like a feed. So they’re still trying to, like, kind of put that messaging in there, or, God forbid, they just let their feed creative run in stories, which looks terrible. If you’ve ever looked at what it does to a feed ad when it pops into stories, it’s awful-looking. So, a lot of times, I’m finding that lack of competition is not because the placement doesn’t work. Quite the contrary, it works great, but it’s not something that creatives have figured out how to do very well yet, if that makes sense,
Matt: So Instagram ads run out of your Facebook ads manager account?
Susan: Correct.
Matt: We just had our mutual friend Akvile DeFazio on last week, talking about Facebook ads and talking about some of this. And so what you’re saying there is, you know, one of the common mistakes that you see is that a lot of advertisers will just lump their creative and lump everything in their main Facebook/Instagram ad will also go into stories, and you’re saying it should be its own sort of category, its own sort of creative?
Susan: Correct, yes. And you can set it up so that if you want to still just be able to check all those boxes and have it run simply from one ad set, you can, but when you get to the creative section, there is an option where you can say “customize placement.” So you can basically say, okay, I want this static image to run for everything, except for stories, I want you to run this. So you can specify separate creative for stories, and that’s typically what I recommend a lot of brands do.
And sometimes it’s taking what’s running in the feed and just formatting it as a vertical video. I mean, sometimes it’s not completely different, but they’re making the edits necessary, so that when someone is watching a stream of stories, it’s not so obviously an ad, because it’s like you’re going from these full-screen things to all of a sudden this cut off letterbox thing with this horrible text beneath it, and it’s so obviously an ad, because no stories look that way natively, right? So if nothing else, you’re at least taking your main message, and you’re making it look more native to the platform.
Matt: So, Instagram story ads are, number one, they are vertical, right? So, landscape is not going to be really effective there. And then there’s also the challenge of how long, or how short, I guess, in this case, the ad needs to be.
Susan: Correct. And, you know, it can go up to 30 seconds. You’re usually not gonna find people watch past 15. And so, the thing with stories ads too is that you, when you’re thinking about it as a placement, another way it’s very different than a feed that you have to account for in that creative is you don’t have ad copy to help tell the story. So when you’re looking through a feed, there’s a visual, and then you can read. And with stories, you really can’t do that, because if you’re creating a 15-second thing, you’ve gotta get to the point very fast. And while you can run subtitles and stuff, it’s really the visual that’s gonna kind of carry that whole thing for you to make it work.
Matt: I’m imagining listeners right now, real estate agents and their marketing person, their team member, whatever it is that handles this sort of stuff, might be thinking to themselves, how on earth, Susan, do I sell a house in 15 seconds or 30 seconds? So, like, what should that look like? What would a real estate ad look like in Instagram stories?
Susan: I always tell people because story ad creative is very different, it’s really important to actually, like, don’t avoid stories like Matt and I did. Watch a lot of them, because then you’ll get a feel for, like, how, what the flow is like, what the user experience is like, and you’ll make better story ads because of it. But if you’re just starting, you know, I would say, let’s say, you know, you’re looking for, you know, leads on a certain house, for example, right? Where it’s like, you want to do email collection for people that maybe see the house and are interested.
So, in those cases, it sounds weird, and it’s almost like blasphemy to say it, because I know how important perfectly staged photos are, but, for something like stories, people are looking for authenticity. So, it’s one of those things where you might be the Realtor and in that case, you can say, you know what, I’m going to create a 15-second video where I basically, you know, I do an intro standing out in front of the house, kind of give them a pan, look back and forth at the outside, and then take short video clips of the best features inside the house. And it’s okay if they see you as the Realtor. That’s the whole point. The whole point of stories is that it’s a human connection experience. So it’s like, yes, you’re showing off the house, but it’s also giving you a chance to sell a little bit more in person than you probably would if it was a static image. Does that make sense?
Matt: That does. And I’m glad you mentioned that too, because I think that’s one of the tensions that agents often have, not just in their advertising, but in their organic posting and all that sort of stuff. “Should I be in the video, or should I focus on the house?” And you’re saying yes, for that personal connection, it’s okay, maybe even recommended, to put yourself in there, even if it’s just for a couple seconds?
Susan: Well, yeah. And if you think about it, like, think about it as a user. If you see someone take shaky iPhone videos and stitch them together, and they don’t see a person, then it’s kind of like, was this just a terrible videographer? Was it done this way on purpose? Whereas like, if it’s you recording yourself walking up to the front door and you’re talking at the camera, then a user knows, like, it is deliberately you. And the authenticity factor is actually huge, because then you’re showing them the house in a way that’s not perfectly staged, it’s not perfectly lit. And it gives kind of that real human feeling of, like, here, you know, for scale, here’s a human walking through the front door, so you have some sense of what it actually looks like, right?
So, including yourself actually lends more credibility, versus, you know, them thinking either they got a terrible videographer or they deliberately tried to make it look like user-generated content in a horrible way. There’s a human element that makes it a lot more approachable. There’s an organicness to stories that, like, you don’t want it to feel like an ad. If it looks perfectly polished, guess what? They know within two seconds it’s an ad, and they’re gonna swipe by. So, there’s an expectation management thing there.
(Woman: Hi, everyone. If you’re enjoying “The Walkthrough,” we’d appreciate it if you tell the real estate agents in your network about us. Even more, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your feedback helps us get better, and in some cases, can also help new listeners find and hear us. And when we get around to having you on the show, the more listeners, the better, right?)
Matt: Another common type of ad that a real estate agent does is they’re not specifically selling a house but they’re just trying to sell themselves, right? So you want to advertise yourself, “Hey, if you need to sell your home in Topeka” or wherever it is, “hire me,” or, “If you need to find a home, hire me.” What could an ad for that look like? I mean, very top of funnel, right? Would it be okay, I mean, just off the top of my head, would it be okay for just the agent to talk into their camera for 15 seconds?
Susan: Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, you can use your phone for it. I mean, and it’s mind-boggling just because it’s not what you’re used to, but in stories, people expect to see a human being, and the thing that’s nice about Instagram ads is for something like lead collection, you really have two options at that point. So, you can set up your ad to, you know… One of the side notes with story ads is that the call to action is always swipe up, it’s not click-through. So, in Instagram organically, you don’t get the swipe up feature on stories unless you have 10,000 followers.
With an ad, you bypass that. So with an ad, the call to action is always gonna be to swipe up. So, if you’re doing something like you’re trying to collect leads, or you’re trying to sell, and you could even really do this for the house example too, but, when you set up story ads, you set them up with objectives like you would any other Facebook or Instagram objective. So when you do it, you can say either, you know, I want to have people click off to my website and drive them to an email capture form, or, one of the things I’ve actually seen be really effective is there is an option to run an ad that when the user swipes up it, will open up their Instagram DMs, and it will open one to you. So that reduces so much friction, where if you just want people to get in touch with you, immediately they can do it right on Instagram.
Matt: Okay. One of the things that I know is popular in real estate, and the first place I heard it was Tom Ferry. He’s one of the big coaches in the industry, right? Like, thousands and thousands of clients. And he has over the years been encouraging agents to use polls in their stories themselves, right? So, I think, if I remember right, his thing was do an Instagram story and just have a poll question, “Are you living in your dream house? Yes or no.” Is that the kind of thing that could be applied in a story ad as well?
Susan: Yeah. And there’s two tips that I would give when it comes to this. So, when you’re running your ads in general, this kind of goes to that, the funnel stuff that you and Akvile were talking about, but you can send ads to people that have interacted with your posts or ads. So, I’m a very big proponent of using all the interactive options in organic story ads as much as possible, to build that audience. Because you’re building an engagement audience that you can then retarget to. So, it can be polls. Polls you can run in ads. That is the only engagement sticker that Instagram has right now that you can put into an ad.
But I still encourage people, in their organic stories, and I have a check sheet for this that I’ll share with you, but there are like 15 different ways to get people to interact with your story, and once they do, they’re automatically in that retargeting audience. So I always tell people, like, yes, you could absolutely run polls and ads, and they work great, but if you’re also just looking to build that warm funnel of people to retarget, there are a bazillion ways to do it in stories.
Matt: You just heard Susan mention a worksheet that she’s going to share with us so we can share with you. You’re gonna love it. It’s really, really good. It’s a PDF that shows exactly what she was just talking about, all the different ways you can get people to interact with your Instagram Stories. And when that happens, you can then start targeting Instagram ads just at those people. Stay tuned, and I’ll tell you where to find that worksheet before we wrap up today. For now, let’s get back to our conversation.
We talked a little bit at the beginning about the sort of the setup here in using Facebook ads manager, and we’re talking audio here, so we don’t have the luxury of screenshots or anything like that, but let me ask you two questions just about the setup process. As we said, this runs through Facebook Ads Manager. So, number one, the same, what do they call it? Special ads category rules for Facebook? Same thing applies here, right?
Susan: Yep. Yep, it’s gonna be the same rules of governance, because technically you’re on the same platform. I mean, it’s different name, but it’s still Facebook’s, so it’s gonna be all the exact same, you know, all their targeting is shared among the two platforms.
Matt: Okay. And if I understood what you said earlier, when you get to, I believe it’s stage two or three of setting up the ad, and, you know, go through the campaign, the ad set, then the individual ad, Facebook will ask you where you want all your ads to show, right? And it’s just like this huge laundry list.
Susan: It’s actually like collapsed, too.
Matt: Yeah, it’s kinda hidden.
Susan: It is. It’s in step two. So you’ll set up your campaign, which is really where you’re just telling it what your objective is. That’s really all you’re doing there. When you set up your ad set, that’s where all the sneaky targeting is. So that’s like, you know, you’re specifying age, you know, gender, location, but if you scroll down, there’s this radio button that’s already selected, conveniently, for automatic placements, and it’s collapsed. So, like, it is so easy to just breeze right by it, but to your point, if you’re, like, manually select placements, if you click that, this whole menu explodes, with, like, all of these checkboxes. And you’re like, “Oh my god, I didn’t know all my ads were running all these places.” And they keep adding stuff. Like, you know, they added, like, ads can show in search, and ads can show in Facebook Marketplace and, you know, so they have all these little checkboxes that show up. Technically, that’s where you would specify Instagram, but it does that for you automatically.
Matt: Right, and it is. It can be very overwhelming. But the problem is, what you were saying earlier is that it’s too easy to just let your normal Facebook ad run in Instagram Stories, and it doesn’t look right because the visual is different. The best practice here is if you’re going to do Instagram Story ads, you’re saying it’s best to separate that from your regular Facebook ads.
Susan: So, here would be my advice on that. If you are small and local, I would still keep it checked off. What I would do is when you go to set up the creative, you can specify different creative just for the story’s placement, so that’s where I would start first. And the reason I say that is because when you separate out placements into their own ad set, sometimes the costs get a lot more. Because Facebook doesn’t have the benefit of all that data to kind of optimize the buy, it’s like, ooh, okay, we’re just going after this one small little sliver, and it can drive up the cost. So I usually tell people, you know, keep it lumped in with the other placements first, but definitely give it its own creative. And then as you start to run, you can see the results by placement. So if you look and you’re like, whoa, stories is killing it, then at that point, I would say, okay, you’ve got a winner. Go ahead and create your own ad set with just that, and you can feel pretty confident that you know kind of what you’re going for cost-wise.
Matt: You know, I always hated, Susan, and I bet you do too, I always hated when people would ask me about how much all this costs?
Susan: You give the same answer: “It depends.” That is the answer for everything in marketing is, “It depends.”
Matt: That’s true and that really is the answer for everything. So, Facebook ads, in the real estate industry, outside the real estate industry, even, Facebook ads have the reputation as being the cheap inexpensive one, right? It doesn’t cost a lot to get a Facebook lead.
Susan: Correct.
Matt: Does that apply to Instagram Story ads as well?
Susan: It does. Yeah. If you do the creative well, I’ve had, interestingly, a client I was running for, they were doing webinar signups. So, the majority of the inventory was obviously, I mean, I retargeted the people that spent time on their website, I retargeted the people that interacted with them on Facebook and those that interacts with them on Instagram. Their by far highest volume and best cost came from Instagram, specifically on stories.
So, when you do the creative right, and you treat it like it’s a separate option, the likelihood is you’ll probably actually get a better return. Your inventory, it kind of depends on how much you’re spending. If you’re a larger spender, you may find that the volume on stories is lower, just because you have so much money Facebook can’t spend it all on there. Which can happen in local. I mean, it’s not that far-fetched. Those are the instances where I’m like, if you see that stories is doing well, put it in its own ad set and max out the budget. That’s what I tell people, like, just go crazy and max out the budget. But yeah, you can definitely see better costs popping up there, especially if you’re going for that kind of younger-ish, like, under 40 demographic, they’re actually generally a lot more expensive on Facebook, because there’s less of them than there used to be because they all went to Instagram. So, a lot of times, you’ll find your costs from, like, you know, the 20 to 30-year-olds, they can actually be more expensive than what you’ll find on Instagram.
Matt: And it sounds like to me too, when I hear that something is less expensive and yet there’s great opportunity, like we talked about at the beginning, it sounds to me like the thing, if I’m a real estate agent, I’m thinking, all right, I at least, if nothing else, I can give this a try…
Susan: Absolutely. Totally.
Matt: …and figure out if it works and, you know, trial and error kind of thing?
Susan: Yeah, I mean, I would say trial and error it, and just throw a few bucks a day towards it. And, like, if you just want to experiment with stories, you can set up an ad set just for stories, you know, like throw 5, 10 bucks a day at it, see what your engagement’s like. Like, and it also gets you comfortable with making creative for it, with figuring out what works and what doesn’t, you can look and kind of just get a sense of, like, what are my costs here versus what I’m seeing on Facebook? You may get opt-ins right away, you know, it’s hit or miss, it just depends. But you have such little competition, especially for local businesses. They all uncheck that box. So it’s like you have so much opportunity there. Especially early on, you’re not competing as hard, you know, as you might on something like Facebook, where everyone’s, it’s kind of a more mature platform, everybody heard that it’s cheap and easy and whatever. So with stories, like, a lot of people don’t think they’re easy, but they’re actually way easier if people don’t overthink them. So, from an opportunity perspective, I would say, you know, for sure it’s definitely something, at the very least, set it up as retargeting and just experiment with it.
So, that’s why I always tell people too, get really comfortable with what you can do organically in stories, because eventually you’ll be able to do it in an ad. And if you already know what works, once it becomes a feature, everybody else is gonna be stumbling around out there, making terrible, terrible decisions with their ads. And you’re already gonna know what works because you’ve been using it for a while. So, just get comfortable with it. It is super uncomfortable. I felt so awkward when I started doing them, and now it’s just second nature.
Matt: It is. And I love, I just circle back to what we started the conversation about with. If I were swiping through stories and I saw an advertisement from a local Realtor, I would just stop dead in my tracks, because it would stand out so much.
Susan: Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. I mean, there are just no small businesses on there, and I think the perception it’s like, oh, it’s because it’s new and it doesn’t work. And I’m like, no, they’re either just unchecking it because they don’t trust it and they don’t know anything about it, or they ran terrible feed creative that looked terrible there, and they’re like, “This doesn’t work,” and they unchecked it. They’re not not running there because it doesn’t work, I can guarantee you. It definitely works. You just have to do it the right way.
(Speaker: Matt McGee, Host)
You just gotta do it the right way, absolutely. And now hopefully, you all know what the right way is. Thank you so much, Susan Wenograd, that was terrific.
Let’s do our takeaways segment, then I’ll let you know where to find Susan’s worksheet, and then you can start skating to where the puck is going to be. All right?
Takeaway number one, Instagram Story ads is a huge wide-open opportunity right now. There’s not a lot of ads, and when they are, they’re typically national brands. So if you want to stand out from the crowd, like I say, in every episode, this is a great way to do it.
Number two, you can run these ads as part of your regular Facebook advertising, or do them separately, but Susan suggests doing unique creative for story ads, because it’s such a different user experience. It’s vertical video, and there’s no ad copy.
Takeaway number three, the good news is that your ad creative doesn’t have to be super polished. In fact, Susan said you want the exact opposite. Be authentic, put yourself in the ad, even if it’s really briefly, and don’t worry about perfect video composition and all that kind of stuff. Just be natural.
Takeaway number four, experiment. Susan said just spend, you know, $5 or $10 a day on story ads. Make mistakes, learn from them, figure out what works, and then go all in on that.
All right. I guess another takeaway too would be to take advantage of retargeting, and the free worksheet that Susan is offering listeners can help with that. It shows you all the different ways that you can get people to interact with your content in Instagram Stories, and once they interact with you, you can target ads at those people. That worksheet will be available in the blog post for this episode on our website. I will link to it in the show notes. I’ll also be sharing it in our new listener community on Facebook.
And I’ve invited Susan to join that community, so that she can answer your questions about Instagram Story ads. Just go to Facebook and type “HomeLight Walkthrough” into the search box. You should see it right away. The community is called “HomeLight Agent Community – The Walkthrough.” Whether you are a new listener, or if you’ve been listening since we started, you should be in this group.
In fact, if you want to get in touch with me, that group is a great way to do it. I’m in there every day. But of course, you can also leave me a voicemail any time. The number is 415-322-3328. Or, you can send me an email. It’s walkthrough [at] homelight.com.
That’s all for this week. Thanks so much to Susan Wenograd for joining me. And thank you for listening.
My name is Matt McGee. Remember, at HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. That’s why we created “The Walkthrough.” We’re on a journey to find out how great real estate agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable.
Go out and safely sell some homes. We’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye, everyone.
Header Image Source: (Anastasia Gepp / Pixabay)