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When Your Website Just Isn't Enough
This week’s guest author is Chris Daley. With nearly six years of commitment to providing Realtors with the tools and knowledge they need to make their presence online a profitable experience, he comes to us today exploring the benefit of landing pages.
Chris focuses on how landing pages can represent the missing link between your website and your next marketing campaign.
Two ways to NOT use your website and find success
“Make your personal website the centerpiece of your marketing!” Sound familiar? Give the client all of the information, all at once and they are sure to leave a name and phone number. Sounds like a plan! Once you get going, advance to search engine marketing like Google or Overture. That will really turn up the volume and increase your leads. Right?
Thousands have followed that logic. Few have found tremen
dous success. Most have found enough success to cover their cost. But a lot of agents have found little success using this recipe.
Now, I am not making the claim that a website cannot produce leads. I will make the claim, however, that the margins from failure to success can be improved. This area in between is where the most opportunity presents itself. Here are two tips on how NOT to use your website to increase your profit or lead margins.
Use what you know
You are paying a premium for targeted traffic in search engine marketing programs from Google, Yahoo, House Values and HomeGain to identify information before it is sent to you When doing a mailer you are promoting one specific service or call to action. For example, a visitor who comes from Google under the term “La Jolla CA Homes for Sale” has already told you that they are a buyer and looking in La Jolla.
Yet armed with this information I have found agents sending that costly targeted visitor to the cluttered home page or to a home search page. You tell them that you have all of the homes in the MLS but for some reason not enough are completing your lead form.
SOLUTION:
Listen to what the consumer has told you. Send them to a relevant page that references the area in which they are looking to do a home search. As simple as it seems, this understanding will build rapport and rapport translates leads.
Shorten the process. Take a look at your website. Take a step back and ask yourself how the information presents itself to the consumer. How easy is your user interface? Do you have redundant navigation like multiple home searches using two different databases. Is your home page cluttered from years of adding content but never subtracting? All of these variables can be overcome by the prospect who wants to “browse” a site. But for the prospect who is serious and willing to leave contact information, they are land mines.
The internet prospect is a virtual hot potato. They will give you very little time and even less of an opportunity to ask them questions. There is a reason they are on the net and not in your car. The longer it takes them to find the information they are looking for on your site and the more, sometimes redundant, questions you ask all decrease the likelihood of generating a lead.
SOLUTION:
Shorten the steps from their original search online or reaction to offline marketing to the desired information. Count the steps. If it involves more then a page, you have too many. When marketing under a specific call to action, send that traffic to a micro-site specifically designed for that content and that content only. There will be a time for your website after you generate the targeted lead. To maximize your opportunity, keep it simple on the front end.
In addition, not only are marketers seeing higher conversions when landing pages are deployed, but Google has declared "relevant landing pages" as a necessary ingredient to achieve high Pay Per Click rankings. Landing pages are becoming increasingly significant in the interactive marketing community with Google emphasizing the 'quality' of a Landing page in your ad position.
So if you have been less than thrilled with the results of your marketing campaigns and feel that you should be generating more leads based on the traffic to your website, then it’s time to consider using landing pages to increase the return on your investment.
Now for the content related, self promotion:
Chris is the director of sales for Integral Impressions, an interactive marketing firm. Next week, at Inman 's Real Estate Connect SF 2006 Chris and Integral Impressions will be launching Outlandish, a web service enabling marketers to deploy targeted landing pages for specific marketing campaigns. Outlandish provides a simple interface that allows marketers to create and integrate landing pages seamlessly into an existing website or on a new domain.
To learn more about Integral Impressions latest web service, Outlandish, visit out.landi.sh or contact Chris Daley direct: 888.816.7856.
Thanks Chris.
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