Have a plan!
I’m back, dear readers, and I’ve got something important to talk about. In my last blog post series we talked about search engine optimization, but that’s only half the story with a website. What good is it if you get X number of hits if none of them ever contact you?
To address that, I’d like to start a “meat and potatoes” series designed to cover the real essentials that go into capturing visitors from your website. It doesn’t have to be a hard concept, or even that technical really. It mostly boils down to empathy, understanding your target audience, their needs and what they’re going through, and how you can equip your website to where you “speak their language” and make it more likely they choose you over your competition.
The first thing to talk about though is figuring out your target audience and what sorts of things you’ll need to keep in mind as you go along.
Who are you targeting? How will you present yourself? Some of you are probably saying “buyers and sellers” to yourselves right now, but really it’s more than that. There are lots of different types of buyers and sellers, and they all have their own different sets of needs and expectations of what to get out of an agent and your website. Here’s the components of what you’ll need to consider in order to make sure that you’re actually “targeting” versus just “building” without a plan:
Targeting ideas:
- What do you want more of? Is there a particular type of buyer or seller that you want to attract more than anything else? Would you rather have more listings versus driving buyers all over town? Build your website with these in mind so that it’s likely to do what you want it to do (versus just casting a wide net and hoping something sticks).
- What do people want or need in your area? Markets shift as do needs. Keep up with those trends and make sure your website is current and follows the market.
- What real estate problems need solving? This is related, but where we’re going with this is that in the end a visitor needs to see you as the “problem solver”. So, first we need to know what the problem is so you can make sure your site offers them solutions.
- What are the common interests/likes/cultures? You need to be approachable through your website, so you need to seem like a person just like them. So, when figuring out what to say about yourself on your site try to keep in mind what would help your image connect with your visitors.
- What will your offers be? Here’s a big one, and we’ll spend some extra time on this part as our blog post series continues. You aren’t really in the business of “free advice”. To some degree your website will have things to offer your visitors freely, but at some point you’ve got to offer them something in exchange for their contact information. What is that going to be? What will your pitch be to convince someone to no longer be an anonymous visitor? We’ll get into this some more as we go along today though.
- What makes you different? This is another big one. Your competition is easy to find so you MUST find a way to differentiate yourself. Whether that means designing your site around becoming a “specialist” in a particular topic or whether it’s your experience or your tech savvy or the team you’ve got behind you there must be some horn you can toot about yourself to let someone know you’re not just one option out of many – there’s a reason you’re the right option. I have an entire class on this topic by the way here on our training page…
When you are contacted how are you going to stay in touch? With what and how often? How will it lead to an appointment? This is the end goal after all. Just because they leave you their contact info doesn’t mean you’re done, so before you start getting leads come in you’ve got to setup a plan for what you’ll do with them to keep them attentive to you and your services. If that’s going to involve e-mail marketing check out our class ” Converting Leads Into Business With XSellerate” which discusses successful e-mail marketing models and how to make them fit your business.
That’s it for today’s post. Again, the intention is to create a series of posts so we can go one step at a time and give you a little bit of “homework”. So, check back next week for “Round 2” where we’ll start taking action on your plan.