In our experience as a Virtual Assistant company, we have numerous clients come to us and indicate they are just plain unhappy and frankly disgusted with their website. Unfortunately, their knee-jerk reaction is to switch to a different website provider because they are disappointed in their results. The reality is that your success with your website has little to do with your website provider and more to do with your approach. If I had to guess, I would say 95% of all agent that create a website through a template provider just upload their photo and logo, add their contact information, and then click the pages they want, leaving all the generic copy in place, maybe tweaking it a little bit here and there. Then, 1 year later and no leads, they think that the provider is not doing their job because there are no leads coming in through their website. Now, I’m not here to judge, believe me, I can not believe all the work that an agent is expected to do. There is no other business in this country that would tell the CEO that they have to be the sales manager, administrative assistant, graphic designer, book keeper, photographer and webmaster for their company. It is for this reason alone that we are in the business of providing support for the progressively thinking real estate agent.
I’m so excited to roll out this new service to our clients. After much research, continuing education and just plain trial and error, we have established what we believe (and many others too) to be the crucial key elements that must be included in a successful online presence. This new consulting service is set-up to present to you the idea behind the documented plans that RealSupport will create for you with regard to your personal online presence. Armed with these plans, you will have the knowledge to implement change to your online presence, with the help of your RealSupport team of course, and get the results you are only hearing about!
The key elements can be broken down into 5 steps:
1. Creating a Strategic Plan
2. Creating a Website Content Redesign Plan
3. Creating a Lead Generation Plan
4. Creating a Marketing Plan
5. Measuring Success
Detailed Project Overview:
Step 1: Creating a Strategic Plan
Establish Goals
During this step, RealSupport will work with you to establish the overall goals for your online presence, which will allow us to measure success in the future and will give us the information needed to determine the effectiveness of the additions and changes that we implement.
Establish Your Target Market
So, now that we understand what your online presence will encompass, we need to figure out the message and content.
To figure out your message and content, you MUST have a target market. With the use of the Internet, buyers can find out pretty much anything that you as an agent can find out for them. They have all the resources you have at their fingertips. For this reason, you must prove to them that you are the expert. You not only can give them better information than they get online themselves, but you are the only person they would trust to purchase or sell their home. In order to gain this trust, you must show them you are the expert. You cannot be an expert at buying and selling real estate. That is way too broad. You MUST specialize, or rather; you must pick a target market. How can you market yourself properly if you first do not establish who you are marketing to?
Create Your Unique Positioning Statement (Tag Line)
Studies show that you have 3-4 seconds to get your visitor’s attention when they come to your site. If you don’t, they move on (this is called bouncing). You must tell your visitor what you will DO FOR THEM or they will move on. Simply stating that you are a Real Estate agent does not cut it in this new ere of Real Estate.
This challenge can be resolved by establishing a unique positioning statement or essentially a tag line. This is a single sentence that when read, will help your target market recognize your value, perceive that you are the best at what you do, and want to take action with you.
This will be crucial to help your target market to quickly identify that you are the expert they are looking for.
Create a Call to Action
The number one reason that website owners are not able to collect leads from their website is because there is no “clear” call to action in the form of an offer. When coming up with an offer, it is important to consider your target market. It cannot be said enough that the offer must be unique to you (only you are offering it), and must use a request form that invites the visitor to share their information. If at all possible, you should have one or more irresistible offer(s) on every major section/page of your site. You should also offer a privacy policy so that consumers feel confident you will not sell or abuse their contact information.
Offers such as “Search All Listings, Receive Automated Email Alerts, etc.,” are good offers, but they are not great offers. If you want this program to be an absolute success, you must offer something better.
RealSuport proposes to create a list of ideas that can be used as your “Call to Action” on your website. These ideas will reflect the solutions to the specific challenges of each segment of your target market. Once implemented, we recommend creating graphical buttons for final call to action choices to be display on the homepage and where appropriate throughout the website. This will grab attention allowing more success for collecting contact information. The idea behind each call to action is to create something of value for your target market, so much so that they will be willing to fill out a form on your website so you can collect their contact information and send them (either by mail or email) the item of interest.
Step 2: Creating a Website Content Re-Design Plan
Restructuring your website around your target market is crucial. During this step RealSupport will create a clear plan to organize your website’s information flow and incorporation new elements that directly relate to your target market. This includes recommending new content and organizing your current navigation. This step also includes providing placement for your call to action. RealSupport will present you with an outline of the new navigation flow and content ideas. (Please note: if additional content is needed, we can discuss the possibility of involving a copy writer.)
Step 3: Creating a Prospecting Plan for Generating Leads
If your offer is a success, you will be receiving high quality leads from your website. Staying in contact with these leads and offering relevant information is critical in capturing the lead for the life of their real estate transaction. RealSupport will work with you to establish an outline for 3 types of lead campaigns along with timelines for each marketing email to be sent. This is a high level plan; it does not include the actual content for each marketing piece.
RealSupport will also take inventory of your current online systems that offer drip campaigns to establish the best online software to control your drip campaigns and to make this system as automated as possible for you. The idea here is to stay in front of your leads by providing RELAVANT and USEFUL information so that when they are ready to make that call, they think of you.
You can expect to walk away with a high-level outline of an entire drip marketing campaign.
Step 4: Creating a Marketing Plan for Your Website
The idea that you can “build it and they will come” is unrealistic. In this step, we will establish a plan to drive traffic to your site. This will be through print and online advertising. Our plans are scalable so that you can stay within your personal budget. Our plan will also be customized to you and specifically to your target market and their needs.
Step 5: Measuring Success
You’ve got it all in place, now how will you measure your success. I’m not talking success as “gee, you have a great looking site”; I’m talking success with real numbers.
RealSupport will provide the following information to you in this step:
Customer Value – We will help you calculate your potential total revenue from leads that come to you through your website.
Conversion Rate – We will help you determine your conversion rate over time, based on your website statistics. This will tell you the quantity of leads you require to hit your revenue goals.
Hit Reports – We will set-up an automated report through Google analytics that will show you your weekly website statistics.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and create a winning online presence, please call or email us today.
Carrie Gable
President
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