A Builder’s Online Strategy: Entice People to Visit Your Site

Quick review – the 7 E’s are:

1. EARN Google’s trust
2. ENTICE people to visit your site
3. ENGAGE those “just browsing”
4. EMPHASIZE your differences
5. ENSURE you’re part of the short list
6. ELICIT a response – generate a lead and convert it
7. EMPLOY your happy home owners to earn more trust

The first two (EARN & ENTICE) are both working to drive traffic to your website, but by using very different tactics.

EARN is working hard to make sure you show up when people are deliberately searching for you or your category when trying to solve their problem. It’s pretty direct – open and honest.

ENTICING people to visit your site is a bit more like going to the “dark side”, but it should still be a part of your strategy.

No, I’m not recommending you run a banner campaign that says “Obama wants to give you free mortgages!” with barnyard animals partying in an infinite loop. THAT is just ridiculous. No, what I’m talking about is much more subtle – yet still effective. There are two ground rules you need to keep in mind:

1. Don’t lie – at least not if you ever want them to trust you again
2. Give value – make the landing page full of useful and relevant information

There are plenty of mediums for enticing people to visit your site – AdWords, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, banner ads, blogs, Trulia.com, Zillow.com, Realtor.com, and too many others to name here.

All of these work to capture those who are on the fringes of becoming qualified leads. Perhaps they are only looking at used homes right now, or they are searching for interior design tips because they are thinking about remodeling – the point is they may miss your SEO work altogether. However, being a home builder you probably have content they would find interesting (I haven’t met a woman yet who doesn’t like to look at pictures or videos of beautiful homes) and you just need to entice them to take a look.

Yes, even syndicating your community, house, and inventory information through a tool like NewHomeFeed or the BDX also counts as enticing because they syndicate that content to many sites that primarily cater to those searching for a used home.

This should NOT be more than 15% of your online budget, and you shouldn’t even go beyond Adwords without having a good tracking mechanism so you can see what works and adjust over time.

Everyone knows how important Adwords are, so I thought I’d give you an example from a recent Facebook campaign I ran over the course of only one week. I created a targeted ad to run and used an ENTICING message – subtle but relative to those who may soon be thinking of moving. The result? 899,956 impressions (those were free) and 453 clicks (those cost me $259.90).

I can hear the hecklers – “so what – it was probably all worthless traffic.” Nope. The average visitor stayed on the site for over 5 minutes, viewed 8 pages - they ended up having a significant interaction with our brand. Best of all, 5 people went on to request additional information bringing my cost per lead for the campaign to $51.98.