John Jantsch, the King of marketing for small business, wrote an excellent article the other day titled Why Landing Pages Are An Essential Marketing Tool, and it got me to thinking yet again about how easy real estate professionals have it when it comes to web marketing.
I’ve always been a big fan of landing pages. These are pages designed specifically as a destination page where you direct website visitors with one purpose in mind. That purpose might be to sign up for a newsletter, to sign up for new listing alerts or it might be to pick up the phone and call you. The merits of any of these calls to action can be argued, but the point is that a landing page is designed with a specific visitor action in mind.
Landing Pages Have A Special Purpose In Web Marketing
A landing page is quite a different proposition from simply directing people to your homepage where there are often a number of calls to action competing for limited attention span. In fact, there are some marketers that advocate that nothing should be on a landing page except the promotional hook and a mechanism for executing the intended action.
To put it another way, if your goal is to get newsletter sign-ups, you do not provide a phone number because a phone call – no matter how beneficial for other purposes – detracts from the intended action of registering for a newsletter.
Whichever side you come down on in this debate, the point is that landing pages are strategic. You devise an intentional strategy for getting visitors to come to your landing page and you devise a strategy for the specific action you want them to take when they get there.
Since you’re in the business of selling real estate, listings information is your friend when it comes to creating effective landing pages and – lucky you – your IDX data is an easily sliced and diced resource for creating great landing pages.
Let’s look at the five benefits of landing pages advocated in Jantzen’s article and how IDX data takes a great marketing idea and puts it on steroids.
Landing Pages Improve Search Engine Ranking
Jantzen specifically says that “lots of local content” is your ticket to impressing the search engines. And what local content is going to be more important to your particular website audience than active listings?
Jantzen doesn’t mention it because it’s not directly relevant to the typical website owner who is manually creating content, but fresh, regularly updated local content is the real catnip for search engines.
And search engines get really revved up when visitors land on your page and stay for awhile. Real estate consumers tend to stick around if you provide lots of great active listings information.
A real estate landing page that pumps in automatically updated active listings information is not only high priority for your visitors, it’s the stuff that will rocket your site’s rankings for keywords that matter in your niche.
Deepen Social Connections
Jantzen next urges that sending your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook connections to landing pages personalized to each network is a great way to deepen the connection.
What I say deepens connection is delivering relevant content that doesn’t waste your connections’ time. Your connections know you as a real estate agent or broker. Hopefully they know you as an expert in your farm area. Either way, if they take the time to click through an invitation on one of your social platforms, you better be delivering active listings that completely support your invitation.
Give Visitors What They Want
Jantzen sets this apart as a separate reason for creating landing pages. I urge you to adopt it not as one of several reasons, but as an overarching mantra for everything you do with your web marketing. Always be asking yourself what kind of expectation you are creating with your messages and branding, and whether you’re delivering on your promise.
With filtered IDX data, you will be able to offer lots and lots and lots of active listings, offered up in all kinds of configurations. If your farm area is known for beach living, you can offer pages of listings by separate beach communities, for instance.
Capture More Leads
Raise your hand if you couldn’t possibly think of anything to do with one more lead….
Hmmm, that’s what I thought. There is always something you can do with another lead, even if it’s to refer it out for goodwill or a split commission.
Depending on the strategy you employed to get visitors to your landing page, these might be very highly qualified leads, ready to take action that is significant to your bottom line.
Landing pages are so good for capturing “more” leads precisely because they are strategically designed for this purpose. You promise something that visitors want and are motivated to click through for – specific types of listings – and then you make it super simple for your visitor to take your desired action.
Are you catching on how straightforward this can be?
Increase Ad Performance
As his fifth reason that you’d be crazy not to use landing pages, Jantzen argues that your advertising efforts will be more effective if the landing page is designed to support the ad message. While this reason is simply another variation of the “make a promise and don’t disappoint your visitor” theme discussed above, Jantzen is absolutely right that you are wasting your advertising budget (whether the spend is on newspapers, search engines, social platforms or something else), if you don’t provide lots and lots of the promised information.
Trust Is The Key To Converting Web Visitors
One critical factor that Jantzen doesn’t explicitly highlight in his article, but which underlies his entire premise, is that the key to converting digital relationships to dollars in your pocket is trust.
Consumers are more than happy to do their own research, but when it comes time to enlist professional help to complete a real estate transaction, they are going to turn to somebody they trust. You had a chance to earn that trust by demonstrating your expertise when these prospects visited your website. Did you deliver?
To see examples of IDX-driven landing pages that demonstrate expertise with luxury beach listings in Southern California, click here and here. These pages update automatically 365 days a year and clearly demonstrate that the owner of the site is intimately knowledgeable about the target farm area.
Be The Obvious Expert
Unsung expertise doesn’t serve you or your prospective clients.
Claim your place now as the obvious expert in your farm area.
Contact us today and we’ll help you create a listings strategy that clearly supports you as the indisputable and obvious expert in your farm area.
