It’s explicitly true that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and that truly is one of the sayings that is wholly accurate no matter the context, situation, or anything else. In business of any sort the need to make a positive first impression is supremely important, and in real estate it’s equally true. In so for as the fact that if a potential client does’t have a favorable impression of an agent after first being introduced to them then it’s increasingly unlikely that person or couple becomes a lead. And even less so a lead that might eventually be converted into a client. All successful realtors will have lead generation strategies they use, but each and every one of them needs to be mindful of these first impressions too.
When we talk about these folks being ‘introduced’ to a realtor that doesn’t necessarily mean an introduction in the most conventional sense of the term. Nowadays it’s very common for introductions to be digital, meaning these potential clients aren’t meeting you in person but rather are being made aware of you as a local real estate professional via a website or other digital collateral means. There are many possibilities there, and we’re not going to get into them. You likely get the point already – you may often be meeting clients via the marketing materials you have available for people like them online.
There are also variations on this that are increasingly a part of real estate lead generation in Canada too, and paid real estate leads are one of them. That’s our specialty and the nature of the service we offer here, and in that instance it is often something an opposite equation – the digital resource means that agents have a inside track on meeting potential clients and getting that face-to-face opportunity to make a good first impression. Paid leads have been hugely beneficial to some many realtors all across the country with the way it’s allowed them to grow their client base much more effectively and have greater numbers of people buying or selling homes through them.
That’s what it is all about in this business, but it still stands to be true that more often than not someone who is considering the sale or purchase of a home is going to be learning of local realtors via the marketing collateral materials they have online at the time. And often with a real estate agent’s website being that first point-of-contact. There are all sorts of routes by which the may have arrived at your website, and they needs to be a part of your focus too. But far and away the most important resource you have in this regard is the landing page for your real estate website. You can have the best lead generation strategies around but if you don’t have a good landing page then you may be disabling their effectiveness.
So what we’ll do with this week’s entry here is to look at the best approaches for creating effective landing pages for lead generation. A lot of this advice is going be easily actionable for you who already have a website, and the same will go for those who are putting their website together for the first time. If you’re one of them then finding this blog entry right now is going to be very timely! Let’s get right into it.
The Right Invitation
Your landing page is going to be where a visitor arrives to your site, and most commonly as it relates to lead generation strategies after they’ve followed a link in an email, ad, or social media post. Landing pages are best geared to promote lead generation when they offer visitors something that will entice them to look into the realtor’s services further, and examples can be a a free ebook, a webinar, a free trial, or anything else that will evoke a sense of curiosity and make the visitor want to learn more.
An effective real estate website landing page is going to be geared to start digital conversations. With one you are going to be better able to establish a line of communication with customers and showing them very clearly that you can assist them with the sale or purchase of a home and improve their outcomes with either course of action. A truly good lead capture landing page should appeal to potential customers who are genuinely interested in what you’re offering. And then if it can work to promote these people sharing contact details via a form on the site you will also be able to pre-qualify your leads, which means investing less time and effort in finding what you’re looking for: customers who’ll convert.
The primary focus with landing pages will be the same one that’s central to real estate lead generation in Canada. And that’s to offer easily-recognizable value. You want to have the content of your real estate agent website landing page providing something that visitors will read and think to themselves ‘this agent is likely one of the better ones here and someone we might want to work with as we move forward with a real estate move here.’ Then have something else that provides them with more tangible value, like a free ebook, webinar, white paper, newsletter, or even a trial period where they can receive a free market evaluation for their home or something similar.
Ensure Good Design
The design of your page is also going to be a pivotal factor in whether or not site visitors are going to proceed to that contact form we talked about earlier. One of the primary considerations with good page design is to keep most of the essential info ‘above the fold’. This indicates the top section of the page that can be seen without scrolling and for many visitors this is the only part of the page they’ll see before coming to conclusions about whether or not they want to learn more.
Another good piece of advice is to have just one goal per page. Make sure your landing page focuses on only one offer and one desired action and this exclusivity can also apply to adding links that lead to other pages on your website. It’s best to not have those so that there are no distractions and visitors are encouraged to only be focusing on your one goal for the landing page. This doesn’t mean you cannot have multiples CTAs on the page, but you do need to be selective about how many of them are included and where they are located.
Another super important consideration is to make sure your landing page – and your entire real estate agent website – is mobile friendly. The majority of internet users are going to be arriving at the site via a web browser on their smartphone, and so having a mobile-friendly website is going to be included in lead generation strategies too. Many web hosting providers will offer a mobile website builder that customers can use and this is something you can look into.
We need to put a focus on social proof here too. What is that exactly? It’s when the agent is able to feature an endorsement from a reputable brand or a testimonial from a previous customer. When this is made available on the page it provides a trust signal and helps create the impression that you’re not just any realtor looking to drum up new clientele and that you really know your stuff and the local market well.
Get Greater Reach for Results
All of this is shared with the understanding that effective lead generation for realtors is going to required multiple focuses, and a good landing page for a website is just one of them. As we mentioned at the beginning, many realtors are choosing to get paid real estate leads for Canada from our service and this can be a good pairing here as outbound lead generation strategies as compared to inbound ones like a good realtor website that features a smartly-created landing page that will work to create that all-important good first impression with potential clients.
If you’d like to do that too then as always we will encourage you to sign up for Real Estate Leads here, and if a little more convincing is required then you can also have a look at our testimonials from satisfied realtors across Canada who’ve had success using this system to be working with greater numbers of clients and earning a higher number of commissions each month.
