Is your sales office traffic inconsistent, with a few good prospects one week and none the next? Does making sales projections feel more like a game of chance than confident forecasting? Do you feel uncertain of where your next sale is coming from, and when?
The ups and downs in your weekly web leads, sales office traffic, and sales may be due to something more than the economy or the latest housing news. Something simpler. Even better, something that you can control.
To drive more prospects and sales in your offline sales office, it starts with your online sales office: your home builder website.
With an estimated 90% of potential home shoppers researching their home purchase online, it makes sense that there is a direct correlation between website traffic, sales center visits, and sales. And yet our research shows that many home builders experience very inconsistent website traffic: a few hundred visitors one month, a few thousand the next, back to a few hundred the month after that.
No wonder our results can feel so inconsistent and frustrating.
The good news is that you can drive consistent, organic, high quality, targeted traffic every week, month after month. This means more sales leads every week, more prospects to work with, and more sales. You don’t need a marketing budget or a lot of technical savvy. In fact, you may be using many of these tools already. But how consistently you work these tools could determine how consistently they product results for you. Your website is your online sales office. Focus daily on how to bring in new traffic as well as be-backs with a simple two step strategy:
Drive Consistent New Traffic: Move Pay Per Click Dollars to SEO
Are you using a pay per click campaign such as Adwords to drive more traffic to your website and sales office? Pay per click campaigns can be valuable as part of an overall internet marketing program, but relying too much on this method means that as soon as the money stops, the website traffic stops. Create your own website traffic with free, proven online tools that increase search engine ranking and drive targeted traffic. Our own experience shows that traffic from online PR, video marketing, Craigslist, and keyword optimized home builder social media tools can drive higher quality traffic as measured by time on site, pages viewed, and opt-in conversion to new sales leads.
Drive Consistent Return Traffic: Start a Home Builder Blog
A significant percentage of your website traffic should come from visitors who visit again and again – the be-backs. Your next sales office visitor is most likely to have interacted with your brand online (via your website, Facebook page, videos, and other content) many times before making a decision to visit your sales office. This return traffic indicates that potential shoppers are not just visiting your website, but moving through an online sales process. Home builder blogs address both the online shopper’s need for information as well as their need to connect in a social and emotional way and build trust. Give your audience a reason to come back to your website again and again with weekly home builder blog content that promotes events, successes, and the community. Blogs also give home builders the ability to quickly respond to housing news, market changes, crisis management, and other time sensitive information that buyers factor into their decision. Give potential home buyers timely, relevant updates to give them a reason to return each week and keep your website traffic consistent.
This is what we’ve seen work to maintain consistent website traffic and new web leads. How are these tools working for you?
