Websites go to great lengths to get noticed. But being a website can, alas, be a lonely experience.
Imagine you’re a website that has pulled out all the stops and gone to a lot of trouble to be found.
You’ve ensured that you’ve got an easy-to-remember, intuitive URL. Your home page makes clear that you were made by an awesome real estate agent with an attractive value proposition.
You’ve got sexy graphics full of color, but you insist on remaining tasteful. Your blog is useful, entertaining, and full of enticing content any website would be jealous of.
Your navigation scheme is simple and inviting. Users can easily find answers to all their typical (and some not-so-typical) questions. And you’ve included your contact information on every page in the most obvious spot.
Still, despite all your effort, few people—certainly not enough to sustain your agent’s business—stop by to look around and stay awhile. What’s a website to do?
You get yourself a landing page!
What a landing page is (and why you need one)
Remember that television show How I Met Your Mother? Ted and Marshall, two of the characters, were often pressed into service as wingmen for Barney, a third character. Their job was to support Barney and help him meet women at McLaren’s Pub where they often hung out.
Think about a landing page as your website’s wingman, but instead of attracting potential partners, its job is to get you leads.
Landing pages go by many names, including squeeze pages, splash pages, and capture pages. In marketing, a landing page is a standalone page, distinct from your website’s pages, that offers a free item of value in exchange for a visitor’s contact information.
Like a school lunchroom, a landing page is where items are exchanged and both parties get what they want.
The beauty of having someone voluntarily give you their contact information, and why you need a landing page, is that once you receive their information, it’s yours to keep. That means you can market to them indefinitely (or at least until they ask you to stop).
The best landing pages will not only provide you with leads and contact information but also act like funnels that bucket your leads into discrete audiences or segments. It’s one of the reasons for having multiple landing pages.
For example, landing pages designed to attract people looking to buy a vacation home versus landing pages designed to attract seniors who are downsizing would naturally suggest different audiences. In turn, these different audiences would require different marketing strategies.
Buyers of a second home or seniors who are downsizing? Design your landing page so it attracts the type of leads you want.
At ReminderMedia, we’ve taken more than a year to study landing pages to determine which ones work most effectively for generating real estate leads. Based on our research and testing, we’ve created a product that provides clients with three of the best types of real estate landing pages that have been proven to attract leads:
- a lead magnet landing page
- a comparative marketing analysis or home valuation landing page, and
- a product subscription landing page
Consider this your personal invitation from me to you to watch a free demonstration video of our landing pages.
Regardless of whether you design your own landing pages, hire a landing page designer to do it for you, or want to give our landing pages a try, these are the landing pages that convert clicks into leads.
Lead magnet landing page
You could probably argue that every landing page is a lead magnet landing page. That’s because, as I described above, landing pages offer lead magnets as the item of value given in exchange for visitors’ contact information.
The variety of lead magnets you can provide is limited only by your creativity and what will appeal to your target audience.
If, for example, you want to attract first-time homebuyers, then you might offer a free guide that describes the steps in the homebuying process. Something like the customizable e-book below, which walks a homebuyer through determining their needs, assessing their finances, finding a lender, and all the way to making an offer, is guaranteed to be perceived as valuable.
An example of an e-book landing page. Click here to get your free copy.
But the value isn’t only found in the information it provides. Potential leads will also appreciate how it helps alleviate uncertainty, offers encouragement, and points them toward someone who can help—you! Go ahead—click the image and download a copy for your own use. It’s on the house!
Another group of potential leads to whom you can offer value is people trying to sell their homes without the assistance of a professional real estate agent.
By definition, people going down the FSBOs (For Sale by Owner) route will almost certainly dismiss any REALTOR® who approaches them directly. But if you offer these folks a guide that helps them accomplish their goals—such as an e-book that helps them to avoid common mistakes in the home-selling process—they are likely to be interested precisely because it doesn’t come across as a sales pitch. (You can download this one too.)
It’s an e-book with a “hidden agenda.” Click here to get your free copy.
However, here’s the beauty of this particular lead magnet. Once someone in a FSBO situation finishes reading about what can go wrong and the devastating consequences an error can wreak, they may decide the risks aren’t worth it. Thinking that perhaps they really do need a professional real estate agent after all, who do you think they’re going to call other than the person who provided them with the information that saved them from disaster?
You might decide to create your own e-book, but be aware that it can take a hefty amount of time to write, design, and produce. However, not all lead magnets need to be e-books; in fact, they don’t even have to be about real estate.
For example, you might offer a tip sheet for cleaning and sanitizing different rooms in a house, a stay-at-home activity bundle for the kids, or a tailgating pack with recipes and grilling instructions. (You can find these and more free lead magnets in our Resource Library, which we make available to everyone.) These types of lead magnets are terrific for filling the top of your funnel and adding names to your email list.
You’re welcome to visit our Resource Library. Download and use as many free items as you wish. Click here to get your free copy of this resource.
Whatever lead magnets you decide to make available, there are two important points to keep in mind:
- Choose your lead magnet based on the audience you want to attract. What attracts one type of lead won’t attract another type.
- The perceived value of the lead magnet needs to match or exceed the perceived value of the information you are asking for in exchange. The more information you request, the more value you will need to deliver.
CMA landing page
On the off chance you aren’t familiar with CMAs (comparative market analyses) or you need an easy way to explain what they are, they are a tool used by agents to estimate the value of a particular property by comparing it to similar ones that have recently sold in the same general area. While a CMA is not the same as a home valuation report (which is produced by a licensed appraiser for a bank), people who aren’t in real estate tend to use the terms interchangeably.
By having a landing page that offers a free CMA, you’re going to attract some of the warmest leads an agent can acquire.
Offering a free comparative market analyses will get you warm leads. Find out more about landing pages and Digital Marketing Platform here.
Anyone who opts in to receive a CMA will be interested in learning about the market and, of course, how much they could potentially sell their home for. Your follow-up call will allow you to ask your discovery questions and determine just how warm a lead they are. And, as is the case with any lead, if they aren’t willing to pull the trigger now, you have the opportunity to continue providing value, following up, and nurturing that relationship until they are.
Subscription landing page
Intended to help you add names to your email list, a subscription landing page offers visitors a chance to raise their hand and say, “Yes, I want to hear from you.”
Our clients use our subscription landing page to invite leads to receive a gift subscription to their personally branded magazine or other ReminderMedia products, such as our biweekly Local Events Newsletter full of hand-curated events in their local communities.
Entice leads to subscribe to something they can expect to routinely receive, like one of our personally branded magazines, and add more names to your database.
You might decide to create a newsletter landing page that invites people to subscribe to your own newsletter.
Similarly, agents have used subscription landing pages that allow visitors to opt in and receive a routine quarterly market report.
Another idea that is popular among financial advisors, but equally useful for real estate agents, is a webinar landing page. (Side note: If you’ve never considered hosting a webinar, you should! It’s easier than you may think, and they are a fantastic way to promote yourself as a subject matter expert. For some helpful tips, you can check out this blog. You can also refer to this podcast episode.)
As a final idea, you can go off the beaten path and encourage folks to join your “Funny Meme Monday” or “Daily Dad Joke” email list.
Our Local Events Newsletter features hand-curated, high quality events in your market. It’s only one part of our Digital Marketing Platform and you can find out more here.
Granted, not all these ideas will generate equally qualified leads, but if you have the opportunity to capture contact information that is yours forever and that you can market to indefinitely, then why wouldn’t you?
How to best use landing pages
You really can’t beat a landing page when it comes to a tool that allows you to easily add leads to your list of contacts.
But more than just adding names, you want these leads to become your clients. To do that, you need to follow up with them—and the sooner the better!
Get notifications
According to NAR’s 2022 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report, 73% of all buyers hired the first agent they interviewed, so “speed to lead” matters.
When speed-to-lead matters (and when doesn’t it matter?), you need a landing page that immediately notifies you when you receive a form completion.
Make sure your landing page is set up so that you are immediately notified when a new lead has completed your form. The sooner you follow up, the better your chances are of being the first agent a lead interviews. Our landing page product will notify you by email, and you can also elect to receive a text message, which is super convenient since you can call at that same moment.
Review analytics
It’s a simple truth that you can’t measure what you don’t track, and measurement is the only way to know if your marketing is producing the desired effect. For this reason, you want to ensure that you are tracking your landing pages’ performance. If you discover that one or more of your pages isn’t getting enough views, then you know you need to make a change.
Google Analytics is many marketers’ preferred choice for monitoring how their landing pages are performing. To use Google Analytics, you need to have a business page set up with Google. And while the level of analytical detail is impressive, it can be overwhelming for some. Use our landing pages, and you’ll find each page’s most important key performance indicators reported directly on your dashboard interface.
Our landing pages make it easy to see how well it is performing by including KPIs right on your account dashboard.
Include desired content
According to Growth Marketing Pro, including certain items on your landing pages will make them more appealing to leads:
- Even a simple landing page will receive more clicks—9% more—if it includes your contact information.
- Short-form video will increase conversions by 86%. Content combined with images and graphics increases the chance that a page gets read by 80%.
- Social proof, such as client testimonials, is trusted by 9 out of 10 page visitors.
Use in conjunction with postcards
Postcards have long been an effective way for real estate agents to farm their communities. To augment the ROI of your landing pages and postcards, consider adding QR codes to your postcards, with each code linking back to a designated landing page. Recipients can scan these codes with their mobile devices and be taken directly to the landing page you’ve designed to best attract your targeted farm.
To further enhance your branding and to keep it looking consistent, at ReminderMedia we’ll design postcards with images that match your landing pages.
Get a FREE landing page when you purchase postcards. Use them for farming and have leads scan the QR code for an immediate connection to your page.
Use in conjunction with social media ads
Perhaps one of the most effective ways to capture leads is to feature your landing pages in ads you place on social media. (If you want to know the best ads to run on Facebook, check out this blog.)
Our goal is to help our clients live a life of freedom where they don’t need to worry about things like their marketing or where their next lead is coming from. So, in addition to providing you with landing pages, we can also run ads for you with our Facebook Lead Generation Services.
If you’re curious, you can view this free webinar that explains the single ad that, for about $5 a day on ad spend, is so far producing an average of 34 leads per month for our clients.
You’ll discover how to set up ads and ad campaigns in Facebook Ads Manager. You’ll also hear lead follow-up tips and advice from an agent who, in one year, had 15 transactions with $3.6M in sales that produced $107K in commissions—all from Facebook!
The key to success when using landing pages
Any marketer will tell you that landing pages are essential for a successful business. But even amazing landing pages are only one part of an overall marketing strategy. By themselves, landing pages won’t convert leads into clients—only real-time conversations will do that.
That’s why the key to success when using a real estate landing page is to follow up with leads.
Landing pages don’t convert leads into clients—only conversations will do that, so be sure to follow up with everyone who completes a form.
When you use our landing pages, a member of our professional staff will gladly offer to coach you on what to say when following up with a lead. You can also use our free call scripts to craft your own follow-up. But, regardless of the tactic you use, the most important thing is to reach out to your leads as soon as possible.
Do that, and your landing pages will provide you with a steady stream of leads that turn into prospects that your skill will convert into clients.
