Stop building pointless websites! There, I said it.
Do you know where your clients are coming from?
I just finished a phone interview. It was with a writer, a real estate agent, and me. The finished article will show up in a large magazine in a month or so. The idea was to have a conversation about the agent’s present and future web presence.
The agent has a template site from his brokerage but was looking at upping his game and going with WordPress. We talked for a little over an hour.
I might have simply skipped the call and told him to
- Get a domain name and hosting account,
- Install WordPress, find a theme you like and activate it,
- Find a 3rd party IDX you like and implement it,
- Make sure you have a proper Sitemap and Robots.txt file,
- Submit your sitemap to Google and Bing,
- And start writing new original local based content,
- Sit back and watch the leads come flying in… 😉
That would have been right for most of the clients I work with (I kid about #7 obviously).
One of the questions I asked him when we started was, who he was hoping to attract with the new site and how. That’s a really important thing to know. (I hope the person who built your site asked the same thing)
It turns out that he works in a ‘resort’ area and hopes to attract foreign buyers.
He runs both Google and Facebook Ad Campaigns.
The primary way he wants to attract new clients is by Ads.
That changes everything. It’s perfectly fine, but he needs to have a site built specifically for that.
Here’s the TL;DR version of what he needs.
- Get a domain name and hosting account,
- Install WordPress, find a theme you like and activate it,
- Make sure it’s Mobile Responsive,
- Make sure it allows you to create Squeeze Pages (landing pages),
- Start building landing pages that match your ads with specific Calls To Action,
- Run targeted ads that lead to these landing pages (never send them to the home page!),
- Make sure your landing pages have the proper codes (tracking pixels) so you can start building custom audiences and run retargeted ad campaigns to those that have been to one of your pages. (Retargeting can boost your ad responses by over 400%!)
- Make sure you have a targeted drip campaign setup for the potential leads that come in – you can’t expect people to hit your site for the first time and pick up the phone and say, “Let’s List My House!”. There’s a Conversion Funnel that needs to happen. Know your Conversion Funnel.
- If they do pick up the phone and call you, make sure you answer it! Studies show that for every second you delay in returning their call the chances of creating a client drop exponentially.
- Create both ads and squeeze pages in the foreign languages you plan to attract visitors from. (i.e. a German ad that leads to a landing page that is in German)
- If you want to take it a step further – match your drip campaign to the same (as in creating a separate german drip campaign)
Did that just change what you might have been thinking?
Build with a purpose and a distinct goal in mind, not just because.
I’ll bet you didn’t even know about Facebook Exchange.
Did you know you could run Retargeting Ads on Twitter?
Did you know…
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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