Just as multiple streams of income spread your economic opportunities amidst market changes, multiple marketing conduits improve your sales lead generation of your real estate website.  Think of your real estate website as the bay into which all your streams of marketing deposit their sales leads.

What are the benefits of using your real estate website as the central gathering point?

1. With an email autoresponder, any contacts who fill out a contact or guest book form get an instant answer. Calls to answering machines or voice mail may not get a response for several hours. Market surveys by various Realtor associations have found that, as with many markets, the first person to answer a potential client’s call usually gets the business.
2. Your potential clients can view all your featured listings and available properties, as well as all your real estate information, without your presence! It is like an online waiting room with all the magazines about you, your listings and the benefits of your real estate services.
3. Any web traffic directed to your real estate website from your articles, emails, real estate postcards, radio ads, and press releases all build a pattern of incoming traffic that shows the search engines how popular your website is.
4. By creating permanent conduits with inbound links from solid sources, such as your local Chamber of Commerce, you build up your website’s standing as an Internet location that other websites point to for information – all a plus for working on higher placement in the search engine rankings.
5. By staying aware of the traffic patterns on your website, you can fine tune and improve your hits to contacts conversion ratio. Having a website the consistently moves hits into contacts and sales leads is where the return on investment goes from green to golden!

Each of your multiple marketing streams can be profitable in their own right, however, by steering them to your website, you can leverage your website along the lines of this list as well as duplicate the knowledge you give to your clients without having to repeat yourself.

IMCD Web Design real estate web designs are the perfect safe harbor for your various marketing streams. With IMC’s informative web content and eye-catching graphic design – it is a perfect marketing foundation for your Realtor bio and list of real estate service benefits. Contact us to improve your online marketing presence with our Agent Select semi-custom real estate website.

Have you reviewed your real estate website copy with the critical eye of whether you are attracting homebuyers and sellers or leaving them unmoved? Simply compare the number of your website visitors to the number of leads you receive from your guestbook or “Contact Us” pages. Is it time to fine-tune your website copy to boost your conversion ratio?

Ever since the Neanderthal torch salesmen went cave-to-cave selling the idea of home-cooking, motivational marketing strategies have not changed much. Find a need and provide a solution. On your real estate website, this translates into presenting real estate options from the point of view of your potential clients – seeing the market and their problems from their point of view and presenting your real estate services as their solution.

Check your website articles to see if they inform your visitors, but are failing to convert the visitor to a warm lead by providing you with their contact information. Is your website copy following the copy writing principle: Communicate with your target market in their language? To communicate in the language of your real estate website visitor is to approach the real estate market addressing their concerns and desires.

If you are selling downtown commercial real estate, show you understand the concerns of the commercial property investor or business person looking for a beneficial location. Any information regarding the amount of property you have sold is on a surface level of interest. However, copy that includes testimonials or your property selling or information on your track record that shows how you have helped businesses obtain property that advanced their investment or business goals has a far greater attractive power to it. Maximum attraction leads to maximum conversions.

To build this copy, simply review your past conversations with your clients and make sure you address their major concerns in your copy. Follow that with examples of how you have helped in the buying or selling of property that fulfilled their needs.

Once you have tightened up your copy with “conversational magnets” for your target market, review your titles. Are your titles (or main heading) arresting and including the keywords used in your article?

Review your real estate website content as if your were your client – is there copy that attracts you? IMCD Web Design has additional website pages that real estate agents can use to add copy addressing the real estate market from the point of view of the buyer, home seller and real estate investor. These pages present an opportunity to attract specific target market to your real estate services…and give the search engines more content relevant to your market, which is always good.

Conversion on your real estate website means getting the right message of your real estate services to the right prospect visiting your website. Is your real estate web design allowing you to target home buyers with one message and home sellers with another? If your current main real estate marketing message is your ability to move homes for sale – is that appealing to home buyers? Are you addressing the interests of real estate investors with another message? Targeted messages that address the needs of specific clients improves the conversion of those website visitors to sales leads.

IMCD Web Design real estate web designs for both agents and brokers allow them to craft their messages to their specific market niches. By adding three pages, each one aimed at a specific market, Realtors can quickly quadruple the amount of exposure their marketing message has. Instead of trying to address three or four markets on one page, they maximize their exposure to both visiting sales prospects and to the search engines.

Home buyers are most often interested in your feature listings, but in this day and age of MLS, they are also looking for someone to be their buyer’s agent. Your ability help them in their home search by pointing out strengths of houses and neighborhoods are the benefits that your prospect is looking for.

Home sellers, on the other hand, visit your real estate website looking for your ability to sell their home at the highest price possible in the shortest amount of time. Not something that will be of interest to the home buyer! If you rely solely on your homepage and “About Us” page to carry your message, you end up trying to use one area to carry two messages to two very different markets. To paraphrase Lincoln, “You can’t please all your real estate markets all the time.”

Being able to separate your real estate Internet marketing messages helps you increase your exposure with the search engines. Search engines index your website by assigning each page on your site to one category, keyword or key phrase. Mixing messages may actually dilute your ability to make an impression on the search engines’ indexing ability. By adhering to the “one message, one page” tenet, the search engine will deliver the right page (and marketing message) to the right real estate prospective client.

Investors approach real estate from a different angle entirely from your traditional home selling or home buying clientele. Addressing their interests and showing your knowledge of market trends is necessary to convert investors visiting your real estate website into clients purchasing commercial or rental properties.

Maximize your real estate website’s ability to deliver keyword-rich and targeted content to both your prospects and the search engines by adding buyer, seller and investor specific pages to your website package. Contact us for help in using your IMC designed website to deliver your best message to your targeted prospects and turn your website visitors into real estate clients.

Can your real estate website and your services benefit by putting in the effort to create a personal brand as a real estate agent specializing on a market niche? National Association of Realtors (NAR) studies found that Realtors who invest in training to gain a particular designation make more money than their less trained counterparts. IMCD Web Design has found that clients purchasing their own agent website make sure that their real estate website clearly shows all their specialist training and credentials.

Two reasons may be behind the improved performance of market specialists: increased trust from real estate buyers and sellers and with increased training, business opportunities become more apparent. By placing their real estate training credentials on their websites, Realtors gain that “third party” credibility factor.

By staying with one area of expertise and building up a reputation and experience, real estate agents can take advantage of the number one factor in choosing an agent. Any testimonials that you can post on your real estate website or blog that reinforce your reputation is the best advertising you can do. Building on reputation, a sign that you have created a personal brand as a market specialist is when you get referrals due to your specific experience in your real estate market. Longevity has its rewards with referrals, since the NAR found that the longer a Realtor had been in business, the higher percentage of their business was referrals.

After reputation, real estate clients perceive a greater knowledge of either a geographical area or a particular commercial or residential market niche as the asset that is desired. In fact, most buyers check their agent’s market knowledge as a major factor in choosing them.

In IMC’s experience designing websites for real estate agents across the country, we have seen that sites the tailor their keywords to their specific market niche and utilize their credentials and testimonials to create lasting brands keep their websites organically high ranked in their various target markets. Our website designers can help you improve your personal branding as a market niche specialist with our successful Agent Select real estate websites.

Increase your real estate website’s return on investment (ROI) through successful and timely follow-up. Real estate agents with the most successful home sales websites find that quickly following up with professional advice or information is just as important as when their websites began.

The strength and weakness of a great real estate website is its high volume of warm leads. The strength is that these leads improve your sales funnel and income. The weakness rests in that sales leads that are not followed up in a timely manner may not only result in a lost sale, but may leave someone with a negative impression of your real estate service.

As a business depending heavily on referrals, the real estate industry is definitely a business that follows the “seven or more touches” to land a sale dictum. Marketing research has found that to move a potential customer from not knowing your company to buying, they must receive seven touches on the average. These touches include visiting your website, seeing your business card, newspaper ads, finding your listing at the local chamber of commerce, receiving a post card on area real estate transactions, and hearing clients talk about your services. This is a quite an intensive marketing campaign, so any opportunity to create multiple touches is a great boon.

Using leads from your website provides the opportunity for at least three touches. The first is your auto-responder email (take the time to make it personal and reflect the advantages of your real estate service), the second is a phone call follow-up or an email/snail mail answer to market questions, and third touch can be following up on information sent at the website visitor’s request or a touch base email or call several months down the road.

Remember to view your touches from the potential client’s viewpoint – done the right way, every touch can come across as a thoughtful piece a help in a home buying or selling process or as an aggressive self-marketing approach. Presenting how your real estate services benefit your clients keeps your image helpful. Presenting the features of your real estate techniques can come across as “this is about me” and not carry the message of help you think it does.

IMCD Web Design’ real estate website designs incorporate successful lead gathering strategies and auto-responder programs. One area we have noticed with our real estate clients is that the websites with some of the best ROI have the best follow-up programs in place. It is not unusual for our clients to begin adding real estate agents to their staff just to handle the growing amount of real estate leads from their IMC websites in a timely manner.

How can a 100 year old (or older) marketing technique help you create or boost your real estate agent website, image or personal brand? The quirks of homebuyers’ and sellers’ curiosity are as strong and influential on the marketing process now as they were 100 years ago.

Often overlooked is how to present your professional expertise with the marketing technique called “pre-emptive advantage”. Claude Hopkins, one of the marketing wizards of the early 20th century used this simple technique to improve the market share of his clients. The pre-emptive advantage is simply be the first real estate agent in your area that tells your potential clients what you do … that all the other agents do also. The key is to tell it first and in such an educational way the buying public has the sense that you just let them in on your “insider” marketing news.

People love the inside scoop – information that you see as day-to-day services that every agent does may well be assistance that most people utilizing your real estate services are not aware of. IMCD Web Design coaches its clients to use this simple but effective marketing technique on their “About Us” page and versions of it on the home page. By telling your potential clients what you do for home buyers and sellers, you are educating them in why they appreciate what you do. Don’t assume your clients are aware of all the hard work you put into their real estate deal – you need to spell it out in your marketing.

You can easily double the mileage from your pre-emptive advantage marketing by sprinkling customer testimonials throughout your story of all the steps you take to insure your clients’ success. The story format is also a time tested way of increasing a person’s curiosity and interest in what your professional expertise can do for them.

In building your story, test market various aspects with your customers when you are talking to them about their pending home sale or purchase. Those aspects of your work that elicit the most surprise or appreciation are great material for your image-building marketing campaign. A home is quite likely both a long-time and important investment for your customer. They want to know as much as possible about the benefits they will receive from working with you.

And lastly, don’t worry about the length of your marketing piece, if you write it in such a way that all your hard work is about your customer, people will read every last word that is written about them. This technique also fulfills one of the requirements of a successful real estate website design: Establish trustworthiness and credibility.

Your real estate website is your best platform for extolling the benefits of your Realtor expertise. But use a venture capitalist’s reaction to judge how well you present your services. Many small business owners make the mistake of being to general in their claims of company growth with statements like “targeting a 5% share of a 47 gazillion dollar market”. The VC blank stare should give some indication of the lack of sales punch. Missing ingredient? Specifics that can be backed up. In marketing, generalities leave no impression.

Unfortunately for marketers, we have 3,000-some years of using superlatives and semi-hard to prove statistics to improve our market share. Now our DNA seems to immune to general claims. The biggest problem with generalities is that it detracts from your real estate websites credibility, since people assume that there is a touch of “telling the truth carelessly” as the Irish put it.

One way of adding specifics to your website is to make sure your testimonials from successful home sales or purchases are specific. These can also be strengthened by adding a personal story dimension. For example, “We were interested in a five bedroom house with plenty of sunlight and play area for our growing family. Our Realtor, Seymour Houseman, found the perfect home near a very good school within two weeks of beginning our home search.” Add specifics and testimonials for each market you are targeting: families, military transplants, vacation home buyers, condo owners or commercial real estate investors.

Since your marketing is directed to a particular market, make sure it is specific on the benefits that your market will perceive. As master marketer Claude Hopkins said, “If a claim is worth making, make it in the most impressive way.” An example he uses to drive home the need for specifics is when you greet a customer, who responds to you best: the one you say “How do you do?” or the one you greet with specific questions about their well-being or livelihood.

Make the best use of your agent biography pages and real estate website’s homepage with specifics about your professional expertise, track record and client satisfaction. If you only have a half a minute for people to check your homepage, what do you want them to remember? Make sure you tell them specifically!