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Don’t waste money on digital marketing!

This month, our marketing guru Nelly Berova points out the five common failings in online marketing campaigns which can ruin your ROI.

Nelly Berova

Link to Digital Marketing featureThere are many different campaigns an agent can invest in to boost brand exposure and generate more leads. From Google to Facebook, the options are numerous. Any campaign however aims to bring the prospecting client to the agent’s website, which in turn should aim to convert them from a visitor to a lead.

Nelly Berova image

Nelly Berova

If your website is not planned and structured with your goal in mind (for example, more valuation requests or buyer registrations), the chances are you will not get conversions and your marketing investment will go to waste.

To help you assess if your website is not fit for marketing, use this check list:

1 Poor or no call-to-actions

This is the most common oversight we see when assessing websites. As much as eight out of 10 estate agents’ websites we come across lack properly executed call-to-actions. There is a simple rule we follow: if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Take a look at your website from a vendor’s or landlord’s point of view. For example, how easy is it for them to book a valuation? Do you have a prominent button or a banner asking them to do so? Is this banner or button placed on all the relevant pages? By placing clear and prominent call-to-actions on a website, we typically see a 30% increase in enquiries. If you don’t clearly ask for the business, the chances are you are not converting as much as you could.

Your website should be planned and structured with your campaign goals in mind.

2 Poor or no tracking

If you plan to invest in a marketing campaign to bring new prospects to your website, you must track the results. Digital marketing, unlike traditional offline marketing, can be properly tracked. You can track the number of clicks to a specific page or button, the number of submitted form enquiries, or the number of calls from each campaign you run, and from each channel. This data can then help you decide if your campaign is successful and what improvements you need to make. If you find a campaign brings you a lot of leads, you can then invest more into it. The same applies if the campaign doesn’t work at all – you can quickly stop it. Without the tracking in place, investing in a marketing campaign can be seen as a cost and therefore discontinued even if it’s performing well and vice versa.

3 No landing pages

Each campaign you run should be aimed at a selected, pre-defined audience of prospects. For example, if you want to attract more local vendors to your website by running a campaign on Facebook, it’s no good taking them to your homepage which is designed to appeal to everyone. You must have a dedicated landing page, planned and designed to appeal to vendors, with clear calls-to-action and properly tracked. In most cases, these are not your standard pages. A landing page which generates results is planned with the campaign message in mind – it should ask for the business and make it easy for the prospect to take action, without clicking on other pages.

4 Poor mobile experience

One in every two websites we assess has a poor mobile experience for the user even though over 50 per cent of the traffic to an estate agents’ website comes from mobile devices. Sadly, in most cases the mobile design is an afterthought. This is a big no-no when it comes to running a marketing campaign as you risk losing valuable leads. So, if you run a campaign on Facebook or Google and do not have a good mobile responsive website, start by assessing the mobile experience. If a vendor or a landlord visits your website via a mobile phone as a result of clicking on a Google search results ad or a Facebook ad, will they be presented with the correct call-to-action? Is it easy for them to enquire or progress their journey? If the answer is ‘no’ – address this first before you invest in a campaign.

5 Slow loading time

We’ve all been there, waiting for a site to load, clicking refresh and feeling frustrated. This applies especially to prospects using mobile devices with 3G or 4G connections. If your website takes longer than 10 seconds to load, the chances are the visitor will leave your website, having just cost you money and, possibly, business. Make sure your website loads quickly before you invest in any marketing campaigns.

So, there you have it. If you plan to invest in a digital marketing campaign in 2021, start by assessing the suitability of your website – put that right and then you build your digital marketing strategy on a solid platform.

Got a marketing related question? Contact Nelly and her team at www.artdivision.co.uk

February 2, 2021

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