While the housing market may be slowing down, that’s no reason your sales pipeline has to run dry. In fact, it’s the perfect time to get strategic about client acquisition and lay the groundwork for future success.

Last week, we discussed in the first part of our new series called “Guerilla Marketing”, and which FREE third-party platforms provide the best exposure for builders.

This week in the new episode of “How Builders Can Keep Their Sales Pipeline Full in a Tough Market”, we’ll discuss tweaks to make to your website. I’ll be sharing some tactics for using your site to continually attract new leads, even when the phone isn’t ringing.

With the right approach, your website can become a self-generating sales machine, allowing you to weather any market conditions with confidence. Keep watching/listening/reading to discover three more ways to leverage your online presence and keep deals in the pipeline.

Builder Lead Converter ATTRACTS, CAPTURES & CONVERTS high-quality leads for builders so they can pick & choose their clients & jobs. Find out how at https://www.builderleadconverter.com

 

Transcript:

  Today on Conversations That Convert, we’re going to talk about how a builder can keep their sales pipeline full in a difficult market. This is part two of this series, all about guerrilla marketing for builders. 

 

Welcome to Conversations That Convert. Every week, we’ll spend about 10 to 15 minutes tackling relevant lead generation, marketing, and sales topics for remodelers. Home Improvement Companies and Home Builders. Conversations That Convert is brought to you by Builder Lead Converter, your perfect sales assistant.

 

And now here’s Rick and Diana.  Welcome to Conversations That Convert everyone. Diana, welcome. Good to see you. Thank you. Good to see you too. Welcome everybody.  What are we talking about today?  Today, how builders can keep their sales pipeline full in a tough market. Yes, tough market we find ourselves in right now.

 

Things have definitely slowed down. Affordability is not good. Interest rates are not good. Inflation is not good. And a lot of parts the economy is not good either. So what it means is there’s less opportunities out there for builders. And the question is, how can you stand out from a crowd and how can you do it on a budget? 

 

So this is all about guerrilla marketing for builders and some of this really the basic things that I would recommend that a builder can do that is free or nearly free. And this is all based on the course of number one marketing challenge, which is finding high quality leads. This is according to the state of the residential construction survey, the annual survey from the association of professional builders.

 

And today, Diana, we’re going to. We will talk about website optimization. This is a builder’s 24 seven showroom of where leads can come and check them out. And so we will be discussing here several things that a builder can do just to update their website, tweak it with the idea being as, Hey, how do I attract, capture and convert  more high quality leads from my website so I can pick and choose my clients and jobs.

 

So what do you say? Should we jump into it? Let’s let’s get started.  All right. So we’re going to focus today on updating website content. Now you may be able to do this yourself. You may have to hire someone to do it. The bottom line is this doesn’t cost a whole lot of money there, but there are some, definitely some investments you want to make doing this, if you are not technically proficient at updating your website, you definitely want to hire this out.

 

However, some of these. Might be simple updates for your website and you can you can do it yourself. So we will start with services  And this is going to focus around remodeling projects or styles of homes, depending if you are a remodeler or a home builder. I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to share uh, a website, an example.

 

This is one of our templated websites that we do for remodelers. And I’ll show an example of a home builders as well. But from a services standpoint, as you can see, this is going to be one of your most visited pages. So we have a quick link here right at the top. Now, as we move through this, We will want to make sure that our remodeling clients have a very specific list of services.

 

So as you can see with this example here, there are four of them. And for these, for these four services, kitchens, additions, bathrooms, whole home, exteriors, and basements, we want to be very clear that when a client lands here, a prospective client lands here, there’s no question whatsoever that they know that you will perform the type of work that they’re that they’re looking for. 

 

Oftentimes we see builders that don’t do a real good job of explaining the types of services they offer and so they get a lot of times the wrong Types of, of leads. Now, from a home builders standpoint we’re, we will have a floor plan or a design library. And so this allows you to go through and showcase all the different types of homes that you’ve built.

 

You can put plans in here you can put photo galleries if you’ve built the home before. And it very clearly demonstrates number one, the type of homes that you build, including architectural motif, the category such as one level, two levels, story and a half, so on and so forth. So Diane, any, any thoughts here? 

 

I like the website and the fact that it’s simple and you can read immediately what’s all about it. So. Yep, absolutely. Very, very clear. And I like doing these quick links right at the top. Yeah. We follow the 19 second rule that if. If a lead does not get their question answered in 19 seconds from the time they hit your homepage, they’re gone.

 

They’re not going to spend a long time on your 20 seconds, but they need to quickly be able to find what they’re looking for. And that’s to simplify, clarify it. So this is all about giving them a good user experience with the type of information that they are looking for. And design, services, whatever you want to call it, is definitely number one. 

 

Now, the next thing that we want to look at will be  pricing. Okay. So the first question is, what can I build? The second question is how much does it cost? So here, what we want to look at is available homes and, or case studies and the scoping tool from a home builders perspective available homes, a lot, whether they’re homes that you actually build as a spec.

 

Or homes that you may build as a, such as like a, to be built again, you have a, a section here and you’re going to put different homes in here with different price points. So you can see this particular builder, very high end homes, but if somebody has a budget of four and a half million or maybe it’s 10 million, they know they are in the right spot.

 

Now from a remodeler’s perspective, we want to go in and we want to create what we call a scoping tool. So a scoping tool is going to be a call to action that when I am in the services area, I can then start to say, Hey, I want to get instant pricing as you see here. And now I can go in and I can pick the type of project that I’m looking for.

 

I can look through  photographs and then I can walk through a process of scoping out the type of project that I want with the end result being, you’re going to request a price, the lead will request a price from you and then you can call them up, give them a budget.  Determine if this project is a good fit for you and then move on to the next step, which is typically a site visit.

 

So again, the two things that we’re looking for here are having some sort of a scoping tool from a pricing standpoint and then showing available homes. The available homes are normally three, so you can show your full breadth of offering. Entry level would be on one side, high end on the other, and then have more of a mid range from there.

 

What do you think of that, Diana?  That’s very, it’s very clear. It sounds that everything first is product and then it’s price. So if you cover that then,  and you get the answer, the question answer in 90 seconds, then probably the client will stay there. The prospect. Exactly. Yeah. No different than any other type of purchase.

 

I’m thinking this is what I want. Okay. Once I find it, which would be the design. Next question is, okay, how much does it cost? And then next question for home builders and remodelers is usually, do you come to my area to remodel or will you build where I want to, to build? Now, from a third perspective, we’re going to look at, which would be locations.

 

Very, very important here. Yeah. A lot of builders miss this as they don’t clearly put together their cities and their maps. of where they where they build. So what we would call this would be more of a service area. So from a remodeler standpoint, you want to again, identify a list of those communities that you serve  along with a map.

 

So you can see here, we have a map of the, of the MSA or metropolitan statistical area. That’s a, that’s a mouthful. But with those areas highlighted again, The reason we do this is for qualification purposes and also for search purposes, because we know people will search for the type of project they’re interested in, in the location where they want to do the project.

 

So as an example here, it might be kitchen remodeling in, we look at one of our cities Plymouth.  And so that’s what they’ll type in. And so we need to have a page like this. That will show kitchen remodeling in, in Plymouth. Now from a home builder standpoint it varies a little bit because you may have communities that you build in, but you might also have a service area.

 

If you build. scattered lot. So from a location standpoint, once we want to really enhance that, we can show not only  the communities you build in, such as like current neighborhoods, as an example, maybe if you build model homes where those are, but then we could also really focus on All the different areas that you build it.

 

And the neat thing about this is once I create this particular  link or excuse me, this particular location, I can then link it to a page that will be optimized specifically  with the content that will rank in a Google search engine algorithm.  So these are pages designed to be what’s called an index page or a landing page where somebody is searching for this, they’ll land on here and then they’ll jump in and start looking again at your floor plans, your available homes and become a lead after that.

 

So very, very important. You optimize these pages just as much as possible. And again, I can’t emphasize this enough. This step is skipped. Fairly regularly by builders. So go back and take a look and make sure you get your locations identified. Now, some other, some other notes here that you want to consider is will be high resolution photos and videos.

 

So Diana, you like looking at websites where you have low resolution images, or they’re taken with a cell phone or bad angles or bad lighting that really makes you want to buy, doesn’t it? Yeah, that’s, that’s true, but I never thought about that. How important is, is this? Absolutely. There’s probably one of the, there’s probably not a whole lot of things that rank higher than having high quality imagery on your website to get somebody interested at the same time when they see low quality imagery or they see photos that are maybe from five, 10 years ago where they’re showing styles that are not really in style anymore.

 

People will get turned off by that and you will lose them. So you may be looking at your website right now and saying, Hey, Buh we don’t have a whole lot of high quality images. Okay, so that means you need to invest in a photographer, go back to some of your best most recent projects, get permission from your from those homeowners to come in and do some high quality images.

 

And then going forward as you’re finishing up your projects, get some photos right away and continually add those to your website.  So what do you say, Diana? Should we talk a little bit more about less, less exciting things?  Are there less exciting things? Well, this one on site search engine optimization is kind of a boring topic. 

 

What exactly is that? What does it do for me? On site optimization is simply where you are looking at  what are the pages or what are things you can do to make your website more attractive to search engines? That’s really it. If you’re not going to show up in the first page or the first 10 organic listings of a potential buyer’s search, you’re probably not going to get a chance at selling that potential buyer.

 

So onsite search, search and domitization is where you look at your website and there’s certain things you can do to make it more visible. To search engines. And I say Google because 90 some percent of all searches are done on, on Google. So there’s a couple of different things that you can do there for onsite search search engine optimizations.

 

You know, number one, we talked about a type of projects, type of homes specific areas where you work very, very important doing title tags, meta tags, optimizing your images, optimizing your videos, if you have them. All of those are going to help in search engine optimization. Some of the simple things you can do.

 

We discussed last week, that’s getting reviews. So go to my Google, my business profile, get reviews, get at least 10, your house profile, get reviews on there and get at least 10 that is going to help your search engine search engine rankings, because now Google looks at and go, wow, here’s somebody really relevant, not only in this industry and locations, but they’ve got reviews, which means.

 

If other people think that they’re great, then I will direct more people to them. Any thoughts on that Diana?  So it seems that the CEO part, it’s also very important and  you need to just find a specialist or just figure it out how to make sure that you.  You have clarity on that. Yeah, this is one that you made a good point at finding the specialist.

 

This is one where I would probably go out and I would work with a professional company that number one works in the industry. So somebody that understands home builders and remodelers and number two, you know, knows what they are doing. It’s hard to find those people. We have a guy that we work with floodlight SEO who does a great job with this, who really understands marketing, local. 

 

Home builders and local remodelers done some really great stuff for our clients over the years. And I want to end with another one which is really all about  being, how do you make yourself more friendly to Google?  So there’s this tool out there called Google Search Console. And this is something that Google puts out that is a guide.

 

To improving performance on Google search. Wow. Who wouldn’t want to do this? So, so you see here, this is the page just Google, Google search console, you see search console tools and reports help you measure your site’s search traffic and performance, fix issues, make your site shine and Google search results.

 

I really like this because you will get notifications if you have this set up like, Hey, there’s something wrong with your site that you need to fix. This also will look at things from a mobile perspective and 50 percent plus of your leads will be looking at your website from a phone. So this is a nice tool to go through and help you to optimize your content. 

 

Get your content on Google and then, like I said here, get alerted on issues and fix your site, understand how Google search sees your pages, and then they give you step by step training here. So again, this is something that if you want to dive in or have someone in your office you want to have do this, you could certainly try to do this on your own.

 

Otherwise, you would hire a professional to actually use this tool. To optimize your site through search engine optimization, no better return on investment from getting eyes on your site. So Diana, any final thoughts here on what that’s, what people can do to help optimize their website and get more opportunities. 

 

Yeah, for me, this is a wake up call just to, from time to time, just to review the website and just pay attention to photos and quality of the of the videos and quality of the of the, of the features of the site. Absolutely. And then just update it. Yep. I often use the analogy of you have a show home or a show room that is on, you know, for the public to come in and look at, well, your website is your virtual show home or show room.

 

So if your show home or your show room, let’s just say it’s dirty and there’s light bulbs that are burnt out or the lights aren’t on or it’s not clean, people walk up to it and they say, wow, is this person in business? Well, your website is no different. So if you don’t have a clean website, it’s not optimized.

 

It’s it’s not has high resolution images on there. It’s updated regularly. You know, these things don’t cost a lot of money, but they need, it needs to be looked at regularly. So just like you would clean your showroom once a week for visitors coming in, so they have a nice experience. Your website’s the same thing.

 

You need to always have eyes on it, be making updates to it, pull old. Stuff off of it because  More is not always better when it comes to websites. Sometimes less is more Sometimes you can have again the wrong imagery on there the wrong content and things that will turn people off And that will help you lose business versus gaining business.

 

So I hope this was valuable for everyone today again This was on the step to this guerrilla marketing What are some basic things you can do right now while it’s slow to help you stand out from the crowd but  If you would like to find out how we can help you attract, capture, and convert high quality leads so you too can pick and choose your clients and jobs and talk about more things like this for your specific company, feel free to go ahead and just click on that link right below to schedule your strategy call.

 

Be happy to get on a call with you, look at your website, and give you some ideas just like this. So from our brothers and sisters in Christ, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all always. We’ll see you next time on Conversations at