Digital Marketing for the House Building Sector in a Tough Market
Having David Tennant's old job would have proved useful in preparing for current times, although imagine stepping out of the Tardis in 2008 to find 7 times more people searching Google for "house price crash" than "new homes London" (the latter yielded more searches only just over 2 years ago).
Bournemouth, UK (PRWEB) November 16, 2008 -- As the Internet matures everyone has access to more information than ever before, and that's changing the way deals are done. Whilst Land Registry information has been searchable online for a few years, now motivated buyers can spy on when and how deep your price drops have been on sites like Rightmove from property-bee.com. With your every move laid bare, acknowledging current conditions and taking an open and honest approach in customer communications is by far the best approach. If you aren't already, get those positive messages to a wider audience using an online PR distribution service.
Whilst there are clearly less people searching for "new homes", (Google's Insights for Search reports the phrase 2/3rd down from the peak, or 50% off from last year), there are still potential customers, and digital is both cost effective and measurable when executed correctly. Google is now delivering 9 in 10 UK searches, so a well run pay per click campaign on this network will certainly help bring targeted leads to your website.
And are the major builders using their PPC budgets to maximum effect? A search on page 1 for "New Homes Dorset" found 5 out of 11 didn't mention the location at all in their advert. Relevant ad text attracts a higher click through rate (CTR) so is highly recommended, i.e. if the ad is shown 100 times and 10 click through to the site, CTR=10%. Also, half the adverts did not land the visitor on a page listing Dorset properties. Visitors have short attention spans when it comes to clicking around a site so ensure you're monitoring your "bounce rate" to see how many are leaving the site immediately from that page, or better still land them on what they are searching for in the first place!
You may also be paying more for your clicks, as Google's Quality Score checks the text on the landing page and rewards those sending visitors to a page relevant to the keywords used in the search. This can result in receiving adverts at a higher position than competitors, but at a lower price!
On the plus side, some adverts were using Dynamic Keyword Insertion to put my exact phrase as the advert title, which emboldens that phrase and helps to increase CTR. There were signs that at least some were also split testing the ad copy. This neat trick displays different versions of the advert before deciding which is the most successful (highest CTR), and continues to show this ad. These are just some of the factors which influence how much value for money you get on PPC and why it's important to have it managed professionally.
If you use an agency, they may review their management fees at year end as Google withdraws "Best Practice Funding" - basically agency kickback - perhaps a good time to ensure they are competitive both in terms of pricing and quality of service.
If you're investing to bring traffic to your website through PPC or other channels such as SEO, PPC, etc, then I strongly urge you to track conversions with a tool such as Google Analytics. At a minimum find out the volume of traffic generated by each channel, and better still, how many conversions were achieved. E.g. your £10k Google spend generated 500 brochure requests, account signups or enquiries, i.e. a cost per lead of £20.
That's certainly better than the 43% of PPC advertisers who have no idea what their ROI is, but ideally you'll know which channels are producing sales rather than enquiries, and this can be done if your website provider sets up your contact form or signup page to pass the referrer through to your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. This requires co-ordination with your marketing partner(s) to tag the inbound traffic, e.g. emails will use a special URL so they can be identified. Your CRM should then report on how many sales came from PPC, SEO, etc. If this all seems a bit complicated then it highlights how important it is to work with a partner agency who advises on strategy and take cares of the technical work, and if you work with a full-service agency the co-ordination becomes even simpler.
Overall it's a great time to invest in digital, there are many ways to do it, but make sure you measure the results and work with an experienced partner.
About the author
Simon Melaniphy is Managing Director of Refreshed Media (www.refreshedmedia.com), a full service digital marketing agency with offices in Bournemouth, Reigate and Manchester working with some of the leading house builders.
###
|
