Part 2: Lead Capture

In part one of our series we talked about traffic. Now imagine you are getting all this great traffic to your website but you have no intuitive way to capture any leads from that traffic. Big problem! Back in the day, most real estate companies were using Google and Yahoo! almost exclusively to drive traffic to their websites. When you developed your online ad, it was built with the thought of sending traffic directly to the home page. This was done because the thought was that people would love the site and would do all their real estate searches there. For this reason, most of the lead capture or call to action were placed on the home page and became lost once a consumer navigated through the site.

Today with the proliferation of real estate search sites and other industry related websites, most traffic that is sent to a real estate brokerage website lands directly on the individual listings. For this reason, you should treat every listing detail page on your website as a goldmine of information coupled with several calls to action points. These calls to action can include:

• Schedule a showing
• Ask a question
• Request more info
• Get prequalified

Having these calls to action hidden at the bottom of the page does not help either. They need to be above the fold on your site and should stand out in regards to design, color or verbiage. Also, if you have control over the layout of these calls to action, you should change the placement to see if your lead capture goes up or down depending on where they sit on the page.

So think about your calls to action as your think about lead capture and develop your website because consumers can’t contact you if you don’t provide them with an easy and clear way to so.

(Coming up – Part 3: Follow Up)

Derek Overbey
Sr. Director of Partnership Strategy
Roost.com
derek.overbey@roost.com
Twitter - @doverbey