How To Build A Landing Page That Turns Clicks Into Conversions

by threshold | Mar 10, 2020 | Digital Marketing

Imagine you’re searching for an apartment. You’re served an ad with stunning imagery, a compelling headline, and a button inviting you to “Find Your Floor Plan.” With your interest piqued, you click on the ad, only to arrive at a webpage that baffles you. As you wait for it to load, you find messaging not about floor plans but about an amenity you don’t care about. A quick scroll doesn’t help, revealing only more slowly loading images and blocks of irrelevant text. You close the page, frustrated, and return to what you were doing.

As real estate marketers, we rejoice when an ad, email, or social post has a high click-through-rate. It indicates that we’re persuading our audience to take the next step on their buyer journey. But click-throughs are only half the challenge. It’s just as important that the web page a user lands on leaves a good impression and inspires further action. It’s surprisingly easy to build a landing page that utterly fails at this job.

So how do you build a good landing page? That is to say, what’s the recipe for a landing page that actually turns clicks into conversions? How do you provide an excellent user experience that inspires further action and results in more signed leases?

These seven tips are essential to building conversion-optimized landing pages that get the results you need.

Know The Goal

First thing’s first: what is your landing page actually supposed to do? Yes, you want it to drive conversions and contribute to increased lease rates, but what role does this landing page play in that larger goal? Be as specific as possible—your landing page can’t do everything, and it’s not meant to. The more focused a landing page is, the more likely it is to drive the conversions you’re seeking.

So, do you want to capture email addresses? Get people to schedule tours? Drive applications for specific floor plans? Whatever your goal, it should be focused and action-oriented. Not only does that translate to meaningful impact on your bottom line, but users appreciate knowing right away how they’re meant to interact with a page.

Use Consistent Messaging & Design

When you click on a button that says “Find Your Floor Plan,” you expect to be taken to a page that features floor plans. When you click on an ad that promises “Downtown Lofts With Active Living Amenities” you probably expect to find information about amenities. When a user is inspired to click, it’s because they want what they think you’re promising—and nothing is more disappointing than a promise that goes unfulfilled.

Think about where visitors to your landing page will be arriving from and what that source promises to them. Whether it’s an email, a PPC ad, or a social media post, its messaging should be consistent with what users find on your landing page and vice versa. It’s also a good idea to keep visual design consistent to provide additional cues to users that they’re getting content consistent with what they expected.

Provide Relevant Info Above The Fold

The average visitor to your landing page wants to get information without wasting any time—therefore, they may arrive with considerable skepticism that your site must overcome quickly. Users are used to having a wealth of information at their fingertips and can afford to bail on sites that don’t give them what they need immediately.

That’s why you need to provide the most relevant info for your users “above the fold”—that is, in the portion of your webpage they’ll see without having to scroll. This confirms that your page is worth their time and keeps a user around for long enough to take a conversion action.

What counts as “relevant information” depends on how you directed your user to this page, but it probably includes a prominent Call to Action (CTA) and might also include high-quality photographs, floor plan info, or amenities highlights.

Highlight the Value Proposition

Since your visitors are unlikely to stick around for long without a compelling reason, it’s your job to make these reasons obvious. In addition to providing relevant info above the fold, use header copy and CTA buttons to feature the key benefits of your property prominently. These strategies not only make your site easy for users to scan through and quickly find what they’re looking for, but also signals to Google that this is important information on your site, allowing your website to rank higher for related searches. In other words, it’s good UX and good SEO.

Minimize Loading Time

Nothing makes a user bounce faster than a page that just won’t load. High-quality images and video can make for engaging web pages that keep users exploring, but be thoughtful of file sizes and loading times. Compressing files typically results in loss of quality, but there may be a sweet spot that decreases loading time while still offering reasonably high quality. Alternatively, it may be worth reducing the number of elements loading on the page overall. An experienced web developer should be able to make more concrete recommendations based on your goals and needs.

Provide Clear Calls To Action

The whole point of a landing page should be to drive a specific conversion action. It should be clear to users what that action is and how to do it. The most common method is through a CTA button placed above the fold (and possibly duplicated further down the page), but header copy may also be effective.

Whether the desired action is calling the office, scheduling a tour, or starting an application, invite users to take this action through convenient links and clear copy; never assume they’ll do what you want without being asked.

Incorporate A Form

Forms are an excellent way to motivate users to provide information you can leverage further down the road. That’s true only because they offer something valuable in exchange for that information, whether it’s convenience, information, a special rate, or something else.

A form might, for example, provide a streamlined method for users to schedule a tour. Alternatively, it might extend a special offer in exchange for a user’s email address. Or it could offer a way to download your digital brochure, then ask nicely for their contact info so a staff member can be available to answer any questions not covered in the brochure. Whatever your form does, ensure it doesn’t take too long to fill out or ask too much of your user. Otherwise it’s not likely to drive conversions.

Get Expert Assistance

This little self-plug is just a bonus tip, but one we (obviously) highly recommend. A conversion-optimized landing page is a balancing act—it requires weighing high-quality visuals against load times and information-rich copy against easy scannability. While these tips can help you build a better landing page yourself, nothing beats having a real estate marketing expert on your team to help guide the way and execute with confidence. If you’re interested in expert assistance, reach out to a Threshold team member today.

3 Reasons Why Print Media Isn’t Dead For Real Estate Marketing

by threshold | Feb 4, 2020 | Creative, Design, Marketing

You may have heard that print media is dead—that the rise of digital media has rendered print media irrelevant. It’s true that the digital landscape has changed the role of print media in real estate marketing, but print media is far from dead. In fact, when it comes to your real estate marketing plan, we highly recommend you invest in high-quality print media.

There are a few reasons we say that, and we’re getting into them all in today’s blog post. If you’d like to learn how print media can improve your brand awareness, brand reputation, and lease rates, then keep on reading!

Reason 1: Physical Objects for Physical Spaces

There’s no escaping the physical world when it comes to real estate marketing. You may do much of your advertising online, and your property may have a digital presence via its website and social media accounts, but at the end of the day, your product is all about physical spaces that people live and move around in. As opposed to a brand that operates mainly in a digital space (like a SaaS brand, for example), a real estate brand must always connect its digital presence back to a real, physical, brick-and-mortar property.

Because of this fact, physical forms of marketing like print media are that much more important for a real estate brand. Consider, for example, your property’s lease space. It’s essential, particularly in over-saturated markets, to have a lease space whose design is memorable, pleasant, and gives visitors a sense of how living in a unit at this property might feel. Your banners, posters, brochures, business cards, etc. all contribute to how a potential resident imagines conducting all the daily activities of their life within this physical space. Digital advertising alone can’t help persuade a customer at this particular stage of the buyer’s journey.

Reason 2: Cutting Through the Competition

We see digital ads all the time, and we’re usually in the middle of something else when we do. This means that digital media often goes ignored, or doesn’t command enough of a consumer’s attention to drive them to convert. It also means that competition is high for digital media—each digital ad is sharing digital space with a lot of other ads just like it. On top of all that, many consumers use ad-blocking programs when possible in order to avoid ads entirely.

Don’t get us wrong, digital ads are effective in their own right, but pairing them with print media campaigns as well helps generate particularly high-quality leads and drive even more conversions than digital marketing alone. When a potential resident reads a brochure, flyer, or poster, they’re devoting more focused attention to your property, and are automatically more likely to call the office, take a tour, or sign a lease than someone who simply glanced at a digital ad while scrolling through their Instagram feed.

Print media also doesn’t suffer from the same problem of competition (and ad-blocking) that digital media does. The ability to market to consumers in a physical space allows for opportunities to bypass the saturated and highly competitive digital landscape to get your brand in front of your audience.

Reason 3: Old-School Appeal

We expect different things from print media than we expect from digital media. For many, a message delivered in print bears more credibility, authenticity, and gravity than the same message delivered digitally. This impression is not always conscious, nor is it always strong, but it still has real impact on how a potential resident processes information about your property. Presented via print, information is perceived as more accurate, more official, and more worth paying attention to.

This effect is stronger for some demographics than for others, but it gets stronger the older your target audience is. For many adults, especially those over 50, the tangibility of print media is a benefit in itself. Some folks would vastly prefer making a decision based on a brochure they can hold in their hands and look back on later, rather than a webpage or digital ad they may only have seen briefly.

If you’re ready to incorporate stunning print media that drives conversions and raises lease rates into your real estate marketing plan, our team at Threshold would love to chat with you! Contact us today to talk about how we can design, print, and deliver fantastic brochures, posters, flyers, business cards, and more to help meet your brand’s real estate goals.

Top 9 Apartment Complex Marketing Ideas For Multi-Family Properties

by threshold | Sep 24, 2019 | General

We’ve been around the real estate marketing block a time or two (or three, or four), and we’ve seen a lot of different apartment complex marketing ideas over the years. Along the way, we’ve also learned that many of our clients and other property managers are constantly searching for new marketing strategies that will help them raise lease rates, revitalize their online reputation, or generate buzz for their new brand.

Well, we believe that good ideas are meant to be shared, so we wanted to put together some of the best real estate marketing strategies we’ve seen in action so that property managers, leasing staff, and apartment marketers are empowered to make bold choices and see big results. We’ve gathered out top apartment marketing ideas into a handy pdf available for download.

Below, you’ll find a preview of the top nine marketing ideas we love for multi-family properties. If you want to see more, you can download the full pdf here.

Host a Pet-Friendly Promotion Event

Four-legged friends are a big part of many residents’ lives, and a pet-centric community event can be a great opportunity to promote your pet-friendly property and get shareable content for your social media pages.

If you have a dog park or outdoor courtyard, consider inviting residents to bring their well-behaved dogs by and partake in some tasty treats. Or hold a giveaway of pet-friendly goodies for resident pet owners who share a photo of their pet at the property on social media. Everybody loves cute pet photos, and showing some love to a resident’s fur-baby is a sure-fire way to get on their good side.

Team Up With Local Businesses

You already know residents are drawn to properties that are surrounded by local businesses they love. So why not team up with the businesses in your neighborhood for some mutually-beneficial marketing? Partnerships like these strengthen both parties while also communicating to your prospects that your property is keyed into the local community residents will be a part of.

[su_button url=”https://www.thresholdagency.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Threshold_Apartment_Marketing_Ideas_Multi-Family.pdf” target=”blank” background=”#ef3c26″ size=”4″ center=”yes” icon=”icon: download”]Get the Full PDF[/su_button]

Next Entries »