Most builders have that “one community” that’s in the back of everyone’s mind. The reason it’s slow is typically a product, pricing, or location weakness – all things marketing cannot fix. But sometimes it’s just a matter of getting enough eyes on the community to turn it around.
Quick Disclaimer: When we troubleshoot a slow community, we spend quite a bit of time analyzing Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, & Appointment/Sales reports to determine where exactly the issue is. This post skips this CRUCIAL step and goes straight to the marketing tactics.
1 – Increase Traffic – Money, Money, Money
First, let’s make sure you have enough promotion (website traffic) to your community. To see if we have enough promotion we’ll use your current conversion rates from traffic to leads and then leads to appointments. You can use the past 30 days’ Session Count along with the actual number of leads & appointments to calculate your numbers. You’ll then want to reverse engineer these numbers to determine how much traffic you need to buy.
See the Excel Screenshot below. You can see that we’ll need an additional 3,023 pieces of traffic over the next 30 days to hit our goal of 3 sales per month for this community.
Where should the traffic come from? This is a tough question to answer as it depends …
2 – Increase Leads – Landing Pages
After you’ve determined the amount of traffic you need based on your CURRENT conversion rates of traffic to leads, it might be appropriate to set up a landing page. A Landing Page is a specifically designed page with the single goal of converting a visit into a lead. Often times key information on landing pages is “gated” behind a contact form or phone call. Without a doubt, a properly-designed landing page will have at least 5x-10x the conversion rate of the website.
HOWEVER – that high conversion comes at a cost. The quality of leads from landing pages will be lower compared to leads who have spent on average 5+ minutes on your website viewing pictures, floor-plans, and learning about you. This isn’t a bad thing, just a variable to keep in mind. Leads from a Community Landing Page will very likely have a lower “lead to appointment rate” compared to leads from the website. However, using a landing page will reduce the amount of traffic needed to generate the targeting number of leads.
See the Excel Screenshot below for the effect the conversion has on the amount of traffic needed. The leads to appointment conversion rate was also lowered to an estimated 5% compared to 30%.
You can see that we’ll only need an additional 318 pieces of traffic over the next 30 days to hit our goal of 3 sales per month for this community.
3 – Reignite Interest – Remarketing Campaigns
Last on the list, but certainly not least, is to make sure you have a community level remarketing campaign setup. You’ll want to make sure this campaign only targets previous website visitors if they visited any of the URLs for the broken community. Creating these campaigns for just Facebook & Instagram is perfect.
Remarketing campaigns should be created to inspire previous website visitors to take a second look. They might still be shopping for a new home and need a catalyst to become engaged again.
Your Next Steps:
