Lead generation is the multi-faceted process of building a brand’s visibility, trustworthiness, and reliability. It’s essential for modern-day homebuilding companies that want to consistently expand their brands.
With a strong home builder lead generation strategy, these companies can make more target customers aware of their respective brands. This increase in brand awareness directly results in more people interested in the home building company’s products/services.
Once we create a strong home builder, a digital marketing strategy makes nurturing curious prospects into the sales pipeline easier. But, homebuilding companies have to take various steps to convert prospects into high-value customers.
After all, generating online traffic and leads is not easy –
In 2017, the average company generated only 1,877 online leads per month. In 2022, that number’s suspected to be even lower.
Hence, modern-day homebuilding companies shouldn’t just focus on generating leads. They should also focus on converting as many online leads as possible.
In this digital marketing case study, we’ll assess the digital marketing success of Element Homes. Element Homes is one of the leading homebuilding companies in California, United States.
The company serves clients from all across the US. The company’s USP is its extensive range of services.
From architectural planning to interior designing – Element guides clients through every step of the custom home building process.
However, as the pandemic unfolded, the company faced many ups and downs while on its path to lead generation success. In this lead generation case study, we’ll detail –
✓ The key digital marketing challenges faced by Element Homes
✓ Our scientific approach to resolving these challenges
✓ The long and short-term results of our solutions and tactics.
✓ The overall impact of refining the company’s digital marketing and online lead generation strategies.
Element Homes had previously succeeded with social media marketing and Google AdWords. These efforts were generating some leads from the company’s website. But, their website had the potential to deliver even more. The company accurately believed that it should be generating more online leads. Here’s how we achieved this crucial goal.
THE CHALLENGES
When we first started working with Element Homes, the company’s website didn’t have enough “conversion points.” Interested customers were not offered convenient ways to learn about specific homes, generate estimated costs, or communicate with brand representatives.
As a result, generating home builder sales for this company was initially very difficult. Along with these communication issues, Element Home’s website also suffered from the following issues –
Lack of Leads from Website
Generating homebuilder leads is not easy. People shopping for new, custom homes are always extra-cautious about dealing with unknown and unreliable companies via the Internet. Since Element Home’s website wasn’t optimized for general contractor lead generation, it didn’t appear reliable or trustworthy.
The website didn’t have high-quality content or backlinks. There weren’t enough web pages with clear, well-defined CTAs (Calls to Action). Plus, the website was over-dependent on manual interactions from the clients.
Unless clients went out of their way to contact the company’s sales team, they wouldn’t receive much brand-related information. All of these factors made lead generation for these homebuilders very difficult.
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Insufficient Follow-Up Sales
Leads are nine times likelier to convert when the company’s sales representatives follow up within 5 minutes. Element Home’s website wasn’t optimized for quick interactions with clients. Hence, its sales team consistently failed to conduct rapid follow-ups with interested customers.
Improper Analytics to Tracing Leads
Effective lead tracking helps companies determine who their target customers are, where they are from, and how to contact these leads. Element Homes didn’t have any strategy for determining and defining their lead sources.
The company didn’t employ the latest lead tracking systems. Hence, it couldn’t successfully nurture its leads.
Low On-Page Engagement
Creating a strong homebuilder lead generation strategy is hard when your website is not engaging customers. According to a recent study, 73% of leads aren’t “Sales-Ready.” That means most users who visited Element Home’s website weren’t ready to purchase. To get them ready, the company’s marketing team had to create a more engaging website.
Only then could the target customers be moved down the sales funnel.
Element Home’s website had low engagement because of various reasons. The lack of well-written content was the most important reason.
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Not Having a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Element Home’s lack of social media presence hurt the company’s ability to generate homebuilder leads. Social media marketing is the most practical way of generating leads from the Internet.
Unfortunately, Element Home’s marketing team wasn’t even spending one hour a week on social media marketing.
OUR APPROACH
Developing successful online marketing strategies requires skill, strategy, and an in-depth understanding of technical SEO.
Element Homes had to make constant, large-scale investments into their web design and SEO strategies to consistently generate high-quality leads. Our local SEO Company took steps to create a comprehensive lead generation strategy for Element Homes.
Improving the Brand’s Search Engine Rankings by Re-Optimizing their Website
Search Engine Optimization is an all-important part of building a strong lead generation strategy. A good SEO strategy would give Element Homes more visibility online.
Here are the steps we took to re-optimize Element Home’s website –
✓ Audit the website to discover key SEO deficiencies. We found various weaknesses in the company’s overall SEO strategy. For example, the company didn’t have a strong content marketing strategy. Hence, incorporating relevant, high-quality keywords into the website was very difficult.
✓ We used keyword research tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, Google Keyword Planner, and more to discover relevant keywords. We uncovered the most suitable, long-tail keywords for the company’s core target audiences.
Using these tools, we determined strong ad group ideas and understood yearly keyword trends in this niche.
✓ The next step was launching a solid content marketing strategy on Element Home’s website. All content and multimedia on the site were optimized with relevant and targeted keywords.
✓ Once the optimized content was published on the company’s website, we kept checking its performance every week. The website’s visibility improved significantly in Google’s search results within three months. Consequently, the site experienced increases in its traffic.
Design an Image Gallery for the Company’s Renovation and Custom Home Projects
Element Homes has many exciting projects under its belt. It’s involved in constructing many attractive properties in Napa, Oakland, Saratoga, and other parts of California. However, the company’s website didn’t display any photos of these projects. After completing a technical audit of the company’s website, we designed a website gallery.
This gallery featured high-definition images of the company’s top construction projects. We asked the company to constantly send pictures of their custom home building projects. Each photograph was optimized with relevant, targeted keywords. As a result, the website had zero high-quality photos of their work to several new images. These photos helped the company establish trust in the minds of target audiences.
Highlight Past Residential Projects
The residential homebuilding industry in the US is worth over $205 billion. Element Homes is a relevant name in this industry. But, the custom home construction company’s website didn’t give off the vibe that it’s an industry leader. To fix that, we made the website responsive and mobile-optimized.
More importantly, after a complete redesign, the re-optimized website now features key highlights of the company’s previous achievements. We created a “Portfolio” section for the website.
In this section, users can check the company’s previous projects. Each project page features information about –
The residential project’s address (so that interested customers can review the company’s previous constructions by themselves).
✓ The number of rooms and features in the custom homes.
✓ Details about the floor plans inside each home.
✓ Additional design-related details of the homes’ exterior and interior features.
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Develop Content Marketing Strategies
Element Home’s website needs to have separate sections devoted to prospects and customers. To build a strong content marketing strategy for the company, we created –
✓ Separate floorplan pages for every custom home built by the company. We ensured all pages contained relevant, up-to-date, and high-definition images.
✓ We included localized pricing details on the website’s sales pages.
✓ Created community pages containing details about what it’s like living in specific locations where the company operates. Designed photo galleries for all homes built by the company with detailed and localized text descriptions.
✓ A blog section was also designed for Element Homes. In this section, in-house writers were asked to create relevantly, high-quality content for the company.
✓ Another section called “How It Works” was created to display the company’s building process. It was important for the company to share information about its lengthy, multi-phase homebuilding processes. In this section, interested
✓ customers learn how to start a custom home building process with Element Homes.
Creating Targeted Website Content, Implementing Conversion Optimization Strategies, and Creating Call-to-Action and Landing Pages
Publishing high-quality, targeted, and SEO-optimized content is the best way for a website to improve its search engine rankings. We created high-quality content for Element Homes and optimized it for search engines by –
✓ Including relevant keyword phrases several times throughout each content page.
✓ Strategically linking each blog page to relevant sources with high domain authority (to boost Element Home’s site authority).
✓ Updating the content regularly.
✓ Interlinking related blog posts from high-authority sources to give readers additional information about the topics.
✓ Integrating relevant keywords in page titles.
✓ Including description metadata in each webpage of the website to make it more search-engine friendly.
✓ Added well-designed “calls-to-action” underneath each webpage to ensure customers know how to kickstart business relationships with Element Homes.
We also created optimized landing pages for the website. A landing page converts 26% of all the traffic it receives on average. The strategy was simple.
Drive as much traffic as possible for the website with organic techniques like content marketing. Then, use the well-designed landing pages to convert at least 1/4th of organic traffic.
Highly Target Demographic Users
The Element Homes website was missing descriptions and meta tag titles. Their ideal customers lived in California and Washington. But, the keywords on their web pages weren’t optimized for that. To fix these issues –
✓ We added Meta Tag Titles and Meta Tags Descriptions on all web pages.
✓ We updated all the web pages by adding more “opt-in” forms. These forms helped users get in contact with the company more efficiently.
✓ Carried out in-depth keyword research to discover the hyper-relevant local search terms the site needed to be optimized for.
✓ Generate relevant content for the target audiences (aspiring custom homebuyers in the US).
✓ Use Google Analytics to identify key audience insights. They included – user behaviors (frequency of visits, engagement rates, etc.), user locations, user devices, etc.
Provide the Best Social Media Manager
Element Homes was in desperate need of high-quality social media marketing services. We helped the company create and implement a strategic social media strategy.
Assigning an active and well-equipped social media management team for the company was the first step. By posting quality content across various social media platforms, we could improve the brand’s overall online visibility.
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THE RESULTS
Improving Element Home’s overall website user experience was the main goal. To achieve this goal, we had to overcome various challenges.
Lower Bounce rate
Increase Site traffic
Daily number of calls from prospects – Monthly (300+)
Cost of customer acquisition – – $300 – $450
Traffic-to-lead ratios (Increase Conversion Rate)
Landing page conversions
According to a recent study, 97% of the world’s leading construction companies are involved in social media marketing. Building Home Element’s identity on social media channels was our main goal.
OVERALL IMPACT
Before partnering with a home builder digital marketing agency, Element Homes struggled to attract online leads. Within six months of partnering with our lead generation agency, the company’s lead generation capabilities improved drastically. Thanks to its robust SEO framework, the home building company’s website now receives 10 times more organic traffic.
All this additional traffic directly leads to more sales. Overall, this case study proves that homebuilder marketing companies are vital to the success of modern-day homebuilding companies. No matter how great you’re at building homes, finding buyers is difficult without a home builder’s digital marketing agency’s expertise.
Our lead generation company for real estate firms is so popular. We have monthly meetings with Element Home’s team to reassess their growth and future objectives. Every month, the company’s online presence and ability to draw leads improve.
Through our local lead generation strategies, you can be found in the search results and turn local traffic into customers.Talk to our Lead Generation Expert