Like most businesses, real estate has moved on from just local marketing. Now a successful website must keep up with technological advancements, and it’s become a fairly sophisticated science to create a website that is both appealing to buyers and achieves your ultimate goals. There’s a lot that goes into a traditional real estate website, and several more new and modern design elements are required to keep a website up to date with technology and competitors. If you’re looking for a real estate website that sells, consider the following tips.
1. Determine Your Purpose, Audience, and Value
Before you do anything, it’s important to know three things: your audience, your purpose, and the value you can provide your audience. Begin by determining your target demographic. Get as specific as possible. For example, you might add “family home renters in Houston, TX” to the list.
Next, establish your purpose. “Thinking about your website as something beyond just an online brochure can set your website and your business apart from your competition,” according to this blog post from Fusionfarm, web design and marketing specialists. “It also can ensure that your investment in a website is getting you the return you need to make the investment worthwhile.”
Deciding that purpose involves using design to prompt your visitors to perform an action. If you want your clients to contact you by phone, you’ll craft calls to action to direct users to your phone number. If you want them to subscribe to your newsletter, you’ll employ design techniques that lead them there.
Finally, regulate the value. In other words, determine exactly what perks you can offer so that visitors will use your website or contact you. If you can’t think of a solid list of reasons that visitors will want to contact you over other companies, seriously evaluate your position and make any necessary changes.
2. Integrate Facebook
Social media is incredibly important for bringing customers to you, and Facebook is the most important one of all for real estate. “You can use Facebook to create highly targeted advertisements,” according to this blog post from Green Residential, expert property managers. “Facebook is currently the most conducive social media platform for marketing [real estate].” By integrating social buttons directly on your site and leveraging social media to share your content, your website can seamlessly integrate into the helpful world of social media.
3. Use WordPress Real Estate Themes
There isn’t always a need to build a website from scratch. By using web hosting, like WordPress, and the right selection of unique real estate themes, you’ll be halfway there. The themes will have already integrated some of the most important design elements for your real estate website, and pretty much all you’ll have to do is fill in the content.
4. Design to Drive Action
A good real estate website will show readers a clear path to take in order to achieve the desired goal. The best way to do this is to create a simple website design that offers a clear call to action on every page. The design of the website should read more like a compelling story than a business card or a company bio.
Using strong imaging, clever phrasing, and the occasional testimonial, lure the reader to your website and then put up a strong call to action that will seal the deal, such as “sign up for our newsletter today” once they’ve made their way through your homepage.
5. Make It Responsive
Finally, it’s getting to the point where almost no website can find success if it can’t be accessed on multiple devices. It’s important to optimize your website for mobile, tablet, and other devices so that your viewers can enjoy a quality experience, no matter where they’re looking up your website. The best way to do this is to test your website on multiple devices. If it’s running too slow on any of them, make some changes to improve it.
Your real estate business will only be as successful as your website in this day and age, but if you take a step back, recognize room for improvement, and make the necessary changes, your website will bring in more customers, guaranteed.