Three Strategies to Increase Qualified Leads for Your Project

So while we all want millions of leads, I’ve come to realise that what you really want are qualified leads for your project.

While selling properties online is a numbers game, you need to focus on what matters, and that is talking to qualified buyers who are ready and willing to act.

All our team care about is the cost per lead, quality of leads and ongoing communication.

So let me run through the three strategies we increase lead quality.

1. Create multiple campaigns to target different profiles

Clients we work with often think they have only one buyer profile for their project but what we have found is that there are often 2 – 3 different buyer profiles that would be interested.

So, what happens is that they only create one campaign message for the entire project and hope it appeals to that one demographic. But when your message is weak or irrelevant, the leads you generate are weak, too, because it didn’t resonate or evoke an emotional response.

Television and radio was once the only way to reach a mass audience and the cost of these campaigns was hugely expensive, so the safest way to market their product was to ensure they created vanilla messages to appeal to the widest possible audience at the cheapest price, almost like a spray and pray.

With the evolution of digital marketing, you can now segment your buyer profiles into niche avatars and create advertising campaigns that target the emotional reasons of why your project would solve their problems on a granular level. The more clarity you can have around how your development makes them feel, the more refined your leads will be.

Remember, the emotional and lifestyle reasons why a downsizer will want to purchase a $1 million apartment with river views are hugely different to the young professional who is looking to enter the property market, yet these two buyers could end up being neighbours. The art is in the way you individually tailor these messages to reach these target audiences differently.

And 30 years ago on TV, you just didn’t have that sort of budget to become so niche.

Our agency’s property marketing team never start working on a campaign until they research who the buyers are by using the ABS Census, reviewing historic results across our different projects and working intimately with the property developer and their marketing team.

Successful property developments all have a story that becomes their unique selling proposition and people, particularly millennials, buy WHY you do something, not what you do.

You need to stand for something. The best clients we work with understand that. Good developers sell features and benefits whilst great developers build lifestyles.

2. Qualifying leads before they get to you

To reduce the amount of click happy people who randomly submit enquiries because they’re Facebook addicts, we have found that 2 – 3 additional qualifying questions on the Facebook Lead Forms will increase the connect rates of the enquiries and give more data rich information to the sales team.

With every additional question, you add to a Facebook Lead Form, expect an increase of 30% to your cost per lead, so by adding 3 questions, you will fundamentally double the cost per lead because it halves your lead volume whilst increase your lead conversion rate by 50%. Again, quality is what we want.

With Landing Page enquiries, we also improve lead quality by asking multiple questions to test their intention to buy.

With one particular project, we were given feedback by a developer that some leads were uncontactable because their phone numbers were wrong. We immediately reviewed Google Analytics data and observed that 70% of all enquiries are done via mobile devices, therefore we concluded that buyers must have made typos (or have fat fingers). Our team came up with a solution by creating a double opt in and asked buyers to confirm their contact details again. This increased both connection rate and enquiry quality!

If you have floorplans or pricelists, we encourage you to gate this content so interested buyers have to enter their names and emails before they can download it, thus becoming a “hot lead”. This strategy ensures that we give buyers access to information they want while you achieve a conversion.

Now think about it, if someone has taken the time to Google your development, then go through to your Landing Page, read all the information about your off plan apartments, then make an enquiry, answers 2 -3 questions and double confirm their contact details, how seriously do you think this lead is?

Or will your sales team still think they’re lonely and wait for a display suite walk in, then complain that your project is overpriced, the leads are shit or you need more marketing budget for newspaper and print?

3. Using AB Split Testing to find the winner

·       Copywriting Ads – Long form vs. Short form

·       Headlines – Emotional or Numbers

·       Source of traffic – Passive vs Active

·       Quality of leads – Landing Page vs. Facebook Lead forms

·       Google AdWords – Effective key terms that convert

Without drilling into the boring details, you basically need to be split testing campaigns. It’s not what you think will work, but rather allowing the market to tell you what is effective and what strategies generate the most leads.

Our team split test:

Long form vs. short form copywriting but 90% of the time long form copy bring in higher quality leads because they:

1. Tell a story
2. It’s punchy and emotional
3. They act as another barrier to entry to qualify the leads further

Headlines because you have less than half a second to get someone’s attention both on social media and Google Ads.

Source of traffic and traffic flow because generating leads from Landing Page is higher quality than Facebook Lead Forms so I always split our budget between generating leads directly from Facebook and using it to drive traffic to the Landing Page.

Landing Pages also need to be continuously updated as the narrative and literature of the project evolves. By changing the Landing Page colour palette for a recent project, we saw a 300% spike in enquiries within 48 hours. This is the power of digital – you don’t have to wait weeks to know if you’re hitting the mark.

Google Ads need constant review because while you’re paying for particular key terms if they’re not converting into an enquiry, it means you’ve either:

1. Bid on the wrong terms and your product isn’t what the buyer is looking for
2. Your Landing page isn’t converting
3. And whichever one it is, use this is data to make immediate changes.

So there you have it, the step by step methodology our team uses to increase lead quality because for us, Volume + Quality = Sales Success.