Different digital strategies are put in place at various levels of the sales funnel. At ONeil we’ve spent years developing a strategy that directly correlates to a home buyer’s journey. From the beginning, when they might not even know that they want to buy a new home, to the end when they’re handed the keys, there’s a digital marketing solution that effectively targets the buyer. Moving home buyers down the funnel takes time and skill. Below we breakdown the strategies to use at each level of the home buying cycle.
Image Author: Seobility Conversion Funnel, License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Top of Funnel
At the top, we’re really only trying to get eyeballs -We want people to take a look at the ad, see my clients name and their brand and bring awareness to it. We want a broad reach and a high frequency so that our clients brand sticks in the minds of the people who view the ads. If those people happen to also click on the ad and visit the clients website, that’s great too. This type of digital ad is the billboard of advertising. This is a great time to employ an external email campaign.
Middle of Funnel
There’s also the ever important middle of the funnel, those are the people with whom we’ve built some brand awareness but might not be quite ready to buy a home. Maybe, they’re at the beginning stages of thinking about moving and they’re doing research. We want those people to not just see our ad, but to also visit the website and take a look around. We want them to look at the various locations in which our clients build, to check out some floor plans, maybe view a pre-filmed video tour and look at the available quick move-in homes available so they can see what the builder has to offer.
In this part of the funnel, we employ a combination of display and search ads including retargeting. We ask for specific conversion events that apply to someone who is in the research phase of the home buying process. We’re trying to bring people back to your website to further engage with it. We’re pulling down people that we introduced to your brand at the top of the funnel.
Bottom of Funnel
Generally speaking, targeting someone towards the bottom of the funnel is a lot more expensive than the top. On the flip side, you only need so many people on the bottom while at the top, we’re looking for as many eyeballs as possible. But at the bottom, We need more investment from the person we’re trying to reach. We need them to show us that they’re really and truly interested in what our client is selling, in our case, we want them to be interested in buying a home. And the intent we’re looking for is a lead on the clients website. We want them to actively try and contact the builder.
Remarketing is key here. The more we can remind people about your homes, the more likely they are to purchase. This is like the shoes you looked at on the Nordstrom website that now follow you all over the Internet relentlessly until you finally pull the trigger and buy them. In fact, that’s why we call our proprietary marketing Google and Facebook marketing product, Follow. We’ve designed a solution that enables home builders to take advantage of tools that were previously only available to ecommerce sites.
Each of these three levels of the funnel are considered when we build out our client strategy and we set up our campaigns to help move a person through that funnel and into the hands of our builder’s sales people who then get to turn them into buyers.
We build the strategy based on that cycle and knowing which types of ads are appropriate for each level of the funnel. We know what costs are expected to be associated with each ad type and segment your budget accordingly. Knowing that this is always fluid and at certain times we may need to move the budget around to increase one level of the funnel over another. We also take into consideration the average timeline of new home buyers when building the audiences, strategies and campaigns. If you’d like us to help you move home buyers through your sales funnel, drop us an email.
