How’s your website working? Is it helping you sell homes?
Do you get 100s of visitors per month? 1000s? Or 10s of thousands even? Do you know?
How about your leads? Is that traffic converting to leads, or is everyone just bouncing off your site and going on their merry way down the internet information super highway?
If you’re reading this and you DON’T have a website, you need to fix that. Today. Don’t even finish reading this. Find an ad agency (like Bild Media…đ), and have them build you a website asap. You CANNOT do good business in 2024 without one. It’s not an investment that you can put off any longer.
If you’re part of the group that does have a website, I’ve got some tips below that will help you make it perform better in 2025.
1. Home Buyer Testimonials
Did you know that 92% of buyers read online testimonials and reviews before deciding which business they will purchase from? How do your reviews look?
If they look good, then you definitely need to get them all over your website. If a potential home buyers visits your site, you want them to see how happy other home buyers have been doing business with you. If theyâre not good, now is the time to ask former customers to give you some good reviews. 9 times out of 10 happy customers will leave a good review if theyâre asked.
Here’s a script you can use to solicit some great reviews:
“Hi Mr. Customer. This is David, from Finneyâs Home Center. I hope youâre enjoying your new home! Iâd like to ask a favor. Would you please leave us a 5 star review on our Google business page? Weâre a locally owned business, and 5 star reviews help us compete with the large, corporate stores. If you didnât have a 5 star experience, please give me a call at this number. I want to make things right.
â¨Hereâs the link for that 5 star review. Thanks for the help!”
2. Use Exterior Home Images
If someone showed you the image above and said, âDo you want to buy this?â, would you know what theyâre selling? Of course you would – it’s a home. But what if they showed you a picture of a kitchen? Does that make it clear what’s being sold? If I saw a picture of a kitchen, I certainly wouldn’t assume that someone is selling a home. Would you?
When you show an image of the homes youâre selling, you need to show the home itself before you show anything else. Our minds have been conditioned to look at the exterior of a thing before we look at the interior, and you need to do the same on your website.
3. Avoid Computer Renderings
Itâs recently become popular for manufacturers to provide their retailers with computer renderings of their homes in lieu of actual photographs. Do not use these renderings in any of your marketing. They donât convert well, and users do not like them. Real photographs are always better than computer renderings.
4. Simple Contact Forms
If you want your website to generate leads, it needs to be EASY for a website user to submit their contact info. All you need to ask for is their name, phone number, and an optional message. Donât try to qualify the lead via the website with question about home location, loan types, down payment info, etc. The website is there to generate leads, not qualify them. It is a marketing tool, not a sales tool.
5. Lots of CTAs (Calls To Action)
At this point in the evolution of manufactured housing, a website is a lead collection tool, not a sales tool. No one is swiping their credit card to pay for a new home. This means that you need to make it VERY clear that you want your website users to submit their contact info. There should be multiple buttons on every page that website users can click to submit their info to be contact by a salesperson. Donât leave any doubt in your customers mind that you want to hear from them.
6. Mobile vs. Manufactured Home
Yes, according to the HUD code implemented in 1976, the term âmobile homeâ was replaced with âmanufactured home.â However, home buyers are still calling our homes âmobile homesâ. And when they search online, theyâre looking for âmobile homeâ keywords ten times more than theyâre searching for âmanufactured homes.â To keep your website ranking up, you must use both âmobile homeâ AND âmanufactured homeâ terminology on your website.
7. Mobile Optimization
50-75% of your website traffic is on a mobile device. Your website needs to equally as functional on a mobile device as it is on a desktop computer. There is no way around this. Just looking good on mobile wonât cut it anymore â websites must function well on a mobile device too. If photos donât look right, text overlaps, or buttons donât work, you are losing business.