Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Is your website failing to convert visitors into homebuyer leads? Imagine doubling your leads overnight with one simple trick. Sounds too good to be true, but it's actually really easy to do. Most builders are leaving money on the table without even knowing it, watching their potential clients slip away. It's frustrating, isn't it? But here's the game changer. Strategic CTA's on just your top five pages can turn your website into a lead generating machine. In this episode, you'll learn exactly how to implement this powerful HubSpot strategy. You'll learn which pages to target, what CTA's to use, and how to maximize them for optimal impact. Now, this isn't just theory. It's a proven method for filling your pipeline and selling homes ready to turn your website traffic into a steady stream of qualified leads? Stick with me, because number two is something that 90% of home builders miss. Let's dive in and supercharge our website's performance. Hey, it's Jeff, and welcome to another episode of the Homebuilder marketing and growth show. In this segment of HubSpot hacks for home builders, we're going to be exploring calls to action. Specifically, which pages you should put your calls to action on so that you can drastically increase your lead flow. So why do CTA's on your top pages matter? Well, number one is it increases your conversion opportunities. Your top pages receive the most amount of website traffic, and so optimizing calls to action on those pages gives you increased opportunities to generate more leads. And which calls to action that you use and where you place them on your website can drastically increase your lead generation capability and help you sell more homes. What it comes down to is we want to capitalize on visitor interest when they're engaged with our website. Now, another reason why having CTA's on your top pages can matter is it can actually improve the user experience on your website. Now, a lot of marketers shy away from pop ups and slide ins and calls to action like that, but they actually can be really valuable for your website visitors in that it gives them the logical next step to follow in their sales process or in their home buying journey. They actually provide clear pathways for your website visitors to understand your product offerings or to get in touch with you. And calls to action can actually answer the question, what now? When website visitors are ready to take action. Now, the third reason why putting calls to action on your top pages is important is because it helps you to maximize on the value of your traffic. It helps you to turn passive visitors into active leads or customers. It increases the ROI of your existing traffic without having to drive more traffic. And it leverages the pages on your website that are already performing well to help drive business growth. All right, so how do we identify our top five pages? What we need to do is go into HubSpot's analytics tools. All right, so for those that are just listening to this podcast episode, we're going to dive into HubSpot and do a screen share. So I encourage you to review the episode when you have an opportunity to and view the video that goes along with it. All right, so here I am inside my HubSpot portal on the left sidebar. I'm going to go down to reporting and then I'm going to click on reports.
[00:03:18] When the reports screen loads up, I'm going to click on traffic and then I'm going to click on the pages tab. So the first thing that you want to do is scroll down in your pages and look at which pages have the most amount of views over the last 30 days. So this gives you an idea in the last 30 days where your traffic is coming to. Now, the other thing that you should do is you want to compare this to the last 90 days. So you can click on in the last 30 days beside date range and you can change that to the last 90 days. This gives you a larger window and it's going to show you it's going to remove some element of seasonality out of it so you can scroll down and see. Now the views have updated and it's giving me a better idea of which content on my website has the most amount of views. Now the other thing that you should do as well is change that date range one more time and look at it over the last you can look at it over the last 180 days or even the last 365 days. But the last 180 days gives you a solid six month window and that should be the definitive pages that have received the most amount of views on your website.
[00:04:31] So you want to look at what are the top five pages that have received the most views. So what are some of the common high traffic pages for home builders? Well, number one will probably be your homepage. Homepages typically receive the most amount of traffic on a website and so you'll see that pop up. It should be in your top five for sure. Another common high traffic page might be your gallery or your portfolio of completed homes. Oftentimes visitors want to see what work you've done and visualize it and get an idea of what their home may look like another common high traffic page is going to be your page with your models or your floor plans or your home designs. Again, people want to see what it is that you build so that they can get an idea of do you offer something that's a good fit for them. Another common high traffic page might be your communities or your neighborhoods page showing where you build. Or it could be your projects page showing what active projects or developments that you're working on. And another common high traffic page might be your about us page or your team member profiles. Because people want to know more about you as a builder and what your story is, and they want to see who they might work with if they hire you to build their next home. Okay, so the next step that we want to do is we want to align our page content with the goals of our calls to action. So to do that, you have to consider the intent behind each page visit. So for example, are they doing research or are they trying to do comparisons? Or are they ready to buy? And you want to match the CTA's offer to that visitor's most likely stage in the buying journey. And when you ensure that that call to action has relevance, you increase the likelihood of getting a conversion from that visitor. So the most common question around calls to action is what should I offer my visitor? My recommendation is always focusing on utility. How can you offer a piece of premium content or some kind of a download that is going to make that prospect's decision making and research along their home buying journey just a little bit easier? The other types of content that you can look at, creating or offering in your calls to action are things like summaries. So as an example, if somebody goes to a community page and they're trying to learn more about a particular community that you build in, your call to action on that page could be a downloadable community brochure or area guide. If they're visiting your models page, maybe you have a model overview brochure. Oftentimes it's really easy for us to create a piece of downloadable content that is just a summary of what is already on the page. And I get asked often, what is the value in that for the visitor? And I think we need to take a step back as marketers and understand that life is constantly happening for everybody. Just because somebody's on your website right now doesn't mean that they're not going to get distracted. The phone can ring, somebody can knock on their door, their kids might start fighting. We are all constantly distracted in life. And so when you offer a call to action on a webpage, you have the opportunity to not only finish delivering the content of that page, but also provide value and capture a lead at the same time. And once you've captured that lead, now you can follow up with that lead over the long term, nurture them along through their entire buying journey. All right, so let's talk about optimizing CTA's for maximum performance.
[00:08:02] We're going to dive back into the HubSpot portal now, and we're going to go to our calls to action section. So I'm back inside my HubSpot portal. I've gone to the left hand sidebar and I've hovered over top of marketing, and I'm going to click on CTA's that's going to open up my CTA's page inside of my portal. Now, one important thing that I want to point out is that recently HubSpot updated their calls to action. So if you see over here, there's a drop down where it says CTA's. If you click on that drop down, you have two options. You have CTa's and you have CTA's legacy. Now, the new CTA's are wonderful. They have a lot more layouts, a lot more functionality. They've made huge strides in their progress with CTA's. The one thing that is a little disappointing, that was unfortunate to see is when they rolled out their new CTA's, they don't have split testing capability yet. So if you want to split test your CTA, and what that means is that if you want to create two different calls to action and split your traffic 50 50 between the two of them to see which one pulls better, to see which one converts at a higher rate. In order to do that, you have to use a legacy CTA. HubSpot has announced that before they get rid of the legacy CTA's, they will have that split testing capability put into the new CTA's, which is great news. So clicking on that dropdown on the left, you can choose between the new CTA's or the legacy CTA's. So for this video, we're going to create a call to action for one of our pages. We're going to go through it really quick. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, but there's a couple of things that I want to show you. So I'm going to click on the right hand side here, I'm going to click on create, and this is going to open up our CTA wizard. Now, there's a number of different HubSpot templates that have already been created that you can take and modify and make your own. So you have things like an event registration slide in preview, you have a live webinar registration pop up. There's pop ups to download content like ebooks. There's all sorts of different lead capture pop ups and different templates and whatnot in here. So there's a good selection to start out with. So you can take any one of these slide ins or any one of these calls to action, update it with your brand and your design and your offer, and make it your own. So beside the search bar at the top is a drop down called type. And if you click on that, you can see the four different types of calls to action that HubSpot has built into their system. They have banners, they have pop ups, they have slide ins, and then they have embedded calls to action. So you can utilize more than one of these calls to action to increase your likelihood of capturing a lead from a page. And so what I mean by that is maybe you create a pop up window and that pops up after they've been on that page for seven or ten or 15 seconds, whatever works for you. So you can create a pop up that says, hey, download our free, you know, let's go with the community guide for this one. So we, they're on a community page, hey, download our free area guide, find out more about this exciting new community. And then we could also have a slide in. And that slide in could be triggered when somebody gets 50% of the way through that webpage. So they've scrolled 50% of the page and then that slide in comes in and makes the same offer. Once again, you could utilize at the bottom of that page an embedded call to action. And again, it's another offer, another attempt to try to convert a lead on that page.
[00:11:45] Then you could utilize an exit intent pop up. So what that means is when they go to leave the page and go back, click the back button in their browser, they get a pop up that says wait, before you go, don't forget to download our area guide. So you can stack these different calls to actions on your page. Because the first pop up might not get them, they might dismiss it right away because they haven't had much time to really take the page in and see what content is there. And maybe they ignore the slide in and maybe they ignore the embedded call to action at the bottom of the page. But that exit intent pop up, those can be really effective for generating a lead when somebody is about to leave your page. So you can stack these up. And I recommend that you start with one and try it out, or maybe one or two. But don't be afraid to stack those calls to action because what we want to do is take every opportunity that we can to generate a lead from these high traffic pages. But the caveat to that is we need to make sure that we're not disrupting the user experience. So you don't want all kinds of pop ups and all kinds of distractions to be happening all the time. So take a look at your statistics for each one of your pages. Look at how much time people spend on those pages. If you use heat mapping software like hotjar or mouse flow, you can see how people actually view that page and then you can determine where it makes the most sense to do a slide in or put an embedded call to action. Okay, so let's take a look at the pop ups. So pop ups are a form of CTA that I really like to use because they're really effective. They do disrupt the user's experience on that webpage. But if your offer is relevant and not really pushy and it helps them to get what they need, they can be very effective. So like I said, two common strategies for a pop up are having them pop up after a particular amount of time that somebody's been on your webpage or I. The one that I like to use the most is the exit intent pop up. So after somebody's finished viewing your page and they go to go back in their browser, the popup will trigger and say, hey wait, before you go, don't forget to take this with you. So I've sorted these calls to action by popup and I have a few different options. Now, the thing to keep in mind with HubSpot is that it was built out of the box as a b two b software tool, but it's incredibly powerful for b two c. Right? Business consumer, for home builders especially, you just need to take one of these different templates and make it your own and make it relevant. So for this example, I'm going to go down to the content pop up and we are going to pretend that we're creating a ebook download. So the ebook could be that community guide or that area guide like we're talking about. So I'm going to click on choose template. So HubSpot uses a drag and drop builder and I'm not going to spend the time to actually build a call to action here but what I want to focus on are just some of the different targeting and options that's relevant to our top most visited web pages.
[00:14:39] So inside of targeting we have some options for creating this call to action. We can have it so that it triggers on a page scroll and you can select what percentage of the page needs to be scrolled before that call to action pops up. We have the trigger on exit intent, which is the one I've been talking about. It's one that I really like and I find to be very useful and very efficient. And then we have trigger after elapsed time. So it's going to start tracking how long that visitor has been on the page. And when they hit, however many seconds that you put in, it will pop up. And then another triggering option that we have is trigger after inactivity. So if the visitor has been on your page but they haven't scrolled and they haven't moved for a certain length of time, you can have that pop up, pop up on their screen and say, hey, you still there? Thought maybe you might like this offer. I haven't spent a lot of time working with this one. Okay, so the next thing under targeting is where will this be shown? And so we want to put our top page in there, whatever page it is that we're optimizing our call to action for. This is where we want to put our website URL. So it says when website URL is and you want to select contains, the reason why you want to do contains and not is, is because sometimes you'll get modifiers in your URL and those modifiers can throw things off. And then you can select who this is going to be shown to. So you can select all visitors if it's a broad or a general piece of content, or you can select filtered visitors and then you can select who specifically that is known in your HubSpot portal is going to see this particular call to action.
[00:16:13] And then lastly we're going to have how often will this be shown? So if somebody comes to your website and they close that call to action, they don't fill it out or they just return to your website later. You can set how many days or weeks or months pass before that pop up is triggered again for that particular visitor.
[00:16:31] So that's your targeting options. And then the last tab that we have here is options. So we're going to go to that. And this gives you some additional settings. So for example, you can shut off your pop up so that it doesn't show up on small screen sizes like mobile devices and tablet devices. You can also add that call to action to a particular marketing campaign, and this helps you to track how effective that marketing campaign is in generating leads and building your list. And ultimately in closing new business. You have options here for click tracking so that you can track clicks through redirect or through the browser. And then you also have scheduling options so that you can schedule a pop up to show up on a page only for a certain length of time, or set an unpublished date and time so that when that time passes, the pop up will stop being triggered.
[00:17:18] So that's kind of the options here for your popups. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about CTA design best practices. So ultimately, the design of our call to action is going to impact its ability to convert leads to be effective, to get clicked on. So what are some of the things that you should consider when setting up and creating a call to action on your webpage? Number one is that you want to use contrasting colors so that that call to action stands out from the rest of your page. So for example, within your brand kit, you might have blues and greens as your prominent color on your website. What you might want to do is your call to action buttons make those a different color, like an orange or a yellow, something that's going to stand out and not blend in with the rest of your website design. That's going to draw the eye to that particular call to action and help it get noticed. Then that's the first battle. The next thing that we want to do is make sure that the text or the copy that we include in our call to action is clear and concise and action oriented. So the best way to create your call to action text is to fill in the blanks from the prospect's point of view. Fill in the blank of I want to blank so I want to subscribe to the newsletter. I want to download the guide. The words that you choose to fill in the blank with make for a very impactful and strong call to action. It's also important to make sure that your calls to action begin with a verb because you want them to be action oriented. So subscribe, download, register, that sort of thing. Now, when you create your calls to action, you're going to want to preview that call to action on both a desktop as well as on a mobile device and a tablet. You want to ensure that the calls to action that you're creating look great on all three different versions. Now, like I pointed out, you do have the option of shutting off your call to action on smaller screens, try to avoid that as much as possible, especially on smaller screens. If you look at your website traffic analytics, you're probably finding that you're getting more traffic and more visitors coming in on a mobile device these days than you are on a desktop. And from the research and the focus groups that we've done, we've found that a lot of times earlier in the home buying journey, people tend to visit your website from a mobile device. But ultimately, when they really start to look at you and strongly consider you as the builder that they want to work with, they're going to move to a desktop device or a laptop in order to get the full viewing experience of what it is that you have to offer. But it's important, especially early in that buying journey. We want to capture those leads so that we can nurture them for the long term. So make sure that the calls to action that you are putting on those top visited pages are mobile friendly. My last design tip for you is important. Don't be afraid of whitespace. Whitespace and design while it can sometimes feel like wasted space, it's actually used to help draw the eye into the call to action. So if you picture a call to action on a webpage and there's a lot of other information and design elements around that particular call to action, sometimes it will blend in and it's hard for it to stand out. But when you add some additional white space around that call to action, it kind of stands out on its own a little bit more. So you'll find that you'll get increased conversion rates on your calls to action when you properly utilize whitespace. So don't be afraid of whitespace in your design. Whitespace is very important and plays a really big role. The next thing you can do to optimize your CTA's for maximum impact is making sure that your CTA's are relevant to that page. So we touched on this one a little bit already. What you want to do is make sure that you're creating CTA's specifically for that page instead of trying to use broader or more general calls to action. Now, sometimes this can be harder to implement. Sometimes you will struggle to find an appropriate call to action for that webpage. But one of the things that you can look at is if you don't have a strong call to action for that web page, try making your offer your newsletter subscription so you can have a pop up that says hey. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our latest updates and find out the new communities we're building in or however you want to pitch that newsletter subscription, be the first to know. But you should always first look at a way to create a call to action that's relevant to the page, relevant to the content. So I gave some examples earlier. Community guides, model brochures or floor plan layouts, things like that that you can offer as a download. Always look for utility like I mentioned, that's one of the easiest ways and the highest converting ways to get new leads is to offer some form of utility around the content that's on your page. So that can be things like checklists, worksheets, that sort of thing. And then lastly, like I mentioned, stack CTA's on your page. So have a scroll in 25% of the way down your page. Have an embedded call to action at the bottom of your page. Have an exit intent pop up for when that visitor goes to leave that webpage. So don't be afraid to stack up your calls to action in order to really increase the likelihood of you being able to generate a lead from that page. Remember that every visitor that comes to our website that we don't capture their contact information and identify their buyer Persona and where they are in the home buying journey is a missed opportunity. In most cases, those visitors are going to buy a home and it's either going to be a resale or they're going to buy from one of your competitors if they don't buy from you. So we want to do everything that we can to capture that lead and then use our follow up lead, nurturing our follow up content to convince them that yes, buying new is a better decision than buying resale first and foremost. But ultimately that buying a home from you versus one of your competitors is the smartest buying decision that they can make. Now, the last step in optimizing your calls to action to increase your conversion rates is making sure that you utilize split testing. And like I mentioned before, if you go into HubSpot, into the calls to action, and you click on that drop down and you select legacy, that's where you can access HubSpot's old call to action tools where you can still set up a b split tests. And again, so let's use the example of creating that community guide as a download. We can create two versions, version a and version b, and they will run simultaneously on the website so that every visitor gets either version a or b. And ultimately, over time, you're going to see that one of them gets a higher amount of click throughs than the other that's your winner. When you identify a clear winner, statistically correct. When you identify that winner, then what you want to do is eliminate the loser and create a new variation and test again. So a b split testing is something that you don't, it's not one and done. You do it continuously over time. And because of how easy it is to split test things inside a HubSpot that should be part of your standard operating procedures whenever you create a new landing page or create a call to action. Now again, when we recorded this episode, HubSpot is kind of in limbo between their new calls to action experience and the old one. And you can only set up split testing using the old one. And unfortunately that means you can't use some of the new tools inside of the new call to action platform. So maybe what you want to do in that case is determine which one or two calls to action do we want to split test. And then you can use the new tools like the slide ins and pop ups and stuff like that also on that page. So you're using both. The other thing that you can do is when you're doing a split test on a CTA and you start understanding like hey, this color outperforms that color or this ad copy outperforms that ad copy. You can take what you've learned from that data and then go into HubSpot's new call to actions and modify and update your calls to action based on the information that you learned from the legacy ones. So what kind of things can you split test? Well, you can split test images, you can split test button colors, you can split test copy or text, you can split test placement, or you can split test your offer. Now what I would recommend doing if you're going to utilize split testing is the first thing that you do is you start off with two completely different versions. So you have version a and then you completely redesign a version b that looks totally different, uses different ad copy, everything. That's how you want to determine what your starting point is. Then whichever one of those two is the winner, then you start creating variations and versions of the winner to start to optimize it to work even better. So the very first split test that you do use two completely different layouts and then use what you learn from your split test after that to optimize the winner. Alright, so I hope you enjoyed that strategy for being able to drastically increase the amount of conversions and leads that you're generating from your website by focusing on those top five most visited pages. If there's anything that I can suggest is that if you are in need of more leads, this should be the first thing that you look at. So go page by page, start on the number one most visited page on your website and come up with a relevant offer and create a call to action in order to start generating leads. Then when that's done, then you can move on to your second most visited page. But put time on your calendar to make sure that you're implementing this top five most visited page CTA strategy because it can drastically increase the number of leads that you generate from your website and ultimately help you to hit your sales targets and sell more homes than you thought. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of HubSpot Hacks Home Builder Edition. We've got more episodes like this coming out soon where we dive into different marketing tactics and then we also have segments that we have guests from the industry come in and join us and we have a really great conversation around that. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe. Please share it with a colleague. The show is still new. We're trying to do everything we can to build the audience. And again, I hope you got a lot of value out of this. I love you guys and we'll see you in the next episode.
