3 min read
Background
Evergreen Homes is a semi-custom home builder located in Canton, Michigan and has been in business since 2008. Jon Goldman, owner of Evergreen Homes, approached us in an effort to increase leads, and to optimize the Evergreen Homes website. Our team implemented marketing strategies to optimize their website for conversions, track leads by source, and increase overall leads for the company.
"Builder Funnel has established the tools and strategies to help us track all marketing information. We now have a much clearer understanding of this valuable data and have built a large database of customers and prospective customers for current and future marketing purpose." - Jon Goldman
The Problem
Evergreen Homes had recently updated their website and had invested heavily in their new web presence and overall branding. Website traffic was growing as a result. However, while their website was updated and bringing good web traffic, the website was not truly optimized to generate leads. Instead, visitors were coming to the site and leaving without actually taking any steps towards contacting Jon and his team. As a result, they were not getting many new opportunities to talk to prospects.
A big reason this problem was occurring? Today's home buyers have a different buying behavior than they did in the past. Previously, buyers would visit multiple homes and talk to different home builders before making their decision to buy.
Today’s homebuyers, however, often educate themselves online before even talking to a real estate agent or home builder. Once they do talk to a home builder, they have already made many decisions, including which home builder they would like to work with. For Jon and Evergreen Homes, this meant that people were visiting his site, but very rarely was Jon ever able to talk to his potential clients.
The Solution
Part 1 - Optimize
We were able to find immediate opportunities that would generate more leads for Evergreen Homes. One of the primary strategies we immediately implemented was adding conversion opportunities on the website in the form of brochures, eBooks, and other premium content offerings. For example, we took their already existing brochures for one of the popular communities and created landing pages, forms, and follow-up emails for these brochures.
“Prior to working with Builder Funnel, our greatest challenge was understanding who was coming to our website, where they come from, and what they were doing on our site." - Jon Goldman
Once these conversion opportunities were in place, Evergreen Homes was able to capture leads from the website giving Jon more opportunities to talk to people looking to build a home. During the first month of working with our team, Evergreen Homes was able to capture 18 new leads. After a few months, new leads increased to an average of 34.5 leads per month, an incredible increase from less than 5.
Part 2 - Analyze
Now that Evergreen Homes was able to convert new leads with their website, it was important to understand where those leads were coming from. We were able to track the number of leads and which channels were producing the most leads each month.
Throughout the first 6 months, our team experimented with many new paid promotions (Adwords, Facebook Ads, etc) and monitored traffic from Social Media, Organic Traffic, and other traffic sources.
Throughout the first 6 months, we were able to determine which sources were producing the most leads. This helped us to better understand where we should focus our efforts, and what marketing strategies were making the most impact.
Leads by Source
After researching traffic and lead information each, it was apparent that Organic Traffic (traffic from search engines) was the primary source of leads. We learned that developing and implementing a strong SEO strategy was going to be the best way to grow the business.
Part 3 - Increase Traffic
The company that built the site had originally managed the SEO for the website. The strategy used by the website designers was very narrowly focused. As a result, Evergreen Homes was missing out on opportunities to rank for a variety of keywords. We viewed this as an opportunity to improve their SEO presence and increase organic traffic across the board.
During the three months before working with us (starting in June), Evergreen Homes was averaging about 373.3 visits per month from Organic Traffic resulting in 1 to 4 leads per month from this source. By next spring, they were averaging just over 610 visits per month from Organic Traffic resulting in an average of 11 to 16 leads per month from Organic Traffic
Organic Traffic Increased by 63.4% while leads from organic traffic increased by 420%.
Final Takeaways
We are Builder Funnel, a digital marketing agency with roots in the construction industry that deeply understands who you are and how you operate. We work exclusively with remodelers and home builders, and we're here to market your business so you can sustainably get results this year, next year, and 10 years from now.
Contact us to start the conversation! Whether we're a good fit or you'd be best served internally or by another company, we'll give you actionable tips you can use immediately and help you evaluate your options.