Landing pages are essential components of a well-rounded real estate digital marketing strategy, and every successful real estate website employes them one way or another.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is essentially the web page people access after clicking on a banner, text ad, or a promotional link. And, while you can choose any page of your website to act as a landing page, it will better serve you to design a different one for each specific marketing campaign and goal.
Landing pages are web pages on the same domain as your official website created for special promotions and never deceiving or divisive mechanisms to get links and page rank. Instead, they target specific audiences and offer value to the users. They are part of well-designed marketing campaigns that focus on a particular audience niche giving them incentives to opt-in for services a company provides.
Good landing pages are well designed and avoid nagging or annoying users into:
reading too much text
fill in cumbersome forms
insert phone numbers
give out physical addresses
give out credit card details
pay for something
A landing page is not:
A splash page: A visually striking intro to more in-depth content, including full websites or online games. Surfers disliked splash pages, especially those made in Flash.
A bridge page: Like doorways or gateway pages designed for search engines.
A jump page: Temporary pages that obstruct a website's content (the user must close the jump page to access the content).
A microsite: Similar to websites but with significantly less content, sometimes different branding, and own domain names.
How to design a good landing page?
When you design a landing page for your real estate business, do remember that people will not read every line of text you publish, nor will they analyze your graphics and buttons or click on every possible link you put there. Instead, they are likely to focus on one single aspect - and depending on your design skills, that will be the message you want to convey, leading them to the action you want them to take.
It will only take a glance (as quick as 50 milliseconds) for users to decide whether to take action on your real estate landing page or not. So, avoid the following misguided landing page design elements:
Heavy text - landing pages must remain clean, with enough "white space" to rest the eye to allow the user to focus on your message rather than on unnecessary word baloney;
Scrolling - long pages that force users into scrolling down will fail;
Dense registration forms - too many fields to fill in will deter most of the users;
Eye-candy imagery is superfluous. Use images that highlight the benefits of what you have to offer on your real estate landing page;
Amateurish designs and stock layouts - go the extra mile to present something unique and out of the box instead of mimicking competitors and templates;
Lack of branding - your visitors must be able to identify your business and brand at first glance when they "land" on a landing page;
Not enough information - you must give your visitors enough information about your offer to help them make an informed, sound decision;
Lack of alternate contact options - always include a phone number, email link, WhatsApp, chat, or other contact preferences for people who are not comfortable filling in forms;
Too many buttons (or distractions) - a landing page is not a website, so you don't need to include navigation menus. You could include a button to lean users to your business website if you will; however, don't overload your landing page with too many choices;
Faulty design or placement of call-to-action buttons - these are critical for conversions, yet too many landing pages have poor placements and colors for call-to-action buttons. You must make them count with a sort of "in your face" position and color that "screams click me!"
Lack of opt-out and privacy statements - since landing pages usually serve marketing needs, you must provide users with information about their privacy and opt-out solutions.
Purposes served by real estate landing pages:
You may design a real estate landing page for any promotional purpose you have in mind, but here are a few ideas:
Get new leads and collect email addresses - suitable for newsletters, specials, and email campaigns. New leads are also useful for future offline conversions.
Brand marketing - sometimes landing pages can educate viewers about your brand, its purposes, vision, and services.
Membership - opting in to access restricted content, like members-only newsletters, real estate articles, studies, statistics, and more.
Direct sales - while fun to create a landing page for direct sales of real estate properties, microsites will serve that purpose better.
Whatever your purpose for creating a real estate landing page, target your audiences carefully and design it to convert. Keep the content relevant, short, and useful. Make sure all the landing page elements are visible without scrolling and test the design on mobile, tablets, laptops, and desktops alike. Do use analytics software to track your success. A/B testing between landing page design layouts will help you see what your visitors prefer and which type of design performs best.
Mihaela Lica Butler is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR. She is a widely cited authority on public relations issues, with an experience of over 25 years in online PR, marketing, and SEO.She covers startups, online marketing, social media, SEO, and other topics of interest for Realty Biz News.
