Let’s talk about online valuation tools….

Ok, so last time we spoke about Rightmove Banner advertising and how to get the most out of it. If you missed that post you can read it here. Today I want to talk to you about the latest ‘fad’ online valuation tools.

Are they really any good?

On the face of it they seem like a fantastic idea, potential vendors use the tool and ‘hey presto’ you get a lead delivered to your inbox, how amazing is that?

No, but seriously if this were the case and it were that easy, it would be absolutely fantastic!

However, they have two MAJOR flaws…

1. Without traffic they are useless.
2. The bounce rate can be quite high (leads leaving the tool before submitting their details).

Let’s deal with the first one first, seems like a good place to start.

So, you’ve invested in an online valuation tool and you’ve added a link or banner to your website to drive potential leads to it. Great, but when was the last time you checked to see how many visits your website is actually getting?

Like I said without traffic the tool is useless!

Just sticking the tool on your site and waiting for leads to materialise is a waste of time and money, it’s simply not going to happen. You are going to need to drive traffic to it. You can do this in a multitude of ways, Facebook advertising is my favourite, however, local adverts are also a fantastic option, leaflets, maybe even the trusty old newspaper (there’s life in that old dog yet).

Instead of sending out leaflets bleating on about your latest offer that no one cares about, how about sending them a leaflet asking them if they know how much their house is worth?

The point is simply to get the receiver to visit the website and submit their details. Remember anything else you decide to put on it unless it’s about the tool, is a reason for them not to take action.

Sounds simple enough however there are two more KEY elements to making this part a greater success.

Now I may get a little bit technical here, but I don’t want to lose all the technophobes in the room, just keep reading I’ll keep it as simple as possible, I promise, and if you don’t understand something or can’t do it yourself just ask…

Firstly, driving the lead to your homepage with a banner advertising the tool is not good enough. There is too much distraction, there should really only be one option and that is to use the tool. To do this you need a dedicated landing page, a page that only advertises/displays the valuation tool and nothing else. It acts like a funnel which drives the leads through the tool and into your database.

You can see an example of a high converting landing page here.

Secondly, I would actually take the one step further and build your landing page as a totally separate entity from your main website. This will ensure that there is absolutely no distraction from the purpose, which is to submit the form. This will massively increase your conversion rates.

Here’s another gem for you…

How about you register the domain www.housevaluesYOURTOWN.com (replace YOURTOWN with, you guessed it, your town), put that on the leaflet and your banner ads or whatever you are using and drive traffic straight to your landing page. How clever is that?

Right, now that I’ve given you some serious value that will absolutely help you generate more traffic to the valuation tool (for FREE), let’s deal with the second point.

THE BOUNCE RATE

For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s the number of people that visit the tool then “bounce” away from the page without using it. Trust me, it’s a very high percentage!

In truth a dedicated landing page, highlighting some benefits of using the tool will help, however, there will still be a high number of viewers bouncing.

So what can you do to capture those too?

It’s quite simple really and I alluded to it earlier, Facebook advertising!

Now I know this will be alien to many of you and some of you will have wasted a chunk of money on it with minimal results, but the trick here is targeting a very very warm audience (yes, very very).You see, with the dedicated landing page we spoke of earlier, you could add a Facebook tracking pixel that would identify, track and serve ads only to people who have visited the page!

This means it would only be serving ads to a person in your area who picked up your leaflet and visited your landing page, whether they used the valuation tool or not.

I mean, seriously, you can’t get a more highly targeted, WARM lead than that!

And the beauty of that is you can continue serving them ads, relevant blog posts, free guides, and your amazing offers for months, with minimal cost…

So, we’ve managed to cover how to drive targeted leads to your valuation tool and how to plug the very leaky funnel that it provides. Your monthly subscription fee for the valuation tool now has a ROI worth talking about and you can also make use of those Rightmove banner ads we spoke of last time, not to mention giving life to all your leaflets and newspaper ads!

Right, now here’s the deal, you can obviously go about doing this yourself via trial error and maybe a smidge of wasted time and money.

You could hire your web developer to try and emulate my superpowers and attempt to piece this together for you.

Or you could take the easiest most cost-effective path to lead generation mastery and speak to me.

The choice is yours, book in a call, send me an email, send me a carrier pigeon.

As always, comments, notes, suggestions & corrections are welcome.

*disclaimer, if you send a carrier pigeon it will be eaten, I’m Greek, just saying…