Building a Conversion Strategy That Targets Your Silent Traffic
As an agent with a marketing strategy in place, it’s easy to get stuck only looking for the immediate wins: whether it’s an increase in website metrics, a direct phone click, a form submission, or anything else where you can see that something positive has happened that either resulted in a lead or an increase in one of your KPIs.
However, that’s just the top of the funnel, and usually a smaller percentage (around 10% or so) of your overall website traffic, but it’s easy to get stuck only looking at those high-level, gratifying results, and ignoring the rest that haven’t turned into anything immediately positive.
But what about that remaining 90%? Who are they, and why haven’t they converted right away?
That remaining group are the people that visit your site, quietly consume your long-form guides, click through to a couple of related pages, and then leave without contacting you or reaching out; and while if someone doesn’t reach out it might seem like they don’t want to, there’s a pretty good chance they will reach out eventually if you consistently provide something valuable.
So because that quality traffic is likely to be engaged sessions, they’ve also likley to be prime opportunities.
These opportunities are called silent conversions, and they’re the people who are quietly, in the background, deciding you’re the local authority, building a deep sense of trust with your brand, and putting you at the top of their list for when they’re finally ready to transact.
So if your marketing strategy is only focused on the initial 10% or so that is ready to convert, and you’re disregarding the remaining 90%, you’re leaving a lot of potential business behind.
And that’s where building an inbound marketing strategy, targeted to that 90%, can prove effective.
What is inbound marketing? It’s when you attract and build meaningful, lasting connections and relationships with people through providing valuable content, resources, and experiences. For example, blog content, downloadable resources, and video content are all inbound marketing techniques.
★ Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Have a look at these posts:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
- How Solving Your Audience’s Problems Gets You Higher Quality Leads
- How Establishing Empathy in Your Marketing Helps Build Trust Before You Meet
- Why Slow Leads Are Better Leads (and How to Get Them)
Here’s how to get started building an inbound marketing strategy that targets the remaining 90% of the silent traffic on your website that didn’t immediately convert, so they’ll convert in the future:
1. Understand No Contact Doesn’t Mean There Isn’t Value
In traditional outbound marketing, if someone doesn’t answer the door or reply to your postcard, that means it’s probably seen as a dead end; but inbound marketing, working towards targeting your silent traffic, is completely different.
That’s because it works towards targeting the silent traffic under the assumption that just because you haven’t made contact with them it doesn’t mean they don’t want to work with you – they just might not be ready to.
Through inbound, your goal is to provide a meaningful, useful, valuable online experience that both reminds them that you exist and brings them back to your website.
When someone lands on your website via an inbound marketing strategy, they’re almost always being driven by a specific, real-world trigger (or, a specific opportunity called a marketing event).
For example, they might be a couple expecting a baby and realizing their starter home is too small, or they might be dealing with an incredibly sensitive, stressful situation, like navigating how to sell a house during a divorce. Either way, when a user is in that type of high-stress, heavy-research phase, the last thing they want is to be cornered by an aggressive salesperson or an aggressive contact form.
A silent visitor, that’s still in the early research phase, wants to get information while protecting their privacy and figuring out what your authority is. Just because they didn’t hand over their email address today doesn’t mean that visit didn’t create long-term value for both them and your business.
2. Build an Internal Path for Them to Follow
By definition, your silent traffic isn’t going to click the “Contact Me Today’ link at the top of your website. Instead, you need to guide them down a path, built on internal linking, to the next, most logical and natural post or page that they’d see value in.
Not only does this actually help them, provided they’re interested in the topic, but it also works towards turning that silent visitor into an engaged session (and maybe a silent conversion later on).
For example, if someone is reading a blog post on your website about how to use internal linking, you can show them related blog posts that provide them further, related information about properly building a linking strategy…
★ Want to learn more about creating a linking strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Using Internal Linking to Get More Visibility to (and Leads From) Your Content Strategy
- Why You Need an External Link Building Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
3. Optimize for Authority That’s Worth Saving
Silent visitors typically like finding content, bookmarking it, and saving it for later, which means to target them, you have to create content that’s useful, helpful, and worth saving.
And a great way to do that is by creating ungated tools that they’ll want to use (and come back to). For example, a downloadable resource, a highly-functional buyers or sellers calculator, or a local neighborhood map showing all of the standout amenities are all useful, valuable tools that are not only saveable, but also show your silent visitors that you care more about empowering them, not just getting their contact information.
When you create content that’s worth saving, it means that when they open it again, your brand will be front-of-mind and providing something valuable that they’ll come back to again and again.
4. Passively Retarget to Stay Top-Of-Mind
Just because a silent visitor left your website doesn’t mean your relationship with them has to end. Instead, you should use it as a marketing opportunity, especially if you know that they’ve created an engaged session by interacting with multiple pages on your website.
But because they’re silent, and you don’t have their email address, phone number, or even their name, how can you market to them?
That’s where retargeting advertising can prove effective.
Even though they haven’t given you any information, just by them visiting your website, you can install a tracking cookie or pixel in their browser, and show them ads on other websites that they visit, which feels a bit like magic.
You can even go a step further and show them retargeting ads specific to the pages, posts, or content they visited on your website. For example, if someone visits your buying related pages or posts, you can show them retargeting ads about your comprehensive buyer’s guide, and then opt them out once they download it.
When done correctly, retargeting advertising works as a key part of an effective inbound marketing strategy as an inexpensive, ongoing reminder that you’re around whenever they’re ready to take the next step and reach out.
★ Want to learn more about retargeting advertising? Have a look at this post called: The Anatomy of a Successful Real Estate Retargeting Campaign.
Building The Long Game
As an agent, it’s easy to find yourself focused on the immediate wins and top of the funnel conversions you’re getting, and disregard the rest, thinking that if they don’t convert now, they never will, but if you do, you’ll be missing out on a lot of potential contacts, leads, and business.
By embracing inbound marketing, and having some patience, you can build a marketing strategy that attracts, engages, and connects with your visitors no matter what stage they’re in, ensuring that they reach out once when they’re ready to make a decision.
Want to get better, more qualified leads and build your authority? Our Inbound Marketing Guide is a walkthrough of the overall philosophy of inbound marketing, why it’s effective, and how you can build it into your own real estate marketing strategy to get better marketing results.
