Creating a Returning Visitors Marketing Strategy
A lot of marketing campaigns tend to focus on attracting new people, which makes sense – to be successful, you continually need new people to discover you, your brand, and your business.
But building a marketing strategy that focuses solely on attracting new people comes at a cost: disregarding the people that have already visited your website and already know about you.
In a lot of cases, if someone hasn’t converted the first time they’ve visited a website (especially if it’s a conversion-focused page), most marketing strategies tend to ignore them and continue to focus on the goal of getting in front of new people.
But focusing on that exclusively is a big, missed opportunity because there’s a lot of power (and potential deals) in concentrating some of your marketing efforts on people that already know about you, even if they’ve only found you once and haven’t reached out or done a deal with you.
Why? Because the goal of an effective marketing strategy is always two parts: 1) having people within your target audience discover you, and 2) making sure they remember that you exist after they’ve discovered you.
And the second part is where creating a marketing strategy focused on returning visitors comes in.
Returning visitors are often more valuable than new visitors, mainly because they’re more likely to convert than someone that’s just discovering your brand and your business for the first time. That’s because you’re more likely to have already built trust and authority with a returning visitor than you are with someone that doesn’t know much about you.
★ Want to learn more about how to make your audience remember you? Have a look at this post called: Using Familiarity in Your Marketing Strategy to Get More Business.
But to successfully create a marketing strategy that’s focused on people that have already discovered you, you have to create a reason for them to return. There are a lot of ways to do that effectively, all of which revolve around creating and providing something of value that someone will want to return for.
Through Your Content Strategy
When it comes to real estate marketing, having a strong content strategy in place is one of the most effective marketing strategies that you can have.
Why? Because your content strategy allows you to establish your authority, prove your expertise, connect with your target audience, and potentially solve a problem for them if you’re providing an answer to a question. Plus, if you’re providing valuable content that interests them, it also gives them a reason to return to your website again and again.
And that’s important because each and every time someone revisits your website to read the new content you’ve published, you build more trust with them, and that means that when they are ready to transact, they’re likely to reach out to you first (or at least, consider it).
When done correctly, your content strategy can run in the background, 24/7, and continually help you build rapport with your returning visitor audience.
★ Want to learn more about building a solid content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- The Benefits of Building a Long-Form Real Estate Content Strategy
- Creating a Content Strategy Based On Emotional Search Intent (To Get Better Leads)
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
- Creating a People-Powered, People-First Content Strategy
Through Your Email Marketing Strategy
A effective, well-planned email marketing strategy is a great way to reach out to your database of people that already know you, remind them that you exist, and have them return to do a deeper dive into the information you’re sending them.
The key to a great email marketing strategy is to make sure you’re providing something that your audience will find value in, not something that you find value in.
For example, a lot of agents send out marketing emails that highlight their recently sold properties, but does their database really care that they sold a few houses?
Sure, it can help to show that you’re experienced, but outside of that, it probably isn’t something that your audience cares about because it isn’t directly about them and it doesn’t solve any sort of problem for them.
If you’re going to highlight a sold property in your email marketing, you’re better off including it towards the end of your monthly newsletter that you send out that also hopefully provides a mix or market data, helpful real estate information, and/or links to your content that works towards solving a problem for them. In short, something your audience actually finds useful.
Or better yet, you can further segment your email marketing database into groups that have a specific interest, whether that’s just buyers, sellers, or anything else. Sending specific audience, specific information that they actually care about it is a great way to both remind them audience that you exist and to create a strategy that encourages your audience to return to your website in a meaningful way.
★ Want to learn more about email marketing? Have a look at these posts:
- Building an Inbound Email Marketing Strategy
- Automating Your Email Marketing List Building
- Why You Should Never Stop Building Your Email Marketing Database
Through Your Social Media Strategy
Your social media strategy is the easiest way to reach out to people that already know about you because they can continually see you in their feeds while scrolling.
While a lot of agents focus on getting more followers, get more views, or get more likes, a solid real estate social media strategy goes beyond that, and overall, the goal should really be to create content that speaks directly to your audience’s needs and wants, whether that’s to keep them entertained, keep them informed, or something else.
Social media is a great platform to make your audience curious enough to want to click through some of your links and return to do a deeper dive into you, your brand, and your business.
★ Want to learn more about building a marketing plan for returning visitors? Have a look at these related posts:
- Building a Marketing Discoverability Strategy
- Why Your Website and Your Marketing Strategy Go Hand-in-Hand
- Building a Real Estate Marketing Stickiness Strategy
Through Your Retargeting Advertising Strategy
When it comes to advertising, a lot of agents tend to focus on traditional advertising platforms like paid search through Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or somewhere else, and while that can certainly work, it’s primarily focused on bringing in new people that have never heard of you.
That’s where retargeting advertising comes in. Retargeting advertising allows you to advertise directly (and only) to people that have already visited your website, which is an effective way to continually remain in front of them, and provide an opportunity for them to come back to convert when they’re ready to.
And, depending how much traffic your website gets, it’s also usually inexpensive, especially when compared to traditional adverting focused on new people (retargeting advertising can be done for as little as $3/day).
Build Trust With Your Returning Visitors
While you certainly need new people to continually discover your brand and your business through your marketing strategy, those people aren’t likely to trust you the first time they find you.
Building trust and having your audience see you as authoritative, knowledgeable, and trustworthy takes time; and by building a marketing strategy that focuses on bringing back the people that already know about you, you’ll be able to create a marketing strategy that focuses on the people that are most likely to eventually convert into deals.
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.
