December 04 2017
To get a clear picture of what many first time home buyers consider important in their home search and purchase, we need to step into their shoes and see the process from their point of view. We can't see into their minds, but there are some facts that can help us to understand their concerns and motivations:
What will help first-time home buyers trust their Realtor? How do we attract them with marketing to get in touch? Even more targeted, how to work with first-time home buyers is what we need to know.
The Internet has changed our business like it has many others. The average first time-home buyer today has done a lot of research online. We know that much of what they find in searches is not necessarily good or accurate information, but they don't know that.
Your online presence by nature will be providing a lot of the same information as other websites, but you should present it with more authority. When you make a statement in an article/blog post about understanding title insurance, back it up with actual quoted segments of a title insurance binder. Even better, offer a real life transaction binder via email to show them what they're going to see. Scrub private info and set up a form for the offer, and you'll get first time home buyer leads.
Sure, there are articles and blog posts on almost every real estate professional's website that are targeted at first-time home buyers. However, they're all over the place, maybe even at a navigation tab at a website once they find it. They're spending hours in searches to get a few questions answered, and often getting conflicting information.
This can be a dedicated niche website, a very strong strategy, especially for SEO reasons. When an entire site is created just for first-time home buyers, and all of the information there is relevant to their interests, it will over time gain search engine points and better positioning.
If you don't want to create a niche website, at least dedicate a portion of your website to first-time home buyers. If you can use subdomains with your site host, it's a good way to do this. A subdomain looks like http://firsttimehomebuyer.yourdomain.com. That part before the first dot is the subdomain and you gain SEO clout. That's because Google and other search engines consider a subdomain as a separate destination for indexing your site. It's like having a separate site within a site. You also don't have to search for unused domain names, as you can use whatever you want.
The reason these buyers are online for hours doing searches is that they have questions about buying a home, from location information through the first offer—and ultimately the entire transaction process. They have the ability, at least in their minds, of getting their questions answered accurately on the Internet, so they want to stay anonymous as long as possible, getting answers online before working with an agent.
If you've ever had one or more questions on a subject, it's likely that you really appreciated finding a page with a FAQ, or Frequently Asked Questions. Create just that for first-time home buyers and title it "First-Time Home Buyer Frequently Asked Questions." Use the question then the answer format, and give brief but focused answers to the questions.
Then, link to more detail in other content you have on the site. Example question: What is a title insurance binder? You would give a brief but explanatory answer as to the purpose of a binder and maybe even the main sections, such as Exceptions and Requirements. However, now you give them a link to more detail and even an example actual transaction binder.
Now you're satisfying their needs for answers, offering more information to support your answers to their questions, and you're leading them to a call-to-action that will generate leads for you. Even if they resist the title binder call-to-action, if you have a supporting article/blog post for every answer in your FAQ, and each has a call-to-action with a compelling offer, you're going to get many of them before they leave the site.
Once you get into their shoes, you can identify with the questions first-time home buyers have, and you can create an online experience that meets their needs and positions you as the expert to work with.
To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.