Whitepapers

W H I T E P A P E R | H O W H O M E B U I L D E R S C A N C R E A T E A K I L L E R W E B S I T E theBDX.com 11900 Ranch Road 620 N, Austin TX 78750-1345 © 2017 Builders Digital Experience, Inc. All rights reserved. About BDX BDX is the leading online marketing provider for the homebuilding industry and for the past 13 years, we have helped thousands of builders attract more homebuyers, engage website visitors, and convert leads to sales. For more information email: info@thebdx.com, call: 1-866-651-8866, or visit: www.thebdx.com. Content Levers Builders Can Use Best-of-breed builder websites educate, inspire, and empower buyers to keep them moving through the stages of engagement. There are five content levers we can pull to achieve our objectives: 1. Copy 2. Art 3. Video or Animation 4. Interactive Features 5. UI Design Most website viewers scan more than they read, but it is still useful to employ good copy to add punch to your visuals. For instance, "a winding staircase greets you in the grand foyer" inspires, whereas "a staircase at the entrance" does not. It is also important to have an array of articles and resources on various aspects of the home buying process. Visual storytelling through art arouses home shoppers—and more is better! You won't reach a point of diminishing returns until you have 50 images, which can take many forms. Go beyond conventional photography to include nighttime scenes with flickering lights, detailed shots of the front entry, a variety of interior options, images with motion, and seasonal images. Don't forget your greatest competitor is existing homes, and these listings use many images. Home listings with video receive 403 percent more inquiries than those without. Video and animations dramatically boost engagement, dwell time, return visits, sharing, and conversions. Use this format for model home and community tours, and to tell your story through customer testimonials and company leaders. Be creative and think about how to use video to accomplish each of the engagement objectives, from trust to driving phone calls. You spend so much of your marketing budget driving shoppers to your site. Get them to click more, connect, and convert to buyers by making your site interactive. Visualizers allow prospects to custom design their homes. These designs must be saved, so they will need to create an account. Use interactive self-directed 3D tours like Matterport and site plans to help them explore your homes and communities, and options portals to let them experience the products in your homes. Responsive UI design makes your site user friendly on all devices. Your site will adapt to the user's screen size, making all of the features just as usable on a phone as on laptop. This is especially important, given that many of your visitors will be in their cars or out and about. It's also vital to millennials who lose trust in companies that don't deliver on this expectation. Don't Strive for Perfection. Strive for Connection. Begin your quest for a killer website with an honest assessment of where you are in customer engagement. Have you earned trust and built confidence, but failed to differentiate from local competitors? Knowing where you are now will put you on a clear path to your goals. Perfection isn't the objective; you don't need every available form of content right away. A killer website meets prospects where they are in their journey. It succeeds by enabling them to cross the barrier of anonymity in order to connect with your brand and your people.leaders. Be creative and think about how to use video to accomplish each of the engagement objectives, from trust to driving phone calls.

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