Qualifying Buyers for your Development

September 7, 2015

As every property developer knows, not everyone who expresses interest in viewing a home is actually an interested buyer. Some people like to look at model homes to get design ideas for their own homes. Other homeowners in the same neighbourhood like to tour homes in the area to see how well those homes are selling and compare them with their own. Therefore, just because you have a lot of interest in a development, it doesn’t always mean you have a lot of actual buyers interested.

So how do you know your leads are hot? In this article, we’ll look at some great techniques for qualifying buyers for your development and show you how asking certain qualifying questions can help you score qualified leads.

Two Stage Opt-in

One of the best ways to score the strongest leads is implement a two stage opt-in. This technique involves a value exchange – you provide strong, compelling content, and your leads give you their contact information.

To get started, you need to create an ebook for the your intended buyer audience. The book should cater to your target audience and offer them something both relevant and highly informative.

If your property development is close to a popular school, for example, then you might target families with kids looking to send those kids to a great school. Your ebook would include a section about the schools within that suburb, highlighting specific benefits.

Once you create your ebook, you’ll want to create ads for Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other sites your audience is typically visits. Don’t forget to post the ebook to your site too. Now when interested buyers click the link to download the ebook, they’ll have to put in their names and email addresses to get the content. This is called gating your content, and it’s an effective way to get more serious buyers to provide you with contact information.

Now that you have their email addresses, you can start sending more interested buyers invitations to book a display suite viewing – provided they tell you a little bit more about themselves first. Again, gate your content, but this time, ask for a little more information. Truly interested buyers will be more likely to answer questions about the neighbourhoods they prefer and their spending limit than those who want to see the suite just for fun.

Facebook Qualification

You have a Facebook page and plenty of followers. Have you been targeting them through Facebook ads to keep them interested?

Facebook offers two great ways to target your followers and other Facebook users through its advertising options. The first – Custom Audiences – allows you to upload emails from your database and segment them into different groups based on their behaviours and demographics. For instance, if you want to target followers who downloaded your ebooks or those with spending limits of $500,000 or more, then you can create several different audiences to match different criteria.

After uploading these email lists, Facebook will match those email addresses in your database to the email addresses linked to its accounts and show your ads to the matching user accounts. This is great way to nurture leads who have already displayed some positive behaviours, such as downloading ebooks or commenting on one of your posts.

If you want to branch out from your followers, you can also use Lookalike Audiences. This is an awesome feature that lets you replicate the demographics of current Custom Audiences and send out your ads to them. Lookalike Audiences gives you two options to use for targeting – similarity and reach.

Similarity replicates your current Custom Audience list as closely as possible based on age, geographical location, gender and other key factors. Its reach, however, is quite small. With the reach function, your ads will go to a lot more people, but those people may not be as similar to your Custom Audience as you might prefer.

Regardless of which ad you choose, both provide you with great options to further entice leads and get them interested in booking a display suite viewing.

Finding the Best CPL

You want your cost per lead (CPL) to be as low as possible, without sacrificing quality. How do you get the CPL low and keep it that way? Test it.

First analyse the size of your target market. If your target is somewhat small or directly defined (single parents with dogs), then you can expect your CPL to be higher than if your target was simply single parents.

There are already so many different channels to promote your content through that part of your CPL might be affected by the channel that you choose to promote on. For example, to target first home buyers, you might use Google Adwords, Facebook and Pinterest to promote your ads and content. But which one will work best?

To know for sure, you’ll have to test your as on multiple channels and see which ones pull in the strongest leads. Remember, there are levels of leads. If your Facebook advertising, for example, pulls in a lot of low-level leads (uni students doing preliminary research) and not many high-level leads (families with one foot out the door, ready to move), then your CPL is going to be higher when only a select few leads actually become buyers.

On the other hand, advertising with Google AdWords might cost more upfront, but if you puller in more moms who are serious about buyer, then the cost may be worth it, and your CPL will go down.

The key here is to test out as many channels as possible and see which ones perform the best.

Scoring Leads

It’s not always easy knowing which of your leads are truly qualified and interested in your property development. You want to pass your most qualified leads to your sales people, but how will you know a strong lead when you see it?

To learn how to better score leads, it’s important that your marketing team and sales team sit down and talk about the buying process. Your sales team knows when a buyer isn’t ready to get serious, and they’ll be able to help you score certain online behaviours – signing up for emails, downloading an ebook, booking a display suite viewing – so that when you’re ready to pass on these leads to the sales team, most of the work will already be done.