Best Practices for Your Listing Content

Content is king. You can bet that any builder who enjoys significant consumer engagement, repeat customers and a healthy referral business is doing something right with their listing content strategy. Sure, when home shoppers start their online search, they look at photos first, but they also look for what it’s like to live in your homes.

Enter listing content. It’s easy to get started, and frankly — with today’s tech-reliant, on-demand communications — if you’re not sharing your listing content online, it might as well not even exist.

To help you attract more buyers to your homes and communities, we’ve teamed up with key industry partners to get their top tips for how builders can most efficiently market their new construction home through listing content.

Here’s Will Duderstadt, marketing and development manager of web platforms at M/I Homes, with three best practices for creating and maximizing your listing content.

1. Build a standard for your listing content

Define a process for creating, proofreading and uploading your listing content. Established steps and milestones — your listing content standard — will help you complete listings with speed, consistency and a defined budget.

Following a listing content standard is an effective way to make your listings stand out. When home shoppers know what to expect from your listings every time, you provide them with great customer experiences that help build trust and credibility.

Your listing content standard also saves time, costs and effort because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every listing. Each one is completed with the same information and published consistently, whether online or in print.

Focus on listings first

While these best practices are applicable to any content you develop, focus on your listings first. They’re the one thing home shoppers make a point of reading — and something that can help you make a lasting impression and stand out from the competition. Compare your listings to all listings in your surrounding area, both new and resale. Are you standing out?

Plus, there’s no guarantee they’ll seek out your other content if you don’t dazzle them with the information they’re specifically there to see.

Discover what content your customers want to consume

One way to find out what home shoppers really want to see is Google Analytics. You can see which of your listings get the most traffic, how long shoppers stay on each one and even what content they click or download most often. You can also get a good sense of what kind of content buyers want from marketing survey results that analyze consumer behavior.

Generally speaking, you can’t go wrong including the following on your listings:

• Videos: Keep them short and compelling, make them understandable without sound and show shoppers something only you can offer.
• Social media: Leverage the highly visual nature of social media posts to showcase your homes. Give shoppers a way to quickly and easily like and share your listings, and use hashtags when appropriate to increase your discoverability.

Define what and how much content to create for your listings

Create a listing template so you can quickly and easily publish listings online, present a consistent look and feel, and ensure each one provides complete information. Typically, the more content you have, the more buyers engage with you.

How long should your listing descriptions be? (250 words is the sweet spot.) Do the words spark emotion and make buyers want the lifestyle you describe? How many photos should you upload? (At least 30.) Will an interactive map add to the buyer experience? Which videos can you shoot right away? These questions will help you hone in on the right content — and how much of it to share for maximum impact.

Organize your listing content

This can be as simple as keeping a spreadsheet of all your listings and a checklist of the information that accompanies each one. Include your floor plans, communities, features, amenities, groundbreaking date, scheduled open house events — anything that affects your listing — and then sort your data to keep it updated, compelling and accessible for sharing anytime.

 

Create a process to keep listing content fresh

Your spreadsheet can also include milestone dates that provide opportunities to reinvigorate your listings. Completed a photo shoot? Replace the renderings. Opened a sales center? Refresh the contact information. Debuting a hot, new neighborhood? Showcase your promotions. Lots selling like hotcakes? Update your feed.

Anytime you can provide home shoppers with new and compelling information is a chance to attract and engage even more of them.

2. Leverage listing content in all channels

The whole point of creating excellent listing content is to share it far and wide. Once you have your listings ready to go, explore the many ways you can get eyes on them.

Web

Your own website should feature your listings front and center. A customer relationship management (CRM) tool can help you create them once and then distribute them in multiple online locations.

Email

Your CRM can make email campaigns quick and easy to compile, send, track and measure. Scrub your database and then use your listings to target buyers with informative, exciting and relevant messages. Make your communications personal and valuable to the recipient.

Social

Leverage the visual nature of social media: Home shoppers spend a ton of time on social media, so why not showcase gorgeous photos of your homes? Introduce buyers to your brand with an invite to your newly opened sales center. Entice them to your communities with shots of all the amenities they offer.

When shoppers leave comments, reply immediately and thoughtfully. Use social media to become part of the conversations home shoppers are having!

Zillow and Trulia

Want even more eyes on your listings? Catch home shoppers at every stage of their journey with the Promoted Communities platform. Use Builder Profiles to highlight your company, services and customer reviews.

3. Measure your listing content’s performance

There’s no point in spending time and money on a listing content strategy if you don’t know how effective it is. Knowing how to measure your listing content performance helps identify where to spend your marketing dollars.

Monitor consumption metrics

Consumption metrics tell you how many people have viewed or clicked on your content.

• Users: The total number of unique visitors to a particular webpage
• Views of items: The number of times shoppers view a specific piece of content
• Shares of page: The number of times shoppers shared a particular webpage
• Clicks on interactive pieces: The number of times shoppers clicked a piece of interactive content, such as a listing photo gallery or links to more content at the end of a video walkthrough

Other metrics that might help you fine-tune your listing content include:

• Location: If your listings traffic comes from out of town (e.g., relocation buyers), consider a more national approach to your advertising.
• Source or medium: Which channels most effectively attracted buyers to your content?
• Mobile: Don’t be surprised to discover how many people consume content on their smartphones. According to Zillow Group, 47 percent of new construction buyers used their smartphone to conduct their search, and more than half (52 percent) used it to access a builder’s website.
• Social media shares: Retweets, repins or any other type of social sharing demonstrate the reach of your content — and that your audience found it worth spreading around.
• Social media comments: It takes a lot for shoppers to leave a comment on social media; getting one on a post is an excellent indication that your message struck a chord.

Find indicators that predict lead conversion

Analyze your metrics for patterns that might correlate with your call to action. For example, did you find that users who click “Contact Builder” are twice as likely to complete your lead generation form than those who click the link to your website?

Clicking one button might not mean anything — you might have to experiment to test your theories — but it’s a starting point toward fine-tuning your content for optimal exposure.

Use metrics to inform content changes

When you have proof of which content your audience responds to, you want to deliver more of it. If certain listings get more clicks or shares, duplicate their tone and style for all your listings, and watch what happens.

Measuring and analyzing your results isn’t a one-and-done task; the savviest marketers make it a regular habit to keep an eye on how their content performs.

Explore new ideas, and get comfortable with change; if something isn’t working and drains your resources, it’s absolutely OK to get rid of it. Once you know what works for your business, you can focus your budget and strategy on creating listing content that works the hardest to attract, engage and convert home shoppers.