Article 2 of Spark Property’s Digital Boost Series, shared exclusively through PropTech Connect:
- From First Click to Lead: Optimising Customer Journeys In Property
No matter what the industry, one of the key things that any person in marketing needs to understand is ‘What exactly is working.’ It’s a harder question than you’d think to answer, due to the customer journey. Understanding and optimising this is key to faster results and better quality leads.
A customer journey is the story of what a customer did between first hearing of you and getting in touch. Cross-industry, there’s an average of 8 touchpoints before a customer will finally choose to purchase. In property marketing, it will vary greatly depending on the target market and asset.
So, what counts as a touchpoint? It’s anything that involves a customer interacting with your brand, whether that’s online or offline. If somebody recommends you, that’s a touchpoint. If somebody views your ‘launch to market’ post on LinkedIn, downloads a brochure from your website, reads about your asset in a print publication or fills out a form – all touchpoints. Consider your own path to market, and how long it takes you to get from researching to purchasing.
Understanding the touchpoints that your site visitors are taking is key to developing a marketing plan that delivers. That’s why at Spark Property Marketing, we don’t let a site go live without Google Analytics. Without it, we’ve lost priceless data.
Google Analytics 4 was recently launched, replacing a version of analytics that has been around for many years. Within it, there are some great tools that deliver a crystal clear view into site activity.
- Retention Overview Report
Understand how your website is retaining its users by looking at how long your engaged users are spending on the site, and the percentage of them who are returning within 42 days. This can tell you whether the visitors to your site are interested, or even searching for new information.
What your site visitors are up to is a great way to understand whether they are interested. With Analytics, you’re able to track many key actions; for example, the watch of a video, the download of a brochure, or the filling out of a form. We also recommend adding event tracking on all links through to agency websites, as this shows us who might be interested enough to contact them there.
A conversion is your end goal. It could be any of the things you’re tracking as an event. One of the most valuable things within your analytics is the Conversion Path Report, which can tell you exactly what online touchpoints have been hit on the way to a conversion. From here, you can see what percentage of conversions begin with an organic search, or a click on a Google Ad.
This is very important, as it can prevent you from removing focus from a channel that doesn’t get the credit at the final step. Let’s say that 50% of your phone calls began with a click on a social media post, but between that there were many other touchpoints that ended with the final conversion from another channel. Without the insight of the Conversion Path report, you’d remove social media from your plan, but with it, you know not to remove the most valuable first step of the journey.
With the data from your analytics account, you’re able to see what to push in your strategy and gather strong leads that become sales.
The customer journey doesn’t stop there! There are many ways to continue this insight into other platforms. By adding further tags onto your site, you’re able to collect information that will enable you to target website visitors with ads on external sites such as LinkedIn and Google Ads.
Here, we can target based on which pages a person has read, how long they spent on the site, or whether they interacted with the website. This helps us ensure that we’re targeting only engaged, valuable site visitors with paid media.
We’ll be exploring LinkedIn Ads in the next instalment of our Digital Boost series, so make sure to watch your inbox to be the first to read that, exclusively for PropTech Connect.
