52. Website Design That Generates Leads With Peter Butler

You've got eight seconds to make an impression. You've got to really own your space. Social moves so quick. There's nothing wrong with reposting pre existing content. It's all about user experience. It's all about journey.

Really.

It's about the outcome, the happiness, the joy, it's the emotion. Anything that gives you credibility, anything that gives you authority inspires confidence. It's really that simple.

This is Professional Builder Secrets, the number one podcast to help you grow your building company safely and securely. Brought to you by the association of Professional Builders. Join us every week as we talk to industry experts and your fellow professional builders on everything you need to know to generate more leads, more sales and higher margins while improving the building experience for your clients.

Hello and welcome to the Professional Builder Secrets podcast, a podcast by the association of Professional Builders for building company owners, general managers, VPs and emerging leaders. Here we discuss all things running a professional building company from sales, processes, financials, operations and marketing. We have another exciting episode from the Professional Builders Secrets podcast. I'm joined today by Peter Butler, Managing director for smarter websites. Peter, lovely to have you here today. How have you been?

Really good, really busy. That's a great opportunity out there for people online.

Well, I'm sure you're kept busy with all the work that you do, but I'd love you to just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about smarter websites and what you specialize in first.

So look, I've been in the web and digital space for 15 years. We've built up a solid team over that time. I've got seven people on the team. Some of those have been with me seven years, five years. So we're a really tight team and work well together. Wow.

And do you specialize in websites for professional building companies as well? I'm told that you come heavily recommended in this space as well.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Hey, look, there's something that's really ironic. Of the two industries on the planet that are the hardest to systemize and automate. Custom home building industry and website design industry. Wow. And the reason is, although they might have 10 stages in the process, it's the variables in each one of of those stages that actually sort of maps out why it's so difficult to automate and specialize. So that's why we work so well with the customer home builders, because we literally speak their language. I'm personally like a system process as an automations freak and I love that and you know, try and bring that other level to it because they're so Hard to systemize.

Well, Peter, I'm just curious, what causes, why do building companies normally struggle with building effective websites? You know, what's the key issue here next to web design, which could be another podcast on its own, but when it comes to the professional building company, why do you think they struggle?

Look, there's two types of websites out there. There's the online brochure model and then there's a high performing website. And so many builders focus on just the imagery. Now that's really, really important. Absolutely. You know, you've got to showcase the quality of your work, but if that's all you're doing, you're not focusing on good lead generation practices. So it's all about imagery, but not about connecting and engaging with the prospect.

Yeah, let's hone in on that. So you talk about for moving away from just the visual aesthetic look, but also focusing on lead generation. So what are some of the secrets that you have uncovered over these illustrious career of yours where building companies are using some of these tactics or deploying some of these tactics to create lead generations? And how do you turn those websites into a lead generation machine that produces high quality leads?

The thing is you've got to have call to actions, so you've got to have the opportunity to identify what their pain points are. And so APB do that exceptionally well. You know, with the free report model, you know, are you planning on building your new house? You know, what secrets do you need to know before you talk to any builder? And they've got a range of these free reports. So those free reports resonate with the web visitor. And so there's an opportunity for that unknown lead, that possible prospect to become identified. You know, in exchange for that information, you get their contact details and so you're the then able to communicate with them and start that rapport, start that relationship, you know, establish that trust as the expert in your industry. Whereas the big glossy brochure style website with none of the lead generation reports, none of the call to actions have that and it's just, it's not going to happen. So APB have really nailed it.

So with that lead, you know, generation sort of tactic, do you call that a lead magnet in your industry? Is that what it's called?

Yes.

Yeah. Excellent. Okay, well look, I'm going to dive a little deeper into sort of the checklist of creating a lead generation website. I'm going to throw you a couple of questions here. So let's start off with the basics, I guess the direction of the website, what Goes into a website header and footer as well. What are some of those key areas when someone lands on the website, what does that first impression look like?

The industry stats are something like you've got eight seconds to make an impression and so many people get it wrong. In as much as they have a revolving slideshow of seven images, 10 images, trying to showcase case everything they do well, the only people that watch all those images is the website owner, not the visitor. You know, three maximum. But if you can find one really standout hero image that encapsulates everything about your business, then you've nailed it. But other important things up in that header is your logo. Not too big, not too small. It's not all about your logo. You want your branding to stand out, but it's not all about that. They don't know you yet, so, you know, don't overdo it there. But your trusted statement, you know, you've got to really own your space and just having a simplified statement is gold. You've all got so got to make it so that it's easy to contact you. I see so many websites that it just makes it so hard to get hold of the, you know, to make a contact. It's just ridiculous. So having a strong call to action now, whether that's a lead generation report, a lead magnet, as you, you've said, or a booking time, you know, qualifying call, you know, you've got to make it easy for people to get hold of you, but at the same time you want to qualify them because you don't want to just talk to tire kickers and there's qualifying processes, other things that are important as far as the website structure, say down in your footer, you want to have your terms and conditions, your privacy. And again, if somebody's gone to the bottom of your website, you might have your contact details at the top, you know, contact form, phone number at the top of the page. Well, you know, that should be replicated at the bottom because, you know, what if they've got all the way to the bottom of the website, there's a good chance they want to reach out more. So you've got to replicate it down there. You've got to make it so it's easy for people to get in contact with you.

Now you talked a little bit about, you know, the website navigation. Why is it so important to have a really strong website navigation experience when people land on your website?

When you're building and designing a website, you've got to give people multiple ways to take Them on the journey that you want to take them on. In your menu you will have, you know, things like your process, your designs, your projects, all of those sorts of things.

But.

And that's in your menu at the top of the website. But then as people scroll down your website, you want to replicate those elements so that you're taking people on a journey. It's all about user experience. It's all about journey. Right, right.

And you mentioned something really interesting. You talked about call to actions. It sounds like call to actions are really important for professional building companies, especially when it comes to lead generation. Why do you emphasize on it? In today's world, it's the difference between.

An online brochure website and a high performing website. Again, too many people, the years have focused on that high gloss look. And it doesn't mean to say your image is not important on a high performing website. But by having pain points, calls to action embedded at every level of your website is just crucial for people identifying themselves. You know, you need your unknown prospect to turn into a known prospect. See if they're on your website. Right. The thing is they're interested in what you do. But you know, maybe their wife just called for dinner or maybe the husband called for dinner, whatever that is. Momentary distraction and will they remember your website. So by having calls to action, there's an opportunity for them to identify themselves so that you can then continue to market to them. You start the relationship. Look, we all do business with people we know like and trust. And until they identify themselves, you're not able to build that relationship, that rapport. Does that make sense?

Oh, totally, absolutely. And you know, you talked about the importance of, and you also define what a lead magnet is and what is, you know, why it's so important. Can you give me some effective examples of a lead magnet that you've worked on in the construction space that worked really well or just an example of what could be given away as a lead magnet.

It's funny, we started in this industry in 2007, right? And at that stage, your free report white paper model, you had about a 70% sign up rate. Nowadays you're lucky if you get a 7% signup, right? Generically now, within the building industry, there's actually a massive opportunity to make that a 70% because those people are hungry for your industry. So some of the models are. Just give us a moment, I'll look at some of them. So, you know, there's the five mistakes people make, you know, when planning, building them, there's the seven Things you must know before designing. There's also pre start checklists, you know, because as soon as somebody starts down this journey, you know, they start to learn this language, they're hungry for more information, they want to get it right. It's a big spend so they can't afford to get it wrong. There's pre start checklists, there's consumer guides to builders jargon, There's a whole host of different types of reports that you can integrate with your website.

Well, it's interesting you say that because I am a homeowner and I obviously have invested into my place and I would give away my contact details if I would needed some of this information. I recently just did my backyard and I wanted to know what type of plants to put into the backyard. And funny enough, the person I worked with actually had some finished work of some looks and everything else that I was able to download and then he was able to call me. So my guess is that the builders are already sitting on this content and they're already giving it away for free. So why not have HTML address collected or contact detail collected in this. In this particular tactic, right? What are your thoughts, Peter Off? A marketing guarantee. Should a building company offer a marketing guarantee? Do you see any benefits to the online visitor having that?

Absolutely. You know, we've all got confidence in what we deliver and so there's no reason that you can't offer that and integrate that with your offer. It's all about customer confidence. It's really that simple. You know, the standard build guarantees that builders have anyway. So why would you not reinforce that as a part of your marketing? Shout that from the mountain, you know, and a lot of the time, especially with the custom home builders, you know, what people like and why they're drawn to that is because they're going to be in direct contact with the builder, not some large building company. So yeah, it needs to be reinforced as a part of your marketing arsenal.

It sounds like this is an opportunity for building companies to even work on their value propositions and selling propositions as part of this guarantee because that could potentially fuel what they have to offer. I'm really excited to ask you the next few questions around storytelling. I'm a bit of a storytelling nerd myself. So the first one I've got for you is what type of visual storytelling should a website have you talked a little bit about, you know, having a really capturing hero image, but tell me a little bit about the types of storytelling that that professional building company should.

Have leveraging from previous work that they've done is absolutely vital. Now, if there's no previous work, if it's a startup builder and they maybe don't have that strong portfolio of images, you can use stock images, but be careful about the stock images you do use. If that's the case, you know, we don't want to see American style plugs if it's for an Australian audience and vice versa. So you've got to be careful there, you know. But videos, absolutely vital. And the thing is that, you know, you can use storytelling as in the builder, you know, cutting to the chase and actually having a conversation with the audience. So it could be a video about their project management, about the builds they've done, all of that, but also that personal connection. So people see that, wow, this guy's real, he's authentic, he's genuine. And sometimes that's hard to do, you know, be relaxed when a video camera's on you. But the thing is that we have those conversations every single day. I do, the builders do. I reckon there's probably 60, 70 conversations that we have where we almost hit the autopilot switch and we go blah, blah, blah, because we've had the conversation a thousand times.

Right.

They're the sorts of conversations you can have in text, in video. In your storytelling of the website, you don't have to. Using a copywriter is gold because they make it so much more powerful. But that authenticity when it comes through is just. Is gold. It's hard to beat.

Now, what about that hero image or the images on the website? You know, you just talked about potentially sourcing images if you're a new builder, I'm assuming websites like Shutterstock, you know, or Unsplash can have some of those images. But like you said, you have to, to make it more customized to the audience that you're in, whether you're in North America or New Zealand. But when it comes to that hero image, are we looking at selling the end results, I'm assuming from a building company? That's really important.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's all about the emotion, showcasing the quality of the builder, property, whatever. You know, if you're showcasing say a two story property and it's, you know, magnificent multimillion dollar property, that's great. But that might not resonate with somebody where that market is just outside of their reach and you could focus on something mid range, but really it's about the outcome, the happiness, the joy, it's the emotion that goes with it. So it depends if you've got a niche and Things like that. So, you know, I see some really successful building companies using a photo of a family holding a set of keys with a property behind them and it's almost blurred out. The focus is on the emotion of the end result.

Right. So I guess it comes down to knowing your customer. In our marketing world, we use the term avatars or Personas. Why should professional billing companies know their customer? Avatar Persona?

Yeah, interesting you say that. I was talking to a custom home builder before where they realized they've diluted the strength of their brand because they have a construction site, but they also have a specialty roofing site. And by melding the two together, you know, they caused a little bit of confusion. So they're going to separate that. I think that's very important to understand your customer and understand the emotions attached to that. But also your niche area, your specialty, you know, and where's the money? Where's the cash cow? What's the simple model for you to roll out? You know, what's your happy place as well. Right? Yeah, it's all very important.

And you know, talk about videos and the era of videos. I've seen a statistic that said Cisco claim that by 2021, or at least the completion of that year, 82% of traffic will come from video sources. And, and obviously YouTube is owned by Google as well. So what are some of the key benefits of having video on the website? And more importantly, what are some of the types of videos that you should have on the website?

Right. So big subject and I see so many people get this wrong from the get go. And you mentioned YouTube. Streaming your videos on YouTube, absolute gold, highly recommended. However, do not embed those videos from YouTube onto your website. No, no, look, concentration span of everybody these days is a lot shorter. So you know, the reason you have your videos on YouTube is simply to direct people to your website and to showcase your business. So if they only visualize it on YouTube, that's okay, that's fine. But you would have links in the description area to your website, to particular web pages, whatever that is. But the videos shown on your website should not be hosted through YouTube. You can use independent hosting platforms so there's no distractions. There's no little YouTube thing down the bottom where they. Oh and scroll and off they go and totally distracted. So there's a way to use YouTube. Now here's an interesting stat to throw Back to you. 92% of videos that are watched on a mobile device, watched with no sound.

Interesting.

So captions. Exactly. Captions are absolutely Vital. And there are some very cool caption services. You just simply upload the video, it'll create the captions, you get an opportunity to edit it for accuracy and load those videos to YouTube and a streaming one to your website. So there's a way to use them and yeah, they can make a big difference to your business.

So would testimonial videos be one of the types of videos you could have on the website? If so, what are some of the other ones that you're seeing in the market right now?

Testimonial videos are great. Not everybody's comfortable doing that. And I've got to say, if you can get it done as like an impromptu thing can be really helpful sometimes. And if you're doing that, I would always recommend that you tell people to, look, I'm just going to do this. You, you. If somebody's just said to you something quite emotive, I love my house, I can't believe it. And you know, that's a great time to get a video because we're at the highest emotive state. It's a great time to get a testimonial too, by the way. But video testimonials, gold. And you know, warn people that, you know, look, just be natural, be hard. Just say what you've said to me. Boom, do it right there. It's going to be quite natural, it's going to come across really authentic. Do warn them to just hold their pose at the end because quite often they'll, I'll say, how's that? And you can't cut that part out.

So let's talk about proof as well on a website. You know, what are some of the entities that basically show proof of success or proof of integrity or in some cases, you know, that reassurance that people need. What are some of the types of proof that should be on a, on a professional building website?

The thing is, there's two things that stand out there for me, right? So there's testimonials against, but there's also case studies. So testimonials are proof of what people think about your business. Case studies are proof that you can deliver what people say about your business. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that's an interesting way of saying it.

Yeah, it's a really important distinction. So it's even more powerful about case studies is when you tie that to then a testimonial. And so with case studies, you know, there's the problem, how you solve the problem and what the outcome was. And we've got A framework for creating case studies that help anybody and certainly builders that we roll out. And so it helps them to identify and it's the way the case studies displayed on the website is really important because you want to convey and you want to resonate with the person who's reading that case study. Because if they resonate with it like, boom, you know, they're convinced that you are going to be able to solve their problem. And when that's reinforced with a testimon, that's just massive added value.

I'm going to throw some other questions at you around authority because obviously this is just as important and authority usually builds trust and in this era today, trust is so important. So I'll start off with how does a professional building company establish authority on a website? And especially if it's, let's say a new builder, where they're getting themselves into the space as well. How do you borrow some form of authority as well?

Look, I mean, simple things, you know, builders have to be registered for a start. So show your registration, you know, your license numbers. If you knew, you might not have any awards, but you know, consider that. But associations, badges, anything you're associated with, you know, and if you're a start off, it might be product ranges perhaps, but you know, also showcasing your team. So anything that gives you credibility, anything that gives you authority, inspires confidence. It's really that simple.

I mean, in a perfect world as well, any listening here that's a member of the association of Professional Builders should also think about putting that as a badge as well because it's, you know, it's part of your, okay, what about the type of quality of content that should be on a website? You just distinguish between a brochure based website and a lead generation website. And I'm assuming there's a different language to actually get those conversions. And what are some of those necessary pages that you need to have on a website?

It's all about education. You know, somebody's coming to your website, you've got some lead generation, some lead magnets there and that's great. But then they've got other questions, you know, and you know, APB can provide the common FAQs as a standard template and then you customize that to suit your specialty audience or your language, the way you communicate. So FAQs, the processes, you know, the processes building a house, how many people know what the processes are? Break that down, make it easy for people to understand. And that's all about education. Which again comes to trust, confidence, everything else. But it also makes your job as a business owner a lot easier because you know those 60, 70 conversations I referred to earlier? Well, they should be all in your website somewhere because their conversations you verbally have. Well, you need to articulate that throughout your marketing, throughout your website, which means that you either won't get asked those questions or when you get asked those questions it'll be shorter, more concise because they've already been pre educated. And it is quite an interesting psychological thing because sometimes people don't like to repeat information. But there's a psychological thing where if somebody say in a free report, and you provide that free report, there's seven vital bits of information in that report. So somebody gets that, they read that report, they take in those seven vital bits of information. You can have a nurture, a follow up sequence providing one bit of information, say every week. And that's where a lot of people do go wrong in the lead generation space. So you could have a sequence offering one point, one week, another point, another week. Is that repetitive? Well, yes, technically. But you know what happens psychologically? People read that and they oh yeah, yeah, I read that somewhere. I know that it reinforces that education, education. So, and that's really crucial that nurture the follow up sequences in CRMs.

Right, and so with some of these pages, right, I'm assuming a home page and about page services, galleries, you know, potentially a plan range for a builder, testimonials, case studies. Yeah, case studies, guarantees, frequently asked questions, you know, advanced pages, kind of like a client login or you know, basically even a blog, you know, for organic content. But these are some of the pages I see out there. Building companies. How important is it to leverage a 404 page? And can you define that to our listeners out there?

A 404 page simply is if a link is broken in your website or they went to a page they thought existed and doesn't exist. And a 404 page basically can be a summary of valid content. So they okay, they've gone to the wrong page. And rather than just saying, oh, you've gone to the wrong page and nothing else can be vital information, they can be links to lots of other valid content FAQs. All the pages we just listed can be listed on that 404 page.

Right. And could you turn that into a lead generation opportunity if they land on a 404 page as well?

Absolutely, yeah. You could embed your free reports on there if they've missed them or weren't interested in signing up earlier. Yeah, absolutely.

Let's talk about social media, shall we? I feel like I've noticed as well with, you know, some of the things that I've hired or services I've taken on on if someone has links to their social platform. Normally if I land on their social platforms and they haven't been updated for years, chances are they're too busy or they might not even get back to me in a timely fashion. So I guess the question that I have is should you link social platforms to a website if you're a professional billing company and should you be also staying on top of your social platforms?

Absolutely. So there's a couple of points I'd like to make there. The trend of number of years ago was to have your social media links high on your website as well. And I would not advocate that. The point is you've got them to your website one manner or another, whether that's, you know, organic SEO ranking in Google or Adwords or whatever that is. Right. You don't want to take them away from your website the minute when they land have your social links at the bottom, you know, so then you can, they can go off and check out your social platforms. But yet not having dynamic content on your social platform platforms is really not a good place to be. You want to be publishing to your social platforms quite regularly. And the thing is that most people don't realize that they've got so many opportunities to create social posts from the content that's already on their website. And that's generally why people don't make regular social posts is because they struggle with getting content together. And time, it's the old adage of time. But look, there is automation out there, there is software that will host to your social platforms and you can set it on an Evergr evergreen cycle, which I mean that by that I mean a lot of the content I call evergreen because it's as valid now as it will be in three months or it will be in 12 months. Right, right. Social moves so quick. There's nothing wrong with reposting pre existing content. I mean you wouldn't recycle something every week. You know, you come up with a 90 or 120 day cycle but you've got to post regularly. And there's other ways to leverage from that. Simply with, you know, photography, imagery, you know, if you're on a project you can take a photo of, I don't know, a bathroom that just got fixed or a bath that just got installed or whatever that it is, publish that on Instagram, it can get reposted to Facebook. You can also integrate it with your website where you have an Instagram page and you've got fresh new content there. So you do one thing. To me, it's all about leveraging business. You know, do one thing and three things happen. That photo goes to Instagram, Facebook and your website. Boom.

I think we call it repurposing content. But I also really like the concept about moving the social icons to the bottom of the page because I read this recently that. And I do agree with you that having the platform, you know, the platform icons at the top is almost like owning a shoe store. And as soon as people enter the shoe store, you have an exit sign that says leave the website or leave the store. You know what I mean? So. So I do definitely agree with that as well. And it's interesting how a lot of the things that you're talking about about is about understanding behaviors of website visitors more importantly than just where you're coming from. From a business as well, because again, a lot of the things you're talking about is kill the cul de sacs within your website and try to create a very smooth user flow and experience as well.

Yeah, yeah, that was a really good term you use, user flow. It's a customer journey. It's that user experience, right? Take them on that journey. Journey. You've got that eight seconds, you know, and boom, they know they're in the right place. Great. Okay, now I'm going to investigate further. And as they go down, your website and your website can never be too long. It really can't as long as. But it can be too boring. So you've got to just showcase and identify their pain points and get them engaged.

And I know that for our listeners out there, the association of Professional Builders have come up with an amazing checklist list that I'm sure, Peter, you've had some insights on. And I know that they'll be sharing that, you know, at the end of the recording as well to our listeners. And so we're going to cover a lot of the best practices, the training as well that we're going to give away as well as the checklist. But what I wanted to talk about is about, you know, what happens once the website's built. Should we have a CRM or an email platform? And why is analytics so important for builder today?

Analytics and for website tracking, we use Google Analytics and you might not look at that for a year and that's okay as long as you're tracking it. But the bottom line is you want to know how many visitors you've had to your website, what pages they're visiting, how long they stayed on those pages. And like I said, you might not look at that for year to year, but historically you can then look back. And we had this classic case quite recently where a different web firm had worked on a particular website and they changed the, what I call doorway buttons on the home page. So there was, you know, doorway to the left, doorway to the right. And this person said to the business owner, oh my God, the website, you know, the interactions that's going off. And we had a look at the Google Analytics, those two big buttons. They were big buttons. So if they're big buttons, you think they're going to get people clicking on them. Right. In the previous six months, not one click through.

Interesting.

We made some changes and within the first month we were getting 13% click through on the left button and I think 17% on the right button. So there was no disputing this. And this person didn't believe, didn't mean to give the wrong information. I just don't think they understood what they were doing. Right. So we proved that people, you know, it's important having that historical data and people were clicking on this now, now how that helps your website is Google measure all this. So if a website has people coming to it and nobody's visiting the internal pages, you will get demerit points. With Google, it's all about browning points and demerit points. It's really that simple. So by more people clicking through, you're getting brownie points, you will get higher organic rankings. That makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of Google, they've obviously updated their analytics because now they've got the whole G4A coming in very soon as well. So analytics is, I wouldn't say it's retiring, but it's getting a new aesthetical uplift, as we say.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So there's a lot more information and for a lot of business owners, that's not in their wheelhouse, their strengths and that's okay. But the historical data is there to be used. So a business owner might go, okay, well, I want to make some changes to my website and so they, they can talk to their webby and have a look at what the traffic has been, what pages are getting visited. So you might have a lot of traffic to a particular page, but then they exit from that page. Well, why aren't they engaging? Why aren't they filling in the contact form? There's something broken there. So it helps you identify those issues as well.

Well, okay, so let's just say the website's done, it's built. What's next? Are you taking a vacation or the work just starts, right?

Yeah. Websites dynamic. When it's finished, when it's built, the go live day and everybody's happy and running around, it's just the beginning. So a couple of things you mentioned, I want to sort of capture. So you mentioned about the CRM. So we cannot forget that. We need to come back to that. Yeah. You know, you've got to add regular new content. So the websites we build and that APB recommend are WordPress. So they're the WordPress platform. WordPress is now commands 46% of all websites on the planet. When I started in this industry, only 10% of websites were built in WordPress. Now it's 46%. And there's a reason for that, because they're very easy to update, they're very easy to edit and evolve as a business evolves. Not only that, the blogging aspect, where a blog is simply a newsworthy post. It's as simple as that. When you add a blog post that is dynamic content and the moment you hit the publisher key, it pings the search engines and pings. Pinging is like a Internet sonar for the web and it says, hey, new content here. So the search engines come back and visit the website. So they index the content index means no exists. So the more often you're publishing new content, the more the search engines are coming back and visiting your website. And that's important. And there's different ways you can add new content.

Right, let's talk about the CRM. So, you know, obviously you talked about lead magnets and my mind went into, okay, so we're collecting contact information and we're sending information. I'm assuming you're recommending a CRM to do both.

Yes, absolutely. So there's web, your contact form, your lead generation, your lead magnet forms. And they traditionally use contact form software within the website itself, but that's disconnected from your CRM. Why would you not use your CRM form contact software? So, boom, the contact is straight into your CRM. And like I said with the free report model, you know, you send out the free report, you know, they register for the free report, they sign up, they get sent that free report. Why would you not then turn that into a nurture sequence? So they get, you know, information number one in week number one, information point number two in week number two. So you're nurturing that contact and you can only do that using a CRM. We actually have a CRM that we're working with some of the APB clients now called Smarter CRM and that is absolutely brilliant software. It's very easy to use, very intuitive and it can be integrated with the custom home builders websites.

I think for me one of the best features that any CRM should have should also capture the journey of what stage they're in in whether in the consideration stage or the sales process. I think from a business side of things, any serum that can do that as well just makes you just map out your leads even better.

Yeah, yeah, look, you're absolutely right. One of the big standouts with the CRM we're using, we've talked about social media, we've talked about websites, so and we've talked about Google. So Google My Business you have a Google business listing and on what most business owners don't realize is that on a mobile device your Google My business listing has a chat feature and when people hit that chat they send you a message. And if you don't have this integrated with your CRM you'll get an email. But think about that's a chat feature. People have an expectation that chat feature is going to get an instant result. Well what we've done is we've taken your Facebook messenger leads, your Google My Business chat leads, your contact forms, Instagram, direct messages, all go into one portal into your CRM and there's actually an app for that on the phone as well. So and you can have automated responses so you're not a slave to these inbound leads. You can have an automate. Hey, we just got your thing, your message. Thanks for that. Please register for this and go and book a schedule, call or sign up for every free report. So there's all this automation that you can create using a CRM.

So you know, I could chat with you for hours and obviously your wealth of knowledge. I'm going to wrap up our really, you know, interesting insightful interview with a very important question and it has to do and around trends basically in this space, what are some of the current trends you're seeing on the market when it comes to effective lead generation websites and more importantly how can the listeners out there on this podcast reach?

So look, trends I mentioned earlier and this is a very simple one, not having too many slideshows on your hero image on your website, finding that one hero image three maximum. If you want to do a little bit of a storytelling, definitely free reports in different areas of your website. So you're really pushing those pain points. And also there's this expectation to respond quicker. The quicker you respond, the more you engage. You think about somebody out there. They're looking for a home builder. Is the custom home builder we're talking to now the only home builder that they've contacted? Probably not. So the person who does the most nurturing is the most responsive and has the best follow up sequence is going to be the winner.

So basically provide value wherever you can.

Absolutely. Cool.

Any wise words from you for our listeners out there before we wrap this up?

Don't be shy on investing in this. It's a capital expense, right. It's a one off expense. So you know, do the numbers but do the roi. You know, how many new contacts or how many new projects do you need to make this worth your investment and invest the time in getting it right.

And smarter websites is how people can find you as well, Pierre.

Absolutely, yeah. So we're APB's preferred partner for websites and also for CRM technology.

Well, it was a pleasure having you. Thank you so much for the wealth of knowledge, the insights. It certainly was a great refresher for me as well, being in this space to hear it from someone else who's a professional as well. Look forward to having you back on the show as well in the future. And again, thank you so much for your generosity and the information provided.

Thank you very much.

Cheers mate.

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