How to Prepare a Real Estate Website Project Brief (To Make Your Own Website Project Successful)
A successful digital strategy starts by having a successful website. Without one, you won’t be able to build an effective inbound marketing strategy that attracts the right people, at the right time, for the right reasons.
That’s because your website is a key part of your overall marketing strategy, as it’s the main place where you can completely control how you, your brand, and your business are presented to your target audience.
But for a lot of agents, beginning a new real estate website project can seem like a difficult, overwhelming task, especially if you’ve never done it before or if you’ve had a negative experience going through the process in the past.
That’s why the initial planning phase, before you even begin building a website, is so important. A successful website project starts by working through and outlining all of the specific details and using that to prepare a website project brief.
A website project brief is your overall plan that outlines exactly who you’re building your website for, what you need your website to do, how you define the success of the project, and a lot more.
If you’re planning on building a website for your real estate business, here’s how to get started creating a website project brief that will help set yourself up for success:
1. Review Your Current Website and Digital Strategy
If you already have a website, the first step is to review it – even if it’s old or doesn’t perform well.
You should start by looking at your website’s overall analytics to review traffic, performance, and other metrics that can help you decide what to keep, what to remove, and what to change.
You should look into things like, over the last year:
- How much traffic did your website get?
- What traffic sources brought in the most, and the least, visitors.
- Which pages were the most viewed and visited?
- What pages were the most landed on and the most exited on?
- What were the main traffic sources that brought people to your website?
- And more…
The more you know about when, why, and how people use your existing website, the easier it will be to make decisions about what you should keep and what’s ok to leave behind.
You should also consider if there’s anything on your current website that’s still applicable to you, your brand, and your business. For example, are there any graphical elements or colors that you still like and want to use? Is there any content that was written that still stands up around how you want to convince someone to work with you? If something is still important, it might make sense to bring some of it over.
If none of the above apply, and your current website doesn’t provide anything of value, that’s fine; but if your website does perform well online, and has an established history and built up authority, then understanding that ahead of time, or at least being able to communicate what’s important to the company that’s building your new website, is key to making sure you keep the important, already successful parts of your current digital strategy in place.
★ Want to learn more about reviewing your current website and digital strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Best Practices When Rebuilding an SEO Successful Real Estate Website
- Measuring the Success of Your Digital Strategy Through Engagement
- How (and Why) to Audit Your Real Estate Website’s Content
- Measuring the Success of Your Content Marketing Strategy in Google Analytics 4
2. Outline Your Business
It’s important to make sure the company that you’re working with has a solid understanding of what you, your brand, and your business is all about, so you should be able to clearly outline what’s important in your business, what your unique offerings are, and what makes you different from your competitors.
Ideally, if you’re building a real estate website, you’d want to make sure that you work with a company that has a focus on working within the real estate industry (or at least a solid understanding of it). Since real estate marketing is a unique business, if you work with a company that doesn’t understand it, you won’t see the same level of success as you would if you chose a company that has a lot of real estate marketing experience and a strong portfolio of work to back it all up.
★ If you want to see some of our real estate brand development, website strategy, and marketing work, you can download our Portfolio of Work eBook right here.
3. Define Your Target Audience
To see success, you have to clearly outline who your specific and ideal target audience is.
Your target audience is always who you work with now, who you want to work with in the future, and also, who you don’t want to work with – and all of them are equally important to define.
Why is this so important? Your target audience is who you’re actually building your website for, which is a critical step that a lot of agents don’t consider. To build a website that actually works, converts, and gets results, you have to remember that you aren’t building a website for yourself: you’re building it for the people that will actually be using the website.
For example, if one agent’s primary audience is 65+ year olds that are downsizing, and another agent’s primary audience is people in their late 20s that are considering buying their first condo, those websites should be drastically different. How they function, what their content strategy is, what the tone of voice is, what the call-to-actions are – all of it should be very different because the audience is so different and they want to do and see different things.
To see success, every website should be different and built with a specific target audience in mind, and despite what most people think, not every agent has the same target audience, even if they work in the same area; which becomes evident once you look into who your specific target audience is.
Start by asking yourself, who do you work best with? What type of person have you worked with in the past that you truly had a great experience with? What type of people have you worked with historically that you’ve done the best work with? Once you really look into who your target audience is, you’ll probably find it isn’t exactly the same our competitor.
By planning your website around who you like to work with the most, or who you do the best work with, you’re more likely to attract them, and that starts by understanding (and being able to communicate) who your target audience is.
★ Want to learn more about target audience? Have a look at these posts:
- Why Your Target Audience Shouldn’t Be Anyone and Everyone
- How to Connect, Reach, and Engage Your Target Audience Online
4. Outline Your Goals and Project Success
To see success in your website project, you need to determine how you actually define that success, and while that might mean different things to different agents, success means outlining your definition and expectations of success at key stages of the project.
For example, you should define how you measure the success of the project as you go through the process, at the end of the project, and a year or so after the project is finished.
Being able to communicate what you want to happen, and how you specifically measure success, helps establish measurement goals for the company you’re working with.
But for a lot of agents, they simply state that their goal is: to generate leads, and while that’s fine as an overall goal, on it’s own, that’s too vague. The best place to start is by defining what a lead actually is to you. Who is the type of person? How qualified are they? Do they fill out a form, click an email address, or call you?
The more specific you can define success, the better. The more you can communicate to the company that’s building your website, how you define the success of the project, up front and before it begins, the easier it will be to make a decision about who to work with.
5. Outline Your Requirements
While you should certainly outline what your most obvious requirements are, like your timelines and overall budget, you should also outline any specific functionality or technical requirements you may have.
For example, do you need to connect the website to a specific CRM? Do you need website forms to integrate with your email newsletter database? Do you have any downloadable guides or eBooks that you want to seamlessly flow into the inbox of people that fill out forms on your website? Do you need other specific landing pages and CTAs that encourage people to take another action?
One other thing you might want to think about is whether or not you want to include an IDX search function; and while that might seem a bit of a radical idea, more and more of our websites have no IDX search function at all. If you want to explore that more about why that is, have a look at these posts:
- Why IDX is Antiquated and Shouldn’t Be Part of Your Future Lead Generation Strategy
- Does Your Real Estate Website Really Need IDX Integration?
6. Choose a Successful Partner
Choosing who to hire to build your website is the most critical part of making sure your website project is successful – many agents have had a negative experience working with a company that over promised and under-delivered, and many of them are hesitant to begin a new website project for fear of it happening again – but that’s where choosing a successful digital strategy partner can make all the difference.
When you’re deciding what company to work with, you should take your time researching their work, interviewing multiple providers, asking a lot of questions (there’s more about that in the links below), and making sure you choose the right agency that understands the real estate marketing industry and has a solid list of successful clients that would recommend them.
Ideally, an experienced agency would help guide you through most of planning above as part of their process, and if they don’t or aren’t able to, then it’s probably a red flag.
Want to learn more about choosing a partner (and to see if Artifakt Digital is the right choice for you? Have a look at these posts:
- How We Work to Empower Clients and Not-Yet-Clients Alike
- 10 Questions to Ask a Real Estate Website Development Company Before You Hire Them
- Download Our Social Proof and ROI eBook
Invest In Yourself
At the end of the day, an investment in your branding, website, and online identity is an investment in yourself and your business – and the more planning you do ahead of time around what you’re building, why you’re building it, and who you’re building it for, the more successful it will be.
★ After your website launches, the real work begins: getting it in front of your target audience. If you want to learn more about that, have a look at this post called: Why Your Website and Your Marketing Strategy Go Hand-in-Hand.
We believe our work is a true reflection of how we deliver on our mission to be: Inspired by Great Design, Driven By Strategy, Proven By Results. Wondering if Artifakt Digital is the right choice for you? Get started by having a look through our portfolio of work we’ve done for other real estate agents.
