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lesliebridgeswriter

Leslie is a partner in Builder Promotions Marketing firm, a company devoted to making life better at work for the Marketing professionals who work tirelessly to deliver New Home Communities that provide a place for families to live and thrive. She loves being a Mom and keeps a suitcase packed for the next travel adventure with her family.

Who are the Influencers in a New Home Sale?

By BP News, Digital Marketing Resources No Comments
bluebonnets-STOCK-1200x540 Who wouldn't want to share this beautiful photo? That's probably what Lennar Homes thought when they posted this lifestyle image for one of their new home communities in Texas. For a lot of us, it's not about the house. It's about what we see through our windows and the spaces outside  where we explore with a small child on a Saturday morning or get out for a run after work. These kinds of images cut through the burden of home buying details and give buyers a sense of how it would feel to live in that home. If you are an Influencer, you want to share this image with people you know. You can't help yourself! It's a gorgeous piece of shareable content. Builders want to be thinking about how to get relevant content to their Influencer audience. I received this infographic about Influence Marketing today. It got me thinking about who the Influencers are for a new home sale. Here are three influencer categories from my perspective. What do you think? Realtors - They can influence their clients to consider the benefits of a new home while they are also looking at resale homes. We recently wrote a post about what Realtors want from Builders. Connectors/Brand Advocates - Connectors are people who love to share content with their networks. They are easy to find if you can send a short NPS survey. You can use a question like, "How likely would you be to refer people in your network to our new home communities?" Nothing better than a one question survey - fast, easy and takes no time away from your customers. When you have this data, take the responders with the highest score and do a quick search to see who is most active digitally. Even if it's a handful, you have the seeds of an Influence Marketing effort. Sales team members may intuitively know who some of these Connectors are, and they may be ready to broadcast for you. All you have to do is ask and share content. The Social Media Examiner has written a good article with 9 reasons you want to engage with these Influencers. Lifestyle Bloggers - If you can connect with a Blogger in your markets, you have a way to leverage your content across a much larger group of home buying consumers. GroupHigh helps companies build profitable relationships with Bloggers. They offer a good database of Blog titles, subject matter, audience demographic, audience reach and tools to easily cultivate relationships on behalf of your builder brand. I love this quote because it reminds us to aspire to give our brands greater meaning. And I think it also makes it easier to connect with Influencers. new-brand-rules-3-728Builder brands are thoughtfully designing living environments that inspire a sense of community, provide an environment for families to connect and offer spaces for renewal and creativity. Influencers will tell people about the important work you are doing, if you can find and engage them!   Have you identified your influencers?  Do you have a Social Influencer Campaign in place? We'd love to hear from you, and we are actively seeking guest bloggers on this topic. Please connect with us if you are a Home Builder Marketer and would like to cultivate this conversation further through a guest blog post or series. Thanks for stopping by and engaging with us. Cheers! Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger Marketing Blueprints is sponsored by Builder Promotions, an e-commerce, and mobile procurement platform delivering branded products used throughout the new home selling cycle. Builder Promotions proprietary GroupBuy service enables Divisions to benefit from collaborative purchasing.

Our Holiday Card Pop-Up Shop is Open for Business. Happy Shopping!

By BP News No Comments
201511040912249482-homepage_business_2015-11-04 2015 has flown by, and I can't believe we've already opened our Holiday Card Pop-up Shop! We've made it easy and fun to select and order your Corporate Holiday Cards with a simple click of your mouse. There are  800+ Corporate Holiday cards to choose from with lots of ways to sort and view on your screen. We are confident that you can find that perfect card to convey your Holiday Greeting to Customers, Realtors, Employees, and Stakeholders. 201310081353151690-holiday_business_v2 We know Builder Marketing teams are busy closing out the year and getting ready for 2016. By using our Holiday Card Pop-up Shop, you can check the box on one more Marketing task, and keep your team's focus on meeting your year-end goals. n5634_0_zoom You can sort by popular cards, themes, photo cards, art cards, etc. Here are links to a few of our favorites! Shop, Select, Order from any device! Cheers! Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger

What if you could attract greater numbers of digital home shoppers? You can.

By BP News No Comments
SEO-Increasing traffic In an industry that is decentralized and local-buy-design, Local SEO can make a significant difference in the number of leads generated. With 90% of home searches starting online, Builder Marketing Managers need to think about how to differentiate at the "point of search". One very cost-effective way to do this is to ensure that you are optimizing your website for Local Search. Model Home GPS is a Local SEO product packaged and sold by Builder Promotions for the New Home vertical. We deliver Model Home GPS with our Digital Partner, Gotcha Mobile Solutions. hi-256-0-eb1487e635c77a9276c76eba386975127c975fabI had the opportunity to interview CEO, Chris Jenkins this week. He has both real estate and digital experience. He speaks directly to the challenges of the New Home vertical and the reasons why Local SEO is a no-brainer for this industry segment in particular. We are excited to be sharing his insights about the potential to build traffic at your models and compete against resale product. Marketing Blueprints: Why is Local SEO important for new home builders? Chris:  New home builders have an advantage over resellers when it comes to local, primarily because the new home builder is pushing their brand that is their style of homes. Resellers have to get agents and agents then have to get customers. Home builders can focus more on their brand, the services they offer, the style of their homes, the market or type of customer they target, etc. A solid local SEO program can deliver this message much clearer for a new home builder than for a resale home.download (3) Every business that has any kind of online presence needs a good local SEO program. It is no different than saying every business needed to be listed in the Yellow Pages 10 years ago. Local SEO is all about taking control of a company's name, address, and phone number (NAP). If the company does not do this, then they are leaving it up to the masses of aggregators and directories to do it, and believe me, they get it wrong most of the time. Consistent NAP is foundational for a business’ online presence. Besides this, Model Home GPS, which is powered by Gotcha LocalSEO, is super robust. It not only handles the control of a company's  NAP, but it covers many other areas as well. First, we go beyond NAP and also push out expanded content. This means we collect up to 45 additional data points about a business and push them out to our directories and sources - i.e.,; content such as services provided, bios of team members, videos, photos, events, etc. We also push content out to the major aggregators and are instrumental in setting up a verified Google+ page, Apple Maps, and more. In addition to that, we provide analytics. Clients can log into their dashboards and view traffic and activity related to their Model Home GPS program.  The program also provides review tracking from approximately 12 review sites so Builders can see new reviews and manage them appropriately. Marketing Blueprints: Why should Marketers ask a lot of questions when they purchase Local SEO services? Chris: Just like any type of marketing service when it is fresh and new, many companies will get on the bandwagon to sell them and make profits. This is fine except that, for end-buyers, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell which is better from one to the next. We understand this dilemma. We have been in the SEO game for many, many years now and work very closely to Google through our AdWords association as a Badge Partner. I mention this because Google's advertising program relies on their search algorithm. So we are trained experts at understanding how search works and why. Because of this, the size of our company, and our knowledge of what our competitors can do, we have the advantage of being able to make our program more robust. We can go deeper into our ability to truly help a business rank higher in search results. This delivers a much stronger foundation to attract prospect calls, website visits, and Sales Center tours for New Home Communities. Marketing Blueprints: Why are images important and how can Builders leverage this?Port-Bristol-Great-Room-Backyard Chris: A picture is worth 1,000 words. Need I say more? The home builder industry has known this for a long time and spends time and money on capturing beautiful and inviting images of their products. We can help by providing additional exposure to these images through our program. One SEO tip: make sure the names of your images are “keyword” relevant. This means the names of the images mean something. “img_22323.jpg” holds zero value in the SEO world whereas “Plantation-home.jpg” is much more valuable. Marketing Blueprints: Google+ - does it matter? Why?Google Chris: Google’s eco-system is super huge! They see over 100 Billion searches a month, Youtube receives the equivalent of 685 years of video viewed monthly, Gmail, Google Play Store, Android, Google Drive, and so much more are part of this eco-system. Google+ is a vital part of the local search system and therefore, needs to be set up correctly. We do that for Model Home GPS clients. Marketing Blueprints: Can you talk about how people can measure results? This isn’t as cut and dry as we’d like it to be. We offer analytics that will show exposure and clicks from certain directories to your business profile. We show how your business may be showing up for certain keyword search phrases related to your business category. But the sheer amount of actual calls, foot traffic, web traffic, etc. that you may receive as a result of our program can be tough to measure 100%. What we do know is that approximately 80% of the businesses on our program say they notice improvement and more business as a result of what we do for them. But remember, the digital marketing game covers much more ground than you may think and to actually have a high performing website or digital marketing program you need to spend money and cover many different areas. For example; have a great local SEO program, excellent on-page and off page SEO for your website, maintenance on your website, an AdWords campaign, social ads campaign, and any number of other options available to market your business online. In today's highly charged and fragmented digital world, the top businesses are investing in multiple areas of digital marketing to ensure the most coverage that translates into traffic that then translates into sales. Local SEO is a digital staple for most enterprises, but for Home Builders, it's a necessity because being close to the local market is critical to attracting the right prospects for each new neighborhood in your portfolio. Thanks, Chris! We are excited about being able to offer a robust program with an affordable monthly fee ($149). Builders can test this program with a few models and track engagement before rolling it out to improve traffic at all their Sales Models, or just use it tactically to build traffic to new locations. Thanks for stopping by. If you'd like a quick review of your Local SEO results, give us a call, and we'll help you gain some visibility. Cheers! Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger Marketing Blueprints is sponsored by Builder Promotions, Inc., an e-commerce company managing the marketing spend of branded products used throughout the home selling cycle for New Home Builders. BP Digital is a service line of Builder Promotions, delivering cost-effective, easy-to-purchase digital solutions that support the home selling cycle.

Is it true that 86% of our time on our phones is spent with an APP?

By BP News No Comments

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I am a huge fan of Wordstream and their team of PPC experts because they offer educational content for a dynamic and rapidly changing area of digital marketing. They recently attended SMX East (Search Engine Marketing East) and instantly distributed a list of "must-have" take away statistics for anyone who is working to track, capture and engage digital prospects. I love companies who summarize all of this for me, and I wanted to share it with our readers.

I was intrigued by one quote in particular which was from Samantha Yeh, Marketing Manager at Bitly: #5 take away from SMX East: "More than 86% of time on your phone is spent with an App".samsung-wallhugger-2 It's hard to imagine how quickly we have become dependent on mobility. In the blink of an eye, we went from using a flip phone to walking around with portable computers that are enabled by an explosion of mobile Apps that are useful, informative, fun and engaging. In this blog, we've been talking about our Sales Center Concierge App which provides services for prospects visiting new home sales models. conciergeIt's a low-cost, simple way to personalize the shopping experience and begin a mobile relationship with home buying prospects. For a lot of businesses, a Mobile App can be a simple and cost-effective first step to a Mobile Strategy. We have a blueprint for this App, and we use your existing content to deliver a great sales center visit experience, by packaging it for busy prospects who are making time to include your sales models in their weekend activities. We've just published our BP App, too.  We know Builder Marketers are increasingly pressed for time and do much of their work on-the-go.  We want to be right there with you when it's most convenient to purchase from our Builder-specific e-Store Collection. Here's the Google Play link to download for your Android device. Apple takes a couple of weeks to publish, so we'll keep you posted when it's live. We are simplifying the purchase of digital tools so that you can buy an App as easily as you can purchase DoorMats and Flags. ModelHome2U is a great example.ModelHome2U_Post When consumers tour your models, they can scan a QR code, text a number or link to a short URL and activate an email of a link or PDF for their favorite model(s). When they decide to review what they've seen on their tours, they have immediate access to the exact model(s) they fell in love with. Your most-desired content is right there when they need it without having to search all the floorplans. I bet your competition isn't doing this. It's a small promotional tool that delivers a big "delight factor" and a supportive brand touchpoint. The adoption of Mobile can be seen globally, as you know. This summer, my family traveled deep into the mountains of the Yunnan province, absorbing the warmth of the Tibetan people who have lived there for centuries. One day, we stopped at a historic town to pay our respects to an important mountain in Tibetan culture (a ritual followed by anyone who travels to this area). IMG_0766 (3)I noticed a woman in brilliantly colored traditional Tibetan clothing looking like she was intently focused on a particular piece of the temple wall. I wondered what the significance was and walked over to get a closer look. That's when I realized she was using her iPhone to make a call! Another day we visited a prominent 300-year-old Buddhist Temple and the young Monk who welcomed us, put down his iPhone. My teenage son commented that he was playing FIFA.  So what's your favorite App? Mine is Pandora. They have packaged and curated music to virtually "score" the movie of your daily life. You use Pandora to relax, entertain, dance, cook, do homework, enjoy a ride in the car or get motivated for your exercise -- all this value for only $3.99/month. To me, it's pure genius. Home shopping consumers have a lot of information to manage. A well-designed App can package and curate Sales Center Visits, Mobilize Design Center choices or manage the details of their home purchase with a Digital Home Manager. What would you like to develop? How can we help you? Thanks for stopping by. Cheers! Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger Marketing Blueprints is sponsored by Builder Promotions, an e-Commerce platform delivering branded products used throughout the new home selling cycle. The company offers centralized control of marketing spend and peace of mind that your brand is protected in every market. Users can purchase their marketing supplies anytime, anywhere, from any device.

#YourBrandInTheirLife. How Do you "fit" into your Prospect's life?

By #YourBrandInTheirLife - New Products, BP News No Comments
22171969 A Home Builder brand wants to inspire future homeowners to live their best life in a new home and to enjoy the total lifestyle that a planned community offers. Builders want to fit into the ideal of what a new home will offer for home buying prospects. #YourBrandinTheirLife refers to branded products that support consumers in their daily lives. I got to thinking about how our e-Store products integrate into "life" for home buying consumers so that we could give builder marketers one more way to nurture prospects during the home selling process. Branded products tend to be low cost and utilitarian. And, they can be a valuable marketing tool to remind prospective home buyers of their connection to your communities. But they have to integrate into your prospects' daily activities. Here's an example using my typical Saturday morning routine. These products integrate into my activities and could easily promote a brand I like. 5:45am: I get up early (before anyone needs my assistance), and have a cup of coffee. My objective is to carve out a little time before I go to an insane exercise class, followed by a day of boys soccer. 22176379 I need to wake up, stretch and enjoy a little content on my laptop. My coffee routine is a space where I devote time to getting set for the day. Starbucks has transformed the coffee ritual, and stylish coffee cups are now part of the coffee experience. I love mine because they are symbolic of this quiet time in my day. And, I always seem to need more of them. download (3) 6:45am: I gather everything I need to make the most of my morning outing. Like many consumers, I am combining errands with my activities. I'm also making use of time in the car to connect with people about plans. Here's my checklist for leaving the house (and yes, I'm running late, aren't we all?). **My teenager has "borrowed" my 21377273portable charger because his phone is out of power. Fortunately, I can recharge it easily, and I have a back up in my briefcase, so I can call my friend on the way home. These are small, inexpensive, and utilitarian products that make it easy to go about living our daily lives. You can't brand everything, but consumers accept that products like this are sometimes branded, and if they are of good quality, they are appreciated as thoughtful gifts from brands they like. Builder Promotions e-commerce store is set up to serve these gifts to the Home Builder vertical. We are told by our clients that they love the simple layout with quick access to categories that sync with the home selling cycle. And whether our clients make a fast e-commerce purchase or email to get a project going before they end their day, the feedback is, it's great to be able to do mobile shopping and still get a human on the phone when it's most convenient to speak directly. I don't know what your Saturday morning looks like, but I bet you use a few products that make your life easier. Could they be branded? Probably! Maybe you can find new ways to integrate your brand into your prospect's life while they are deciding where to purchase their new home.  Thanks for engaging. Cheers! Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger Marketing Blueprints is sponsored by Builder Promotions, an e-commerce solution offering Convenience, Control and Peace of Mind.  Our branded products are used throughout the home selling cycle.

How Do You Extend the Impact of Your Community Marketing Events?

By #YourBrandInTheirLife - New Products, BP News, Rewarding Prospect Engagement No Comments
NCEM_BANNER If you are a home builder, a successful marketing event means you are introducing a prospective buyer or a realtor to your homes (in real time!). You have a chance, in-person, to showcase all the custom options that make buying new such a delight, and people get to experience what it feels like to be in a beautifully designed home. Anyone visiting a new home community also sees how the outdoor environment interplays with your models, and they begin to imagine their life in those spaces and environments. But that's just one day. It's been a successful event, and then everyone goes home. And chances are, your prospects are still looking at other competitive products, weighing their options. Last week, we launched a Community Event Marketing e-Store to help builder marketing clients extend the impact of successful events.  We know our marketing clients are using every mean possible to keep prospects connected to their brand. The products in our Community Event e-Store are tools that work for you before, during and after events. They have the potential to draw a crowd, and they keep prospects connected to your floorplans, virtual tours, home albums, and other digital content. Some products work for you as mobile billboards and let people in the local area know about your new home community, too. We have selected products that integrate, enhance and fit into your prospects life to support their connection to you and nurture interest in your brand. We hope you take some time to shop around. Here's one product that provides a fun family experience at home. MovieCardMockUpOur Digital Reward cards, reproduce photos of your homes and lead prospects to a branded landing page to redeem their digital gift (in this case a movie rental). When they redeem their gift, they supply their contact information. Our team quickly formats that data into a report for your Sales and Marketing teams, so they can follow up on prospects who attended your event. The gift, landing page, and reports are all included in your cost! Digital Movie rentals are a fun way to showcase your Great Room design.  Check out our other digital reward gifts; Tree Planting, Music Download, Fitness Download or customize a Digital Choice card. Click here to learn more about how other industries are using digital rewards to engage prospects and capture important data too. You can use your redemption landing page to survey, capture contact info., promote a new community, or deliver specific detail about green building benefits. The key is that the gift integrates into your prospects' life in a way that connects them to your new home benefits. And, for this particular example, who doesn't love an excuse to enjoy a family movie night! How are you connecting with prospects after your events? We know this is one tactic of many! Thanks for engaging. Cheers, Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger Marketing Blueprints is sponsored by Builder Promotions, a branding and procurement platform that ensures brand consistency throughout the home selling process.

Can an effective CRM tool help you predict your next home buyer? Marketing Blueprints interviews Lars Helgeson, CEO GreenRope.com

By BP News, Digital Marketing Resources No Comments
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I recently did some marketing consulting for a start-up firm who had purchased Salesforce.com. I loved having one central tool for capturing prospect brand touches and engagement, but I was stunned at the cost per subscriber, and unhappy with the price to "customize" for our business. That set me on a search for a CRM partner that would be nimble and easy on the budget. CRM is a business "must-have" when you are managing lots of prospects, and there are many options out there. When, I heard Lars Helgeson, CEO of GreenRope, speak at a Digital Marketers conference, I  knew I had found the CRM expertise I'd been seeking. I asked to interview him for Marketing Blueprints because our clients are managing a large segment of the nation's home buying prospects. Great CRM is paramount to the new home sales process. Here's our interview: Leslie:  CRM “Customer Relationship Management” has different operational meaning to different people. How do you define it? Lars: Salesforce dominates the CRM conversation, and that creates perceived barriers for mid-market and smaller companies who benefit from the efficiencies and expanded marketing capability of an effective CRM tool. Some people think CRM is the same as their contact database. Others think it’s synonymous with their email program. Within the framework of the Homebuilder industry, CRM is an eco-system that works to generate new homeowners. Leslie:  What specific features should a CRM tool encompass? Lars: It’s important to say that features are only as powerful as their ability to integrate and provide a 360-degree view of your prospect’s journey to purchase a new home. That said, an effective CRM tool needs to deliver:
  • Customer Relationship Management
  • Email Marketing
  • Social Network Marketing
  • Opt-in SMS Text Marketing
  • Real-time Tracking and Stats
  • Automated Sales Tools
  • Survey tools
  • Event Management and Calendars
  • Project/Task Management
  • Predictive Analytics
Leslie:  70% of leads generated by marketing efforts are not ready to make a purchase, and that makes a compelling case for the importance of Customer Relationship Management in any industry. Builder Promotions’ clients know that they have to educate and engage prospects to move them closer to purchasing a new home. Why do people stall their decisions to adopt a holistic CRM tool? Lars:  Our customers have told us that it feels like a big change, and that equates to time, which is scarce for Marketers everywhere. People don’t realize that it’s relatively simple to get started. Most marketers have a list of contacts or leads.  A smart CRM partner will get that data input for you during the onboarding process. You can start using the CRM eco-system immediately to segment and target your list. That drives conversion because you are relating to prospects more specifically and demonstrating that you understand what they desire from their new home community. Leslie:  GreenRope has built-in predictive analytics. It's an exciting area of CRM that has immediate application to the homebuilder sales cycle. Can you tell us about how that works?images (2)
Lars: Let's talk briefly about Analytics and its value to Marketers. Analytics is defined as the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data.  You look at any website analytics, and you can see how many people visited your website, who is referring to you and how people are searching. Ideally, analytics delivers actionable insights in service of your business goals.  That's what Google and other analytics services offer.  With the right CRM tool, you should get proprietary tracking that looks for specific contacts in your CRM to see how they are engaging with you.  Analytics offerings like Google and others cannot do this because they don't track individuals.  Only a good CRM can do this for you. Now, the next step is to understand Predictive Analytics.  Your CRM will capture data about your prospects and every engagement they've had with your brand. Predictive analytics looks at this historical data (tracking of homebuyers throughout the sales cycle) and builds a model around what causes conversions, or actions that lead to the purchase of a new home. We've made it simple to correlate conversions during the sales cycle, to home purchase behavior. Once you apply that model to people who have not yet purchased a home, you know exactly where to spend your Marketing and Sales energy.  It's empowering for Sales and incredibly cost effective for Marketing. Leslie:  Can you share some of the benefits of a good CRM system? Lars:  I always use GreenRope as an example. We are a company of 20 people supporting 1700 clients in 20 countries because of automation and the portability of information. CRM gives people a user-friendly way to view prospect demographics and behavior. The CRM eco-system tracks anonymous data until a prospect self-identifies through a conversion (registering, filling out a survey, taking a tour, etc.). When prospects do self-identify, the CRM tool back-fills all the data and Sales gets a map of the buyer’s journey.  It’s very simple and powerful. A sales person cannot find all the new homebuyers in a market. You need inbound marketing to fill the sales funnel and educate prospects.After a year on average, GreenRope’s clients are up 75% in revenues.  A good CRM tool makes it simple to centralize, organize and relate to your prospects. It then enables you to take historical information and apply it to future prospects in with predictive analytics. House-Sold-for-Happy-FamilyThe outcome should be more home sales, and referrals from long-term happy customers.
Thanks, Lars!  If you want to learn more, feel free to connect with the GreenRope team at GreenRope.com.   We know that builders are investing in quality content that invites prospects to tour their beautifully designed homes.  The right CRM tool won't break the bank, and it will expand your capacity to produce sales-ready prospects. Thanks for listening in. How are you supporting your prospects' home buying journey? Do you have a favorite CRM tool?  We'd love to hear from you! Cheers, Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger
Marketing Blueprints is sponsored by Builder Promotions, a centralized procurement solution that delivers brand consistency throughout the new home sales cycle.