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. 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. You can sort by popular cards, themes, photo cards, art cards, etc. Here are links to a few of our favorites!

• Construction Site Santa
• Peace, Hope, Joy
• Snowflake Holiday
• Red Bridge Winter Scene
• Blue Winter Collage
• Festive Red
• Artistic Trees
• Blue Wreath 
• World of Best Wishes

Shop, Select, Order from any device! Cheers! Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger

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. I 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. 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? 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? 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.

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". 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. It'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. 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). 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.