This was one of our initial blog posts and a very good interview on a topic of real importance to home builder Marketers - How to turn Happy Homeowners into profitable customer reviews.
We've written a few blog posts about our expansion into Mobile Engagement through the launch of BP Digital. We thought it would be a good time to introduce our software partner, Kevin Vaughn CEO of iGlobal Apps. Together, Builder Promotions and iGlobal Apps are on a mission to bring simple, user-friendly and cost-effective Mobile Solutions to Builders nationwide. Professional Builder magazine just published an article about how home buyers are using digital tools in the process of purchasing a new home. The digitization of home selling continues to gain momentum, and mobile engagement is going to be a must-have sales tool. Here's what Kevin had to say about this when we caught up with him last week.
Marketing Blueprints: Kevin, can you talk about why you are so passionate about partnering with us to empower Homebuilders with Mobile marketing tools?
Kevin H. Vaughn, CEO iGlobal Apps: Builders, like all enterprises, need to deliver their value proposition through digital content. Trends in mobilization tell us that digital house hunters will want more access to digital tools and flexibility to stay up to date on new home communities while they are on-the-go. Mobile devices deliver this on-the-go convenience. This is about integrating your brand into your prospects' life. Here are some stats of interest:
- In January of 2014, mobile Internet usage surpassed that of the PC for the first time in history.
- 21% of Millennials have ditched the computer and devoted themselves to their smartphones for online access. That number will grow.
- Mobile Apps account for 89% of time spent on mobile media while only 11% is through the mobile web.
- This year, the costs spent on mobile marketing are rivaling that of desktop advertising, and by 2019, 72% of digital ad spending will go toward mobile.
Event Marketing enables you to play host to your prospects and make it easy for them to experience your location and home designs. Marketers are doing so many creative things to increase traffic at events; we thought we'd devote a blog post to 4 Event Marketing Categories that get beyond food. Don't get me wrong, food works! Gourmet food trucks, Americana BBQ's, food n wine demos and more, all welcome your Sales Center guests into a festive atmosphere. And, who doesn't love to eat! Everyone is doing it. So how do you differentiate your events? Here are some Event ideas that allow home buying prospects to make use of precious weekend time and visit your Sales Centers too.
Informational/Learning Events: These are events that offer learning opportunities that sync with home buying. You give prospects valued in-person content that adds value to the home buying process and showcases your designs.
Our Ideas: Get a local author to do a reading and book signing. Think home decor, food or gardening as a theme. Combine a cookbook author reading with a farmer's market or a cooking demo. Invite a local children's author and create a kid-friendly event. If your school district is a strong housing draw, invite a school Principal to come speak about the benefits for kids educated in the neighborhood school. In the California market, prospects are interested in water use/costs. In this market, providing content about low water home design or drought resistant landscaping would deliver information most home buying consumers are seeking currently. I noticed a builder on Instagram promoting a class about mortgage financing in a market where there are a lot of first-time buyers.
Exercise Events: While we were traveling this summer, we met a group of journalists "sampling" our Lodge as part of a trip through several properties. I awoke one morning to find them enjoying an early morning Yoga class with a local Yoga Master. They were situated on mats under a shaded trellis, next to the kitchen's organic garden. The hotel was able to showcase their outdoor environment by pairing it with the class. The journalists looked serene, calm and happy afterward. They said they loved it! Everyone needs to move more, and most of us sit at computers more than we should. So why not promote your outdoor space by hosting exercise classes with local community experts.
Our Ideas: Start and end a 5K run from your Sales Center. Finish with healthy snacks, water and offer maps of running/walking trails in the area. Host Yoga, Zumba, or any other fun fitness class that works outside. Begin and end a Fitbit walking challenge from your Sales Center. People love to get moving on weekends, and you can marry that desire with a visit to your Sales Center, by helping prospects make time for something they want/need to do anyway.
Charity Events: Local charities benefit from the sponsorship of community businesses. Include prospects in your brand's charitable efforts and create an event around fund-raising or volunteering to help a non-profit near your new home community.
Our Ideas: Tap local music talent to create a festive atmosphere and make it fun and easy for people to give or volunteer their time. You can partner with a food bank and pack boxes for homeless shelters. A local homeless organization near us is trying to collect 8400 pairs of shoes to get an image of what it looks like to take care of 8400 homeless people. They will use them for an art installation and fund-raising event and then distribute them to their shelter members. It's a simple way to help, and most of us can recycle a pair of shoes. People want to give, and they want to teach their kids to give. In providing these kinds of events, you demonstrate that a "sense of community" already permeates your new home neighborhood. It's a powerful draw for people who know they are buying more than a home when they decide to buy new.
Mobile Events: These are events where you take your product to your customers. Hard to imagine with a home, but think Food Trucks and Pop-Up Retails Shops. Not everyone can get to a new home sales center when you have your event. Why not take a "Mobile Sales Center" to your prospects where they are already shopping, eating, and living. These cost more, but the mobility might just pay for itself if you are a larger builder.
Our Ideas: Ride the Food Truck wave and create a mobile Sales Center that delivers big screen virtual tours of your homes and interactive registration devices that make it fun and rewarding for prospects to share their contact information. Including music will give people a reason to hang around. Retailers are successfully using the food truck idea to market products. We know you cannot put a home into a shopping cart, but builder marketers can capitalize on the trend in Pop-Up stores, and bring the Sales Center experience to consumers. How would you design a mobile "sales center"? This Adidas shoe box is a creative piece of mini-real estate designed to attract consumers to the brand outside of the standard retail setting.
For any of these types of events, make use of local celebrities - authors, athletes, artists, musicians, chefs, etc. Local celebrities love to participate in their communities. If you are Marketer, you are probably a networker, and you already know someone who knows someone! And to help you attract a crowd, Click here to make use of a checklist for marketing your events.
Thanks for joining the conversation. We hope this adds value to your week.
Cheers!
Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger
Marketing Blueprints is sponsored by Builder Promotions, a branding solution that delivers brand consistency throughout the home selling cycle.
Time is a rare commodity when you are competing for the attention of new homebuyers, showcasing new communities, and building market share for your new home brand.
It's no secret that in 2008, Marketing teams shrunk as the industry contracted during the financial crisis. Today's Marketers have reason to be hopeful (and busy) as homebuying trends upward again. What hasn't changed is that Marketing teams are still operating with historically low staffing levels. And, the role of a homebuilder Marketer has evolved to include an ever-expanding ecosystem of digital marketing functions. Digital Marketing holds the key to capturing home buyers early in their search for the ideal home, and has become a mission-critical priority for Homebuilder Marketers.
This busy infographic (it's so detailed I cannot even insert it here) illustrates the challenge to digital marketers everywhere. There are an exponential number of platforms to help you capture, engage and convert digital house hunters. Builder Marketers need to spend more time on digital, without compromising other important Marketing channels.
To stay current, I make a habit of studying trends in digital marketing for a few minutes every day. I love Hubspot for their action-oriented blogging content. This recent Hubspot post is a great example of a simple best practice that illustrates the power of digital tools to drive the human interaction which is so fundamental to selling a home. Realistically, the best marketing ideas are often relegated to our wish list because we need time to think through their application in our business environment. Where to find extra snippets of time to pursue "the list"?
Builder Promotions likes to think of ourselves as "gifting" you back your time with a centralized e-commerce service.
We manage the procurement and timely delivery of branded products you use throughout the home selling cycle so that you can focus on your mission-critical Marketing priorities.
Our e-Store Solution delivers Control, Convenience and Peace of Mind. It's a complimentary service, too (what's not to love!).
- Order when and where it's convenient for you
- Preferred Pricing that helps everyone's budget
- Control marketing spend with Corporate/Division reports
- Peace of Mind that your Brand is being protected
- Click to Quote access for Custom Products
When digital house hunters reward you by scheduling a visit to your sales center on their busy weekend, you want to be mindful that you are competing with precious weekend recreation. It pays to think about how you can curate a great customer experience to nurture this important advance through your sales funnel.
Curating a customer experience takes thoughtful design and smart execution, something our Builder marketing clients do with excellence. But there's only so much time in the day and our clients are doing amazing work with historically lean marketing departments!
Given the staggering growth of mobile usage, we think it's the ideal time to launch a Mobile Channel to help our clients personalize the brand experience the minute someone self-identifies on your website and the process of getting browsers to visit a sales model, begins. Our mobile app enables you to automate mobile marketing and makes it easy to curate a great customer experience, without adding marketing staff. Think of it as a "Virtual Community Concierge" that means your next Sales Model visitor just an APP away!
When home buyers you are nurturing decide to visit your sale centers, your Community Concierge App can make them feel like they are receiving a personalized service -- like they would get from an actual Concierge. It would help prospects.
- Plan their sales model visits
- Click to call for a personalized tour
- Get on-the-go directions to sales models
- Experience your well-designed home environments in-person
- Locate your other sales centers in the region, not your competitors
- Search "around us" and find a place to relax and grab a bite or drink to imagine their lives in your new homes.
- Access your social media to talk about their visit.
- Engage with Builder "Internet Advisors" via call/email/text
- 89% of new home shoppers use a mobile search engine at the onset and throughout their research.
- Mobile applications are used by 68% of new home shoppers at the onset and throughout their research.
- Get general information about homes
- Get directions to an open house on-the-go
- Compare Prices/Features
- Search Inventory
- Contact a Sales Person or Agent
- Read customer reviews
- Research financing options
- Watch video content
- Easy access to product information (homes) and store location (sales centers)
- Help planning and navigating Trips (on-the-go sales center directions)
- Ability to communicate in real-time (one click access to builder sales contacts)
- Proactive and relevant (to them) information and services within the context of their location at a particular time (around us GPS for your other sales models and places to grab a bite or drink in the neighborhood)
When a digital prospect converts from online shopper to Sales Model visitor, they experience all the qualities that make new homes stand out in a real estate market dominated by resale product. The Sales Model visit is an ideal time to reward the investment they've made in learning about the benefits of owning a well-designed, beautiful brand new home.
Many of our clients consistently reward their sales model visitors and we'd love to hear about how you are rewarding yours! Meanwhile, we thought we'd share a list of engagement touchpoints where you can reward prospects throughout the new home sales cycle.
- Reward event registration when you are trying to capture specific segments. (in a previous blog post, we share one Builder’s success with this)
- Thank Realtors who promote new home communities. They will multiply your sales efforts.
- Reward digital shoppers who click to call for a model home tour
- Host a 48 hour Facebook Event where users share photos of life in their new home. Reward each entry and make a permanent album for Facebook.
- Recognize customers who tell their stories in video testimonials. They are credible to digital house hunters browsing your site at 10 pm.
- Ask customers for online reviews and reward them for taking the time. Google will reward you with higher rankings because today’s house hunters expect to validate their findings with reviews from your customers.
- Reward prospects with a digital gift when they download your Mobile APP. Your next prospect is just an "APP away"!
- Ask new homeowners for a family selfie on move-in day. Give them a branded selfie stick to inspire a playful photo shoot. Prospective home buyers want to imagine themselves having a happy life in their new home. Candid images deliver fresh content and authentic reactions to a new home purchase.
- Deliver product and warranty information on a USB flash drive and embed a link to your social channels so new homeowners can share their experience with your brand.
- When prospects download a brochure or finish a virtual tour, reward them with digital gifts they can redeem while they are online.
Visit our Facebook page and share your Homebuilder brand ideas for rewarding prospects and new homeowner engagement. Your reward? The first 15 posts receive a sleek portable power bank that provide power when you need it most on-the-go.
Thanks for stopping by!
Cheers,
Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger
Marketing Blueprints is sponsored by Builder Promotions, a centralized solution for consistent branding throughout the home selling process.
This just emerged in email traffic from my favorite resource for all things Pay-Per -Click! For Homebuilders, the statistics below are of significant interest because there is now proof that digital shoppers are more likely to connect with you via their mobile device. This post tells you about the one tactic you can test right now - Call-Only Campaigns. Here's the background from Pay-Per-Click wizard, Larry Kim of WordStream.
According to Larry Kim, WordStream Founder, Calls to Businesses are Worth 3X More Than Clicks to Websites.
Why does this matter to builders? Read on! I am going to let Larry describe this himself from his blog post about "call-only campaigns" which can be incredibly successful if you are engaging digital house hunters through a mobile device.
"In May, Google revealed that mobile phone searches have finally surpassed desktop. The anticipation has been building for years with critics claiming having a robust mobile strategy is overrated, but now the importance of mobile literally cannot be ignored by marketers. Users are 9X more likely to place a call on the search engine results page (SERPS) than on desktop, according to a WordStream study. If calls are proving to be so much more valuable what can marketers do?
For those using Pay Per Click to capture prospects, the solution is simple, implement call-only campaigns. Call-only campaigns are available on mobile devices and essentially force the searcher to call directly from the SERP rather than visit a landing page, cutting out the leakiest part of the sales funnel. “Pay per click is turning into pay per lead,” says Larry. This is exciting stuff!"
Build your own Mobile App, and you can curate prospects' experience with your brand from their mobile device. Builders can use the call-only campaign to promote Sales Model Tours. Our custom Sales Model App is a one-of-a-kind App designed by an experienced developer, to help you deliver a convenient and entertaining experience for prospects visiting your Sales Models. With your own Mobile APP, you can guide prospects from a phone call to a Sales Model Tour with one-stop navigation that brings them to you, enables them to enjoy the surrounding neighborhood and share the experience with their network.
Want to know more? We'd love to let you speak with our software developer to discuss your custom Sales Model App.
Thanks for stopping by to engage.
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.
Since paid search is now becoming the norm, I've been seeking input from industry thought-leaders so that I can intelligently invest in keyword search that is intuitive to prospects searching for us. And because we live, eat and breathe Builder Marketing, I began to think about how our clients and prospects could use this information too.
I am a big fan of Larry Kim's content at Wordstream, a leading pay-per-click solutions company. What I like about Wordstream is that they are genuinely focused on educating marketing professionals about how to best use pay-per-click dollars to achieve their marketing goals. Their resources are plentiful with strategies and tactics you can implement right now.
Here's a link to Wordstream PPC University White Papers. My top three Builder must-reads are:
- How to Drive 1 Million Monthly Blog Visits
- The 3 Types of Search Query & How to Target Them
- Complete Guide to Geotargeting & Local PPC
- Brand journalism is being expressed through Corporate Blogs everywhere! But who reads them and are you really being heard? Builder Blogs have a distinct advantage because purchasing a new home requires decision support that touches a myriad of lifestyle categories. Your blog is an ideal venue for distributing content about lifestyle topics that influence consumers' decision to purchase a new home: schools, energy efficiency, financing, design, transportation, green space. None of these live in a silo, and a blog post can weave them together intuitively to deliver a holistic message about the benefits of your community.
- I like the simplicity of focus on three types of search Query. It's a customer-centric way of looking at how house hunters are looking for new home information online.
- Geotargeting and local Pay-Per-Click is made for new home communities. Consumers imagine their lives in a specific geography within a new home community that draws them into beautifully designed homes and a carefully curated vision of a lifestyle they can purchase. Local search is an imperative for Builder Marketers.
I recently interviewed SEO Expert, Julien Brandt, CEO of a successful Digital Agency, Organik SEO,
a firm specializing in local search. What got me interested in Julien's perspective is that he has real estate experience. His knowledge about the intersection of Real Estate and Digital Strategy informs his thinking about how Homebuilders can get the best results from their SEO efforts. Here's what he had to say during our interview:
Leslie: What would you suggest a Home Builder marketer should expect from their SEO Partner?
Julien: What you should NOT expect are immediate results. SEO is a time intensive process that takes a lot of factors into account. Anyone who guarantees top rankings or offers immediate results is not interested in a long-term relationship! People making these claims are often trying to game the system which may create a short-term result and almost certainly have longterm negative effects. A successful partnership should be based on long-term goals and the company should focus on educating you about their process and how you can all work together to accomplish your goals. Make sure to have in-depth conversations with the SEO team to identify the most valuable goals and establish KPI’s to measure them. A good SEO company will create a timeline that incorporates all the moving parts into a meaningful strategy.
Leslie: What do you see has the biggest challenges for Home Builders in their SEO efforts?
Julien: Some industries are an “immediate need” with a very short sales cycle. As an example, someone looking for a plumber will likely conduct a Google search, call the top result and buy the service. In contrast, the sales cycle for home builders is much more in-depth, typically lasting 12+ months. For this reason there needs to be a well thought out sales and conversion funnel. People in different stages of the sales process are looking to consume different information. It's not simply enough to rank for “new homes” and expect that your prospects are not going to research all other possible options. A solid strategy should focus on having a great website to showcase your product. You should also create great content that can answer questions at every stage of the buying cycle, establish strong “calls to action” that entice people to join your email list or inquire about your product, and build a solid online presence with PR, social media, and great back links.
Leslie: What is Pigeon and how can Builders navigate this and other changes that rewrite ranking rules?
Julien: Pigeon is a recent and the first Google “local” ranking-centric algorithm update. The industry that was impacted most heavily with this algorithm update was real estate. In the past we had seen a lot of terms like “San Diego real estate” or “homes in San Diego” display local map based results but with this recent update Google no longer displays local results for most real estate related phrases. In addition, builders can no longer use virtual offices/PO Boxes to rank in the local results section of a google result page. Additionally the ranking factors for local are looked at more closely which means citations must be uniform, the “Google My business” page must be claimed, and it needs to be verified and managed appropriately as part of a strategic campaign. The local results are a lot more competitive now, and the ranking factors look more like traditional organic rankings factors than in the past.
Leslie: Top 3 DIY tactics Marketing teams can implement to increase in-bound traffic?
- Being active on social media and publishing unique informative and strategic content on your blog can significantly help increase organic traffic and social media traffic.
- Continuing to analyze your existing website traffic will help a great deal. By understanding how people find your site, where they are located, what they are interested in and how they interact with your website you can make ongoing improvements. Refining and improving your overall UX (User experience) will help increase conversions.
- Getting active offline will also reward you online. Activities such as sponsoring little league teams, 5ks and school functions are the best way to naturally earn links to your website - which is ultimately one of the best ways to improve rank, show transparency/credibility and convert more business.
- Don’t be afraid to try new things, just make sure to utilize landing pages and A/B testing.
- Pay-Per-Click can be a great way to get instant traffic to specific pages of your website from people typing in specific keyword phrases. You can then track and analyze this data to make ongoing improvements to your website.
- Make sure to spell out the entire home buying process for searchers. Tell them to fill-out the form or offer a call-to-action, along with offering an explanation of what to expect after they act.
- Don’t expect leads to come through online sources without a funnel to make it as easy as possible to navigate next steps.
- Continuously test and improve your website.
We've launched our business Facebook page where you'll find offers and fresh content! Share generously if you feel so moved! We couldn't do this without our amazing client network. Thank you!
Cheers,
Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger