Most of the content you find about home builder marketing isn’t about marketing. It’s about advertising tactics.
You get long lists of tips without any strategic thinking behind them on generating leads, and that’s usually it.
But these tips about home builder advertising are just one tiny aspect of marketing.
Marketing is much more, and this is where today’s article about home builder marketing comes in covering…
- Why do home builder marketing in the first place
- Home builder leads & identifying and understanding your target audience
- How to craft a unique value proposition as a home builder
- How to create a home builder marketing plan and strategy
- 5 Home builder marketing channels
- Measuring and analyzing home builder marketing efforts to optimize performance
Why Do Home Builder Marketing in the First Place?
Home builders are not exempt from the business reality of marketing being the lifeblood of any business that wants to survive.
So without marketing, you will not acquire clients you can sell new constructions to. Hence you don’t have a business.
Of course, there are also some secondary benefits besides plain old business survival for doing home builder marketing.
If you execute an effective marketing plan, you will attract potential customers and generate leads of homeowners interested in a new home or a renovation project.
Provided you offer a great service that clients perceive as added value, home builder marketing helps build your brand and market visibility. This can make you stand out from your competition.
The next benefit of using marketing (here, content marketing) is that you can showcase your expertise and experience by creating educational content informing potential clients. This can increase your credibility.
And finally, provided you have the sales skills and a decent closing rate, home builder marketing can increase your sales.
Home Builder Leads & Identifying and Understanding Your Target Audience
One crucial element of effective marketing and lead generation, but also regarding copywriting (my article), is identifying and understanding your target audience.
Why?
Because once you have identified and understood your ideal client, you will know about their needs, wants, preferences, and more.
And this information informs the rest: the marketing channels you want to use, the offer you create, and the sales copy or messaging you use to persuade them.
Some target audiences you can focus on as a home builder (but not limited to) are…
- Renovators looking to update or improve their homes need a home builder to help them. They may want to update their kitchen, add a new room, or change their floor plan to an open one.
- Investors, especially fix and flippers, need minor or major renovations or updates to increase the reselling value of a property.
- New homebuyers wanting to build a new home or just wanting to make an upgrade to their current home (in this case, this overlaps a bit with renovators)
- Real estate developers who need a partner to build new multiplex properties or other types of properties that are sold or rented later.
All these different audiences or potential clients have different needs, wants, and pain points. To run an effective lead generation campaign, you first need to understand them.
For instance, if you say in your marketing message (e.g., ad copy) that you have experience working with older homes but use the wrong marketing channel targeting new homebuyers, the results will likely be suboptimal.
You have to aim for the correct “market message match.”
The latter ensures that your message communicated through your marketing efforts matches your target market or audience’s needs, wants, interests, and pain points.
If you don’t know much about your target audience yet, be it new home buyers, renovators, investors, or others, you can do several things to gather intel.
- Conduct market research by analyzing data on demographics, buying behaviors, and income. Additionally, you can do surveys to gather feedback from potential clients.
- Based on your market research, create a buyer persona that is the fictional representation of your ideal client. By the way, this is also essential preparation work for crafting persuasive sales copy. By describing the buyer persona, you can better outline your potential client’s wants, needs, and pain points.
- By monitoring your competition, you can identify gaps in the market or your market niche and find opportunities to make yourself and your business stand out.
How to Craft a Unique Value Proposition as a Home Builder
A unique value proposition is a brief statement describing the unique value your (home builder) business provides to your clients. It also needs to differentiate you from your competition.
Can you just invent a unique value proposition out of thin air?
You could, but your chances would be pretty slim to speak to your target audience’s needs, wants, and pain points.
Therefore, the work you did before in identifying and understanding your target audience is necessary.
Based on the results of this work, you can craft your unique value proposition.
So the steps involved in creating it are as follows:
1) Identify and understand your target audience (this should be done already, as mentioned earlier)
2) Analyze your competition’s messaging and offerings and find an angle that makes you different regarding the value you can offer.
3) Define and craft your unique selling proposition based on the steps before.
You can use one or a combination of the following three formulas:
Problem-Solution Formula:
For [target audience], our [product/service] solves [problem] by [unique solution].
Example: For busy families who want a custom home without the hassle, our full-service home building team manages every step of the process, from design to construction, ensuring a stress-free experience.
Differentiation Formula:
Unlike [competitors], we [unique value proposition].
Example: Unlike other home builders who only offer pre-designed homes, we work with you to design a custom home that fits your unique style and needs.
Benefit Formula:
Our [product/service] provides [benefit] for [target audience].
Example: Our energy-efficient homes provide significant cost savings on utility bills for environmentally conscious homeowners looking to save money while reducing their carbon footprint.
4) Apply your UVP to your messaging across the various marketing channels you may use: social media, advertising campaigns, your website, etc.
5) Testing and optimizing: You may need to test and tweak your UV and messaging based on your target audience’s feedback you may get.
Like in copywriting (the UVP actually is part of copywriting), you want to avoid focusing on features your homes may offer. Instead, focus on the benefits you can provide to potential clients.
For example, instead of highlighting the square footage or number of bedrooms, energy efficiency, smart home technology, or customizable floor plans, you want to focus on how your homes can improve your customers’ lives.
How to Create a Home Builder Marketing Plan and Strategy
Evergreen principles for creating a marketing plan also apply to home builders.
I already discussed these in this, this, and this article.
So to create a comprehensive marketing plan for your home builder business, you want to…
- Define your (marketing and sales) goals, such as, for example, annual sales, the number of leads needed to reach the annual sales, improved customer engagement, etc.
- Assess your limitations (e.g., monthly budget, experience, and skill level in various marketing channels, available time, time to reach your goals, etc.)
- Related to your limitations, do a SWOT analysis to assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
- Identify and define your target audience, including buyer personas, customer journeys (also important for content marketing; read my article here), etc., to reach a better message market fit and improve your copywriting.
- As discussed in the section before, work out your unique value proposition, helping you stand out from your competition and communicate the unique value you can bring to the table.
- Determine which marketing channels to use based on all the prior steps (e.g., content marketing, PPC advertising, direct mail, etc.)
- Create the sales copy for the various marketing channels you plan to use. Good sales copy works in also the UVP.
- To stay organized, define your marketing action items, tasks, etc., via a calendar or another management tool.
- Measure marketing performance by tracking relevant marketing key performance indicators. Based on this data, you can make the necessary improvements.
5 Home Builder Marketing Channels
Most information regarding home builder marketing confuses marketing with marketing channels or advertising and lead generation channels.
But as you could read earlier, advertising or lead generation is just a subcategory of marketing.
And this goal-oriented lead generation or advertising should happen in the most suitable and viable marketing channels where your target audience will see your marketing message.
It should also align with your limitations, as you should have assessed before.
In this article, I discussed generating real estate leads from a more generic perspective. I also covered different marketing channels which you can use for home builder lead generation.
There are only four to five main channels. The first is outbound real estate lead generation, both paid and “free.”
Examples of digital methods include text message prospecting, push notification ads and PPC advertising on social media or search engines.
Offline methods include cold calling, calling expired listings or FSBOs, and door knocking.
This approach is characterized by being more proactive and can feel interruptive.
The second channel is real estate lead generation via database marketing, which involves converting cold leads or past clients into warm or hot ones using a database or customer relationship management system.
Here the methods can be past client direct mailing, email marketing, and sphere of influence marketing.
The third channel is inbound real estate lead generation, which can be paid “free.”
The methods include content marketing on your website or social media, answering questions on forums or Quora, and leading magnets.
Offline methods incorporate publishing content in larger publication channels or organizing events.
This approach allows prospects to find you rather than actively searching for them. It is less controllable than outbound lead generation, but having your own website can increase your visibility, credibility, and efficiency.
The fourth channel is real estate referral marketing, which relies on partners, past clients, or acquaintances to refer you to potential new leads.
For home builders, methods could include partnering with investors and real estate developers or participating in events to network.
The results can be even more unpredictable than inbound lead generation, and success relies heavily on the referrals you receive from others.
Finally, there are real estate lead generation done-for-you companies that operate on a pay-per-lead basis or a referral fee at closing, offering either exclusive or non-exclusive real estate leads.
These providers may label their services as lead generation. Still, they provide contact scraping functionality to collect potential buyers’ or sellers’ contact information.
Examples include Zurple, Offrs, and Realtor.com.
However, the level of control over the results of these services is similar to real estate referral marketing since you are relying on the service providers’ performance.
Measuring and Analyzing Home Builder Marketing Efforts to Optimize Performance
Measuring and analyzing your home builder marketing is crucial to optimizing performance and generating more leads at eventually lower costs (my article).
It also helps you identify areas that lack good performance and results so you can make adjustments.
Here are some steps you can take to measure and analyze your marketing efforts:
1) Your Key Marketing Performance Indicators
Identify and set your business’s most important key marketing performance indicators, such as website traffic, conversion rates, or sales.
These will be the metrics you use to track the performance of your lead generation or advertising campaigns.
2) Analytics Tools
Use free tools like Google Analytics (my article) to track your website traffic, lead conversions, engagement, popular content, and more.
It will give you information about your traffic source and the best-performing marketing channels regarding lead generation and help you understand your audience even more.
3) Run Your Lead Generation Campaigns With Tracking in Mind
You don’t want to realize you don’t know which lead generation campaign or channel brings you the most results when it’s too late.
How can this happen?
When you forget to implement tracking in your campaigns.
So, for example, with an offline method of using signs to promote your services, you want to use unique phone numbers for each.
Or, for each Facebook Ad campaign, you want to use a dedicated landing page.
4) Analyzing Your Results & Steady Improvements
It is also a sound idea to analyze the performance of your lead generation efforts regularly and use the data you collect to identify areas where you perform well and areas where things could be better.
This helps you to weed out marketing channels that are not a good fit or to improve your sales and ad copy.
This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.
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