For some of your prospects, this will quickly become a minor annoyance and not much of a concern. For others, concern for the health of those around them will be a long-standing issue.  At a minimum, this means for some people, they’ll want to delay unnecessary in-person contact until later in your sales process even after restrictions are lifted. 

What adjustments should you consider?

Show your homes really well online

Now more than ever, an easy to use website that showcases beautiful photos, video walkthroughs and information from the comfort of home is invaluable. The quality of your work should be abundantly reflected in the quality of your online presence. If you haven’t added fresh photos in years, it’s well past time. Get professional photos, or at the very least, have a professional clean up and curate existing photos to help visitors fall in love with your homes even if they can’t see them in person.

Post on social media

We’re all sick of the constant virus news. While you shouldn’t be tone-deaf to what is happening, people want distractions. They want to think about something other than the latest breaking news. Give them some inspiration and help them to dream about that new kitchen or new home.

Make it easy to connect

If you have yet to do so, consider adding a live chat feature to your website. You can control the hours and have it go directly to a mobile phone if need be. Studies show, website visitors will ‘text’ a question before they’re ready to pick up a phone and talk live. It’s a great way to break the ice and get a conversation going.

Make your availability clear

By utilizing a free service like Calendly integrated with whatever calendar you use, you can have a link right on your site for visitors to schedule a meeting, virtual or in-person. Giving the prospect the ability to look at available time slots without calling gets them over a mental barrier without committing, and makes it more likely they’ll actually book time with you or your sales team.

Get comfortable with virtual meetings

It seems like overnight, “Zoom” (a common online meeting platform) has become a ubiquitous term. It really is easy to use. As a builder, rather than meeting in your office, you can use the Zoom app. When virtually meeting with your clients, if you do so from a model home you can flip the camera and walk them through the home pointing out various details and distinguishing features. They can tour the home with you, without even being there.

If you need help with any of the above, even if you’re just having trouble getting a Zoom meeting to work, we’re here and would love to help you out. As always, we’re happy to talk free of charge, no strings attached. Call us at 574-400-6267 or schedule a consultation here.

The post Home Builders Post-Coronavirus: Now What? appeared first on Advent Builder Marketing.

But where the heck do you start?

There are lots of tools you can use to drive qualified, profitable leads, but there are three that are absolutely fundamental to all others:

1) A well performing website

90% of home buyers (including 73% of senior home buyers) will search for options or research a home builder online before contacting you (NAR 2017 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers). Regardless of which marketing tools are used, and even for word of mouth potential customers, eventually nearly ALL of your prospective customers are going to funnel through your website BEFORE they decide to take the next step with you. Your website is the lynch pin to all your marketing efforts.

You build high quality homes. Your website needs to convey that with every fiber of its being. It needs to connect visually (great photos, presentation, etc.), intellectually (sound reasoning, your unique selling points, etc.) and emotionally. Yes, emotionally. Studies show most people make decisions, like building a home, based upon emotions and then back them up with reasoning. If you’re site is ignoring this point, you’re missing out on great leads.

Secondly, your site needs to encourage the right prospects to contact you. Notice I said the ‘right’ prospects. A great site will subtly discourage those customers who are not a good fit while encouraging the right prospects to contact you with effective calls to action.

2) Local search optimization and citations

If you’re hard to find, or your competitors are showing up more than you, that’s a problem. Search optimization (SEO) is nothing more than optimizing your website so that you show up when someone searches for “home builders” in your area. There are things that need to be done on your website, as well as things to be done outside your website. One of the most important things are citation listings. There are litterally hundreds of sites out there, sites like foursquare, apple maps, mapquest, superpages, yellowbook, and on and on, that will list your site. The more of those that have consistent information pointing back to your website, the better you’ll rank.

3) Review and reputation management

Reviews matter. Even for a product like building a home, reviews matter. Inc Magazine reported 91% of consumers pay attention to reviews and 84% of them trust online reviews as much as friends’ recommendations. And reviews affect your search rankings. If you have poor reviews, or they’re non-existent, this can be a great area to improve the volume of interested prospects visiting your website. There are automated tools that can make getting and improving reviews easy.

That’s it. If you don’t know where to start when it comes to digital marketing to help drive more sales as the housing market starts to slip, those are the big three to start. No doubt you’ve got questions, and we’re here to answer them. Just click here to schedule a quick chat and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you have and offer some free advice without obligation.

The post Home Builder Digital Marketing… Where do you start? appeared first on Advent Builder Marketing.

As a builder, the feast and famine modes are all too familiar. But with a properly designed and executed digital marketing plan, you can get a leg up on the competition and insulate the downside risk. Here’s what you can do now to better position yourself for a market slide.

1. Invest while you can – Done properly, digital marketing has a great ROI. But it does take some investment, especially upfront if you haven’t laid the ground work already. If you want to turn on the spigot when home builds are fewer and farther in between, you have to have the plumbing first. So while profits are still relatively good, invest some of those profits in a marketing ‘insurance policy’ of sorts, to set up a digital funnel you can crank up when you need to.
2. Review the big picture – If marketing dollars get tight when times get lean, you best know where to put those dollars for maximum return. Take some time to evaluate now what you’ve done in terms of marketing the past few years, and ascertain where those dollars are most effective, so you have a game plan in place. If you’re depending mostly on word of mouth, nows the time to talk with marketing experts and establish a plan.
3. Get social – For most home builders, the potential customers are a matter of geography, and one of the best ways to get your name out in front is to use social media like Facebook. If you don’t have an account, set one up. If you do and you’ve been busy, it’s likely received very little attention. Start posting new builds, home owner tips, etc. to build a following. It’s a long term strategy that will get you better top of mind positioning should the market continue to tighten.
4. Consider paid ads – PPC, or Pay-per-click advertising is one of the easiest ways to turn on instant traffic to your website. With a properly designed campaign, you can turn it on and start driving leads to your door in pretty short order. And when the queue gets full, it’s easy to turn that volume back down. It’s one of the best ways to even out the ebs and flows of the market.
5. How’s your website – Digitally speaking, prospectives that search for home builders are going to route through your website (if you’re getting decent search results). How’s that website looking? Does it need attention? Are photos current and professional? Does it put your best foot forward. Now is the time to invest while cash flow is still good.

With a little planning, you can go into any market downturn better positioned than your competition, garner more of a shrinking market and avoid downsizing and losing some of your best personnel. Now is the time to take a good hard look at your total marketing picture.

The post Home Builder Marketing in a Shrinking Market appeared first on Advent Builder Marketing.

1) Find out when home building competitors are mentioned on the web

If you have a gmail or google account, you can set an alert to get notified every time someone somewhere on the internet mentions your competition. This is a great way to keep tabs on what is going on in your local home building market, and get insight into how your competition is promoting themselves.

2) See what home builders are doing on social media

Facebook, Pinterest, Houzz and more… if your competition has an account, make sure you follow them. For some incredible insight into Twitter and Instagram posts, use Keyhole. Keyhole analyzes posts giving you detailed metrics of your competitors such as posts, impressions and reach. It can also provide demographics, share of posts, geolocation and more.

3) Find out what keywords your home building competitors are ranking for

Google’s keyword planner is a great tool for ferreting out what the best search terms are that your website needs to be optimized for. However, you can also find out about competitors data as a feature of the tool. If you’re looking for even more competitor information, SEMRush has some great tools for analyzing competitor keywords, ranking and traffic. You’ll quickly learn what your competition is doing to capture leads.

4) Find out where their website visitor traffic is coming from

A backlink analyzer scours the web to find pages that link to whatever site you’re wanting to research. With a tool like the Moz Link Explorer, you can find out where your competition is listed on the web and make sure you’re listed there as well.

5) Find out where other custom home builders are advertising

What Runs Where technically specializes in helping businesses buy paid advertising, but it has some great tools to help watch what your competition is doing as well. It supports dozens of ad networks and allows you to track a list of your competitors. You can even set alerts to find out the moment your home building competitors launch a new ad or publish new content!

6) Don’t forget to play average consumer!

If your home building competition is harvesting contact information as they should, make sure you subscribe to any email subscription they are utilizing on their website. To keep things anonymous, use a non business related email address or create a generic email account with gmail, yahoo or other free email providers to use as a proxy for the subscriptions.

What if find out my home building competitors aren’t doing much in terms of digital marketing?

Well then… sit back and get ready for a pretty easy home run! Most home buyers start their search or do significant research online before getting serious about selecting a home builder. If most of your competition is taking a very passive online strategy, with nothing more than a website serving as an online brochure, you’re in a position to get a serious leg up! By employing some basic pro-active strategies, you’ll get your name out in front of more potential home buying customers for a minimal investment.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by any of the above? We totally understand. We do this for a living and sometimes it’s taxing for us too! Feel free to give us a call and we’d be happy to help and answer any questions you may have.

The post The Top 6 Ways to Spy on Your Custom Home Building Competitors appeared first on Advent Builder Marketing.