Home Builder Marketing

Focus on Geographical Location

In order to market home buyers, you need to start thinking like home buyers. Home builders are proud of their communities — and you should be! But when it comes to marketing your communities, you need to rethink your approach.

If you were a home buyer, would you run a Google search for a specific community or home builder company? Probably not. When home buyers are searching for new homes online, they are often unaware of the communities located in a specific town or city. If anything, they know where they want to live, and that is what they search for online. A more likely search might be “new homes Cincinnati” (or any other city or town).

Our multi-channel marketing approach can help you find home buyers, regardless of your location, and can even target theirs.

Set Meaningful & Realistic KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) vary from industry to industry and even can change depending on an organization’s goals and other factors.

In terms of digital marketing, KPIs are equally varied: Do you want to focus on the number of converted leads? Increase clickthrough rate? Decrease cost per click?

We’ll help determine meaningful and realistic KPIs on an individual basis. Just as no home builder business is the same, our home builder marketing campaigns are different for each client.

Multi-Channel Approach

Don’t sell your home builder business short by advertising your communities and houses on one channel. You want to reach as many potential home buyers as possible. It only makes sense to do that using a multi-channel approach.

We’ll help your home builder business create a holistic marketing plan, which may include some of the following elements, depending on your audience, goals, and needs:

PPC Ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can help home buyers see your houses and communities quickly. PPC ads are tied to search results for a keyword, making them highly targeted advertisements — not to mention that you can ensure those ads are only shown to people in particular locations. When you’re trying to sell a home in Sarasota, Florida, you can target ads to people living in surrounding neighborhoods.

We go above and beyond for our clients when it comes to researching relevant keywords and long-tail keyword strings that home buyers use in their search for the perfect home.

Display Ads

As the name suggests, display ads use images and/or basic animations to catch home buyers’ eyes. Whereas PPC ads are text-only and appear on search engines, display ads can give you more creative freedom and more options for where they’ll be “placed.”

Display ads are typically seen on websites that have content that’s related to your homes, such as a blog post or article giving future homeowners advice for finding their first house.

These ads are effective in remarketing (also referred to as retargeting) home buyers. Remarketing refers to the process of advertising prospects who visited your website and left (also known as bounce). When used as a remarketing tool, display ads are neat little reminders that keep your homes at the front of home buyers’ minds.

Display ads can also be leveraged for other campaign types through “in-market” audiences on channels such as the Google Display Network. These audiences are handpicked based on their online behavior to the “in the market” for a new home. 

Paid Social Ads

Social media is no longer a place to just share pictures of new family members and big life events. Social media is an excellent tool for influencing perceptions and purchasing decisions.

Paid social media advertisements are even more accurate in terms of targeting home buyers since users provide demographic information upon signing up: location, sex, age, and even their interests and/or goals.

Plus, with the lower cost per click (CPC) and per impression compared to display and PPC ads, you’ll be able to reach even more people through paid social ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter & LinkedIn than you would on other channels. 

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way to have your home builder website rank higher on search engines organically, meaning you don’t have to pay Google or Bing like you do for PPC advertisements. The higher the search engine ranks your website, the better. Most people don’t go past the first or second page of search results, so it’s important that your website ranks on those pages.

We use a local-first strategy, which is a huge advantage in the home builder industry. Home buyers are going to search using keywords and phrases like “Columbus homes for sale.” Once we get your website to rank high on the first page of local search results, home buyers are going to be much more likely to check out your homes.

Part of our local-first SEO strategy includes optimizing your home building business’s website by including its address, local keywords, and localized content that home buyers are actively seeking out. We also set up a Google My Business listing, which makes your business easier to find.

SEO is a long game, though, so if you’re looking to increase in high-quality leads in a relatively brief period of time, you may want to consider other digital advertising channels (i.e., PPC, display ads, and paid social media ads). Despite that, it’s a strategy that pays off when done right.

Landing Pages & Websites

As of 2019, Google uses a “mobile-first” analysis when ranking a website, which means the search engine judges the mobile version of a website before the desktop version. If your website is difficult to navigate or doesn’t translate well to a smartphone, your search engine results page ranking is already taking a hit. If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, that’s another hit.

That’s why we develop sleek, professional websites and landing pages that load quickly and are mobile-responsive, giving you a leg up on the competition.

Customize the Home Buying Experience with Landing Pages

With home builder marketing we’ve discovered that national home builders with multiple divisions do very well when we create specific landing pages for each division. Our landing pages designs are based on extensive conversion rate testing and implement lead tracking and attribution. 

We work with you to ensure your brand shines through on each page while still slightly differentiating between divisions. Not only does this make your homes easier to find, but it also helps home buyers find the house of their dreams. 

Gather Key Data Points

Every landing page includes a lead tracking system that gathers information from web form submissions and phone call data, demographics, and more. It’s imperative to accurately attribute leads to the correct advertising channels. Doing so can prevent your home builder business from investing more resources in channels that haven’t attracted as many leads as others have.

Our lead tracking systems are a valuable tool when it comes to determining the proper return on advertising spend and attribution to where the highest quality leads are coming from.

Test New Approaches

The last thing we want to do with our advertisements is alienate home buyers who are fans of your homes and communities. We make any changes to landing pages and ads slowly and run A/B tests. By changing one small part of an ad or web page and running the original along with it, we can see if there’s a difference in home buyers’ responses.

Try New Ad Channels

Not all ad channels are created equal — or at least some are more effective in certain industries than others. It’s important to diversify where you advertise, but you’ll want to be investing resources in the channels that are most effective for you.

Google & Bing

Google is so ingrained in people’s lives that it’s become a verb: Googled. Naturally, Google is one of the best websites for advertising your homes. Plus, it has great dashboards and tools for monitoring websites and your advertising campaign.

Before you say no to advertising on Bing, it’s worth mentioning that Microsoft’s search engine reaches up to 49.4 million searchers in places Google can’t reach.

Facebook & Instagram

These two social media powerhouses are affordable and easy to use. It’s even easier to target specific demographics on Facebook and Instagram than on search engines. When people register to use these sites, they have to include information such as their location, sex, age, and more. This data is incredibly useful to have and makes ad targeting more accurate.

YouTube

If your home builder business has a solid creative team, YouTube ads might be an excellent option. Video as a medium has the ability to create context for prospects in the most efficient manner by visually showcasing value propositions. We have seen video campaigns on YouTube not only drive engagement but even direct conversions. YouTube has definitely become a permanent part of our new home builder marketing strategy.

Home Builder Marketing Case Studies

M/I Homes

M/I Homes’ PPC advertising strategy was based on an individual community model. Each M/I Homes community had a small monthly budget; it only took 1 or 2 clicks to shut off a PPC ad for the day in some cases. This meant these communities were missing prime opportunities to get in front of prospective residents.

We developed a unique strategy for M/I Homes that targeted prospects seeking new homes based on geographical area by shifting the marketing model from a community model to a division marketing model. We designed and developed customized single-page microsites that improved division positioning and increased conversion rates.

By implementing our unique PPC strategy and custom microsites, M/I Homes:

• Increased conversions by 85%
• Increased clickthrough rate by 40%
• Decreased the cost per conversion by 40%
• Decreased the average cost per click by 35%