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How Home Builders & Developers Can Nurture Leads [5 Challenges and Solutions]

Hand drawing sales funnel business concept with black marker on transparent glass board. nurture leads a concept.
4-min read
You will learn strategic solutions to help with the many challenges about leading your prospects down the marketing funnel. Learn how to nurture leads.

First impressions can make or break the way potential home buyers view your brand and products. With a great first impression, the prospect has a higher chance of making their way down the marketing funnel. On the contrary with a bad introduction, the opposite is true, and prospects might depart for one of your competitors. This is why learning about how to nurture leads and starting with a great first impression is important.

Lead nurturing is not only about delivering a quality first impression, it’s about engaging your target audience by providing relevant information at each stage of the home buyer’s journey, AKA the marketing funnel. Guiding them throughout the buying process with effective strategies can be extremely rewarding as a home builder.

First, let’s take a look at the many challenges which come along with lead nurturing. Then we can create strategic solutions to combat each one of these obstacles. Continue reading about how to nurture leads…

 

Challenges:

  • Creating relevant content

According to the Lead Nurturing Trends Survey, creating relevant content is the number one most challenging obstacle to lead nurturing success. As a home builder, you are always on the construction scene, talking to clients and keeping up with your day to day tasks. I understand where you might not have the time to devote to creating new content for your website and marketing materials.

 

Solution:

Hire a third-party writing or marketing agency to create new and relevant content instead of trying to do it yourself. For example, you can create a blog on your home builder website which provides pertinent writing material regularly for your target audience more efficiently with the help of a professional resource.

In addition, you should consider creating a plan with a marketing agency where you can give your feedback on the content, frequency and length of each blog article. Let the agency do this task work while you focus on running your business.

  • Targeting by decision stage

This is the second hardest challenge to overcome according to the Lead Nurturing Trends Survey. When home buyers are in the decision stage, they can have potentially many homes to choose from. More often than not, they are deciding between your homes and other similar homes in the market. This phase in the homebuying process is critical when trying to make the sale.

 

Solution: 

Use retargeting for the solution of targeting your buyers during the decision stage. What is retargeting? Retargeting is a strategic advertising technique which targets those who have expressed interest in your products or services before. Hence the name “re-targeting”.

For example, let’s say someone visits your website, looks around, then eventually goes to other sites. Retargeting can have your specific company’s ads appear on the Google Search Display. Which means your ads can pop up on another site they visit. In fact, you can customize your ads and feature your most valued products to give the prospect more awareness to your brand. This is a proven tactic to convert sales.

  • Multi-channel integration 

As a home builder, finding time to incorporate multi-channel integration is hard. Yet, this is key in getting your brand on many networks exposing your business to a wider audience. This is a challenge because all too often you don’t have the internal resources to manage the communication between your website, emails, social media and other online digital marketing platforms.

 

Solution: 

Thankfully, there are outside marketing firms to help with such automation. Marketing and advertising agencies have the power to cycle multiple campaigns across many platforms and channels. For instance, they can create an automatic direct mail campaign, pre-schedule social media posts, get alerts when your business shows up in Google, monitor the calls coming to your business and many more effective marketing solutions to advance your goals.

  • Targeting by prospect persona 

Targeting by prospect persona means more than just knowing the demographics about your target market. This technique focuses more on your prospects’ needs and buying preferences. By understanding the needs of your market and potential buyers, what their buying process is like and by knowing their perceived barriers, you have a better chance at producing a higher conversion rate from your marketing campaigns.

 

Solution:

The easiest way to learn about your home buyer’s persona is by asking your audience directly. You can conduct customer surveys, host in-person interviews and ask your sale team for their insights. In fact, you should never underestimate the knowledge behind your sales team. They are the ones who communicate with your prospects the most and are your boots on the ground!

  • Personalizing campaigns

Last, but certainly not least, is overcoming the challenge of personalizing campaigns. This is hard because although you want your brand to be exposed to as many people as possible, you also want your marketing campaigns catered individually towards each member of your target audience. You should consider making each touch point personal because 90% of consumers find that personalized content is far more appealing to them.

 

Solution: 

Creating personalizing marketing campaigns are not as hard as you might think. Some easy-to-apply techniques include adding your client’s name to direct mail, adjusting the greeting on your website to represent the time of the day, adding their names to emails and including special offers on their birthday or selected holidays.

 

Other personalization techniques to nurture leads include:
  • Reciprocating social media likes, following and comments
  • Map out your content to fit the interests of your target audience
  • Enable retargeting to increase the chances of your customers making a purchase
  • Include a chat bot on your website to answer many of your customer’s questions 24/7
  • Continue to collect important data on your target audience to more clearly define them

While lead nurturing comes with many challenges, it can also be very rewarding to your business. By implementing these solutions, you will increase your chances of connecting with the right home buyers and completing a sale. I hope these solutions offer new approached to nurturing leads for you.

 

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Terry Zelen

About Terry Zelen

Creative Director | Consultant | Author | President of Zelen Communications

Terry Zelen is a seasoned Creative Director with more than 35 years of experience in Home Builder advertising and marketing.

He is the founder of The Punch List, which is an online blog to help inform home builders and developers on strategic marketing insights to fuel their firm.

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