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Digital Marketing Strategies for Builders: 4 Ways for Prospecting

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5-min read
In this article, you’ll learn four digital marketing strategies on modern-day prospecting for your home builder and developer company to gain more qualified and interested homebuyers.

In today’s world, everything is continually changing. For instance, more and more people are shifting from working in the office to now working from home. Before COVID-19, approximately 3.6% of people worked from home at least half of the time or more. Continue reading to learn how to gain more business from homebuyers in today’s ever-changing world through digital marketing strategies for builders while prospecting.

To pick back up on my point from working from home, according to Global Workplace Analytics, their best estimate is that 25-30% of the workforce will be working from home multiple days a week by the end of this year. Homebuyers working from home isn’t the only big change in today’s evolving landscape. You also have to consider techniques for prospecting.

 

4 Digital Marketing Strategies for Builders While Prospecting:

 

1. Consider Shifts in Work Culture in Content Writing

Shifts in the work culture give you more opportunities to be in front of key decision makers than ever before. This is because decision makers are more accessible due to decreased traveling around the country. Don’t get me wrong, people still travel to great lengths for business but not as much since the global pandemic. Reflect on these cultural shifts in your content writing.

Consider the homebuyer’s perspective while crafting your content. For example, write articles that would rank for a specific keyword or phrase that current homebuyers are looking for. This can be “How to have cleaner air in my home”, “Benefits of buying now vs. renting”, or “How to create a home office space”.

Just like the market, consumers are adapting to the COVID lifestyle as well. Homebuyers are looking for new ways to handle the situation and to be more comfortable in their current home. Make it easy for them by supplying your target audience with this content through your blog and SEO program.

There have been shifts in sales cycles as well in the COVID era. Sales cycles have been shorter, giving you more opportunities to meet with new prospects and interested homebuyers. While you might find yourself busier, it’s best to create a plan of prospecting with measurable strategies for builders to see real growth in business and sales.

 

2. Implement an Email Marketing Campaign

One of the biggest marketing challenges homebuilders and developers face is how to break through the clutter of online content. You can do this directly to the consumer by implementing an email marketing campaign for your home builder or developer business.

When creating an email marketing campaign, showcase your model homes or condominiums, amenities, and any current sales promotions you’re running. For those colder leads, I suggest you re-engage those prospects by emailing them new content that they enjoy and partnering with an agency for extra assistance.

As for email engagement rates, they have been surprisingly increasing during and after COVID-19. While we aren’t in the clear from COVID entirely yet, the real estate and construction industries’ click-through rates have improved by 1.02% from this year to last year (from 18.88% to 19.9%). Let these statistics fuel your campaigns by pushing out relevant content your target audience is interested in.

 

3. Update Photography Content with Drone or Video Footage

The third digital strategy to consider goes hand and hand with photography and video. When was the last time you took professional photography of your model homes or community? You need to have a professional shoot done at least once a year to keep your photography updated. Plus, this content can be strengthened by drone or video footage.

Recently, I coordinated a video concept series for one of my homebuilder clients in South Tampa. Our creative department worked together with the videographer to create a series of videos about their Design Center. They also filmed videos talking about their brand partners such as Fisher & Paykel and Schluter Systems.

This one client, in particular, has a strong relationship with those brands and only uses their products when constructing their homes. The digital marketing strategy to incorporate this new video footage would be to publish it globally to social media, create a playlist of their partnered brands for their YouTube channel, and more.

More digital marketing strategies we plan on utilizing include creating blogs about each one of their videos and publishing the content on their website – specifically on their gallery and brand partners page. You can repurpose professional video footage in a lot of ways to fuel growth and to strengthen your prospecting.

 

4. Run a PPC Campaign

One of the best ways to not only guarantee more traffic to your website but to also grow your brand presence is through running a pay-per-click campaign (PPC). PPC is when you pay Google for each click you receive from your campaign. It’s based on keyword research, landing page optimization, and A/B split testing.

Keyword research is important for PPC because it’s what drives the right people to your website. Here’s how it works. Your digital marketing team or agency will perform keyword research on what words your target audience are searching for that makes them land on your website. For example, this can be “New Home Sales Near Me”, “Condo for Sale in (the areas you build)”, and easy keywords to include are all variations of your brand name.

Once keyword research is complete, the next steps are to create and optimize a landing page. This page is what your audience will “land on” after they select the PPC ad with the targeted keyword or phrase. The most important aspect of this page is including only one call to action (CTA). Which is preferably a submission form with about 3 fields (name, email, phone number).

This page will be one of your many pages on your website to collect important prospecting information from your leads. A/B split testing comes into play here because you can have two landing pages with different CTAs. This way you can understand which wording is more successful. Google Ads will then automatically push the more successful page for you to get more bang for your buck.

Since you pay Google every time your ad gets clicked on, I highly recommend partnering up with an experienced agency for them to implement this campaign on your behalf. Furthermore, if you need assistance with any of the other digital marketing strategies discussed then partnering with an agency will be the move.

Do you have any questions about how to use digital marketing strategies for builders while prospecting? Do you want more digital marketing strategies for builders? Let me know in the comments below.

 

For more articles about digital marketing strategies for prospecting for home builders and developers, read up on the following:

 

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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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