It goes without saying that the last 10 years have been a very transitional time in the world of marketing. The old rules of mass reach and frequency have not been washed away completely, but undeniably diluted by the ever-expanding choices available to both the consumer and the advertiser. Thanks to technology, the more interesting news is that the end of this "transitional" period is no where in sight. The flood gates of new mediums are wide open and they continue to pour in on us.
With ad budgets shrinking on a daily basis, it's more crucial than ever to make the right choices. One of my favorite quotes that I'm unfortunately unable to credit is 'More is not better. Better is better.'
The problem with a mass media, or 'more' approach to homebuilder marketing has not changed. You need super high exposure numbers to reach your buyer through mass media if you don't have a mainstream product. Coca-Cola can advertise on any number of TV shows and stations (and they do), but that's because every man, woman, and child on the planet is a likely purchaser of their product. This is not the case for two-bedroom multi-level condos from the low $200's on the east side of town.
There's a smaller buyer pool for our product. Homebuilders don't need more advertising now. They need better advertising now. This is good news. More advertising costs more, but better advertising may not. So how do you make your advertising better? Here are just a few thoughts:
- Spend your budget on people actively looking for a home first. Don't pull money out of your Google campaign to run generic radio spots. Your keyword targeted ads are only showing to those actively searching for a home. Your radio spot may, or may not, be hitting people who are in the market.
- Ask publishers for targeting or segmenting options. If you're currently running banners or video ads on a local media site, ask them for how you can better target your buyer profile. You may pay a higher rate per impression to only target a particular geographic region, behavior pattern, or income level, but you'll probably be able to reduce your total impressions to offset the cost and end up with better quality traffic.
- Interview your current buyers. Pick a sampling of your current buyers and offer them a free gas card if they'll sit with you for a 30 minute interview. Ask them questions to learn about their media consumption. What tools did they use in their search? What websites do they visit daily? What information do they expect to get from their cell phone? If it's a representative sample of your buyer profile, chances are you'll learn how to reach your next buyers.
- Measure. Test. Measure. Test. Measure. You get the point. One of the most beneficial aspects of technology based advertising is its measurability. Before spending any money on advertising, you must invest in a website analytics platform. With this information, you can determine not just where your traffic is coming from, but where your better traffic is coming from. This information allows you to make decisions about what's working and what's not. This is a key component to spending your ad budget on better advertising.
The byproduct of technology is more choices for you - most of them offer solid targeting options allowing you to drill down to location, age, income, and behavior of your ad recipients. Embracing new technology allows you to segment your marketing based on your target profile and focus your budget in the right place.
No need to wait until its time for budget cutting. Take a look at your media plan today. Analyze closely where your dollars go and look for ways to target each penny.
Dennis O'Neil heads up ONeil Interactive LLC, an online marketing and strategy company for the new home industry. You can learn more about Dennis O'Neil and ONeil Interactive by visiting www.oneilinteractive.com.
Email marketing is truly an industry in itself. There are many nuances to the effective uses of email marketing, lots of it is beyond the “need-to-know” scope of today’s marketing managers. However, understanding the most basic principles will ensure you’re getting the most from your email delivery provider and your designer. Designing for email delivery is not the same as designing for the web. Have you ever been to a website and been asked to download an update to see the website’s content? Are you a Mac user and been served a message that says your Safari Browser is not supported? Content on the internet is not always seen by the user the way we intend it to be. Variables such as computer speed, internet connection speed, Windows vs. Mac, browser type, among others affect the way a visitor sees content. Experienced designers know how to compensate for these differences to make a generally identical experience. The same things must be considered for email marketing.
This post will discuss just one law of email marketing, but it’s one I see broken very often. Most email software blocks the automatic download of pictures in emails. You probably have opened an email and seen white boxes with little red X’s in the corner. You have to click and specifically allow those pictures to appear unless you’ve previously added the sender to your “trusted sender” list. Maybe some of your recipients have made you a trusted sender, but there’s no way to know. And why not maximize the impact of your email to all of your subscribers. Why is it important to understand this? See this example:
The above example email was sent to me, and as you can see, is completely blank. The entire email is made up of images, or red X’s. You took the time and effort to build a campaign and send an email blast. You wrote a subject line compelling enough to make your prospect open it. This empty screen above is not what you want them to see. Of course, your prospect can just click and allow the pictures to be seen and display the intended message, but why give the recipient yet another opportunity to decide not to read your message? You’ve already made it past the spam filter and the [delete] button, don’t blow your opportunity.
So how do you fix this? Your email blasts should always be designed as a combination of images and text. When an email with this format is opened, the pictures may still appear as red X’s, but the text content appears as intended. See this example:
Now your recipient has the opportunity to read the main content of the email without clicking anything else. They may read it, decide the message is not for them, and delete the message. Most likely though, assuming your message is well targeted, they’ll read your text and then click to see the images and the rest of your message.
Additionally, they can still click on something (the text links) without the pictures. In the first example, there was nothing clickable or actionable about the email.
As an aside, some users still download their emails and disconnect from the internet before reading them. Albeit not very many people, users like these will not be able to see your images ever, as they must be connected to the Internet for those images to appear in your email. This is also the case for users whose Internet connection fails intermittently.
Emails in the proper mixture of text and images allow you the opportunity to communicate some of your message despite that fact that your images may be blocked. This simple design format will ensure that the maximum number of recipients have the opportunity to read your message and act on it. Be sure your designer is following this basic principle for your next campaign.
Dennis O’Neil heads up ONeil Interactive LLC, an online marketing strategy company for the new home industry. You can learn more about Dennis and ONeil Interactive by visiting www.oneilinteractive.com.
This graph represents a study comparing advertising on websites with search terms (gray), display ads (orange), and both (blue) and the effect they have on sales versus a control group seeing no online advertising. According to the article, 18 separate businesses were tested to determine what type of advertising affects sales online and offline. Since our sites are database driven, think of the term “search ads” to include new home listings, location searches, and/or price range searches on a site like www.NewHomeSource.com. “Display ads” are simply banner ads which show up with the results of a user’s search.
Note** -- the most successful increase is offline sales when display and search term ads were presented to the potential customer online within the same time period. This is the first study we’ve seen effectively measuring what online marketing does for offline sales.
We know, based on our reporting, driving directions are requested more often than leads or website click throughs; this is, however, an independent third party, testing online-to-offline conversions through 4 business sectors, showing that Internet advertising brings more people to your door than to your website. You don’t have a product to sell online, so picture these results in your industry, where they must come to your door to buy…
A link to the original article online is below the graph:
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?ml_action=get-article&articleID=F0804H&ml_issueid=BR0804&ml_subscriber=true&pageNumber=1&_requestid=294432
So what does this mean? You should be listing online with more than one website (our service places you on more than 15 other industry sites); you should run banner advertising; you should use engagement tools including video and interactivity, and you should be sure your onsite sales agents are asking the hard questions. With gas at $4.50 per gallon, your signs aren’t bringing them in… signs are just the last thing they saw.
We know the market is a little rough right now, but this kind of research is encouraging as Internet marketing is so much more affordable than offline efforts. If there is anything I can do to assist you in your marketing online or off, please don’t hesitate to call or email me.
Chad Bria
Sales Manager
Builder Homesite, Inc.
cbria@builderhomesite.com
480-370-3141
 Builders are looking for cheap marketing options with major impact these days, and now BHI's New Home Source Professional team has created a way to reach buyers across multiple media outlets and still have change to spare. BHI's latest innovation, "Mobile Marketing," allows potential homebuyers to text message (SMS) a customizable code to BHI from their phone, which builders can use over and over again on billboards, TV, print ads, and more.
Buyers instantly receive a text with a mobile web URL to view high-res community photos, community descriptions, floor plans, and even request a salesperson's call. The website is custom designed for easy phone navigation. This new opportunity is a great way to attract interested passers-by and generate leads for a relatively low cost. Text the code 3529 to phone number 49469 to see a sample.
With traditional advertising dollars now transferring on-line, this is the question that most companies are now scrambling to discover. And with the rising costs of Pay Per Click Advertising, the opportunity to receive free traffic (not cost per click) from Search Engine Optimization Initiatives is more attractive now than ever before. It is no secret that Google owns most of the market share in this space (Google - 69% Market Share, Yahoo - 14% Market Share, & MSN - 10% Market Share). They revolutionized the search industry and their search algorithm is as much as a mystery as the coca-cola formula.
Or is it?
There is rumored to be over 200 different attributes to the Google Search Algorithm. Each differently weighted and having a different effect dependent on the age and competitiveness of your industry. Most understand the importance of keywords and their ability to highlight to the search engine spiders what each of your web pages is actually about. But what most have yet to grasp is the very foundation that the Google Search Algorithm was built on: the measurement (PageRank) of each web page based on the overall value of links pointing to that page. Google's ability to calculate each page's value based on it's Internet Popularity was what set Google apart from Yahoo and AOL at the turn of the century and to dominating the search space today. They do not hide this from all of us, publicizing it on their site and in every interview, but marketing professionals and SEO's alike still tend to focus primarily on keywords, meta tags and on page optimization. Why?
Because that is all that we can control. Is is impossible to control external factors and it is extremely difficult to build links - there are no guarantees. But if you do work with us as a BHI customer/partner - there are options. Please contact us now to learn more...
 Green Homes – and Green Homebuilders – are Hot!
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has honored K. Hovnanian Homes for the number of Energy Star Homes it built in New Jersey last year. Energy Star homeowners can save as much as a third on their utility bills over the life of the home, especially when compared to homes that meet standard building codes.
K. Hovnanian has been building New Jersey Energy Star Homes since 2001 and built 1,587 single-family detached homes, townhomes and condominiums in New Jersey in 2007 that qualified as Energy Star. Is your company building green? Let us know!
 According to several recent trend reports about how consumers buy and sell homes:
- 85% of home buyers used a real estate agent to search for a home, and 80% used the Internet (up from 77% in 2005)
- 22% used the Internet to get neighborhood information
- 81% of home buyers who used the Internet to search for a home bought it through a real estate agent
SOURCES: Luxury Institute Survey; Pew Institute & American Life Project; NAR Profile of Buyers & Sellers; RISMedia; MarketWatch.
 Sometimes, not changing is a good thing. According to the latest NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI), released this week (March 17), builder confidence in the market for new single-family homes stayed the same for March, and NAHB experts predicted recovery later this year.
“NAHB applauds the Federal Reserve’s aggressive actions in response to escalation of financial market pressures,” said David Seiders, NAHB chief economist, in a press release. “Provided that the necessary actions are taken promptly, a housing market recovery most likely would take shape by the second half of this year.”
The NAHB/Wells Fargo HMI gauges builder perceptions of current single-family home sales and sales expectations for the next six months as “good,” “fair” or “poor.” The survey also asks builders to rate traffic of prospective buyers as either “high to very high,” “average” or “low to very low.” Scores for each component are then used to calculate a seasonally adjusted index where any number over 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as good than poor.
The index gauging current sales conditions for newly built single-family homes held firm at 20 while the index gauging traffic of prospective buyers stayed at 19, following a significant gain in February. For more: http://www.nahb.org/news_details.aspx?sectionID=0&newsID=6447.
(Photo credit: PennyWise, Stock Exchange. Thanks!)
 Besides keeping track of how many of us live in the U.S. (281,421,906 as of April 1, 2000), the U.S. Census Bureau also tracks, on a monthly basis, a wealth of construction and housing statistics.
Specifically, the Bureau measures the number of housing units authorized by permits, started, sold or completed, and the dollar value of all construction put in place that month. It also tracks residential construction in 30 metropolitan areas across the country each quarter and the sales of new single-family homes in those areas each year; and keeps tabs on the dollar value of residential improvement and repair work each quarter.
In addition, the Bureau’s Census of Construction Industries, taken every five years, gives a comprehensive overview of the construction industry. For more information and links to other industry-related resources, log on to: http://www.census.gov/const/www/index.html.
(Photo credit: Woodsy, Stock Exchange. Thanks!)
An article in this week’s Nation’s Building News online edition recaps a presentation at the recent International Builder’s Show in Orlando about closing new home sales – a good topic anytime, but especially valuable now.
The piece includes sound advice from industry experts, including that sales offices and communities should highlight visible signs of activity, such as “sold” signs displayed prominently on homesites and updated community maps with sites marked with “sold” icons.
The article also reiterates that, not only is it a good time to buy a home, but from a financial standpoint, it’s also a smart time to buy a home – and sales staff should convey that to potential buyers. Mortgage rates remain at low levels, so showing customers the money they’d potentially pay out even if rates increased by one percentage point could be just what they need to convert them from browsers to buyers.
Other points in the article include negotiation tips and getting referrals from existing customer. For more, check it out online at http://www.nbnnews.com/NBN/issues/2008-03-10/Sales+and+Marketing/index.html.
(Photo credit: Woodsy, Stock Exchange. Thanks!)
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