When you spend money on home builder marketing, you want your message to reach people who will buy your homes. Your goal is to make a profit, so you can grow your business and sell more homes. But how do you get the most bang for your buck? In other words, what kind of marketing will give you the most return on investment (ROI)?
Marketing gurus have all sorts of mathematical formulas to help you measure your ROI, so you can see where your marketing efforts have worked and where they need to be improved. You still may feel like there’s a lot of trial and error involved in the process. Should you invest more in your marketing? Should you take a more traditional approach to marketing or jump onto the digital bandwagon? What happens if you try something new and it doesn’t get results? These are all questions you may be struggling with, and there isn’t one answer that will make everything crystal clear.
However, we can offer a few tried-and-true strategies to help you get more ROI from your home builder marketing budget. Hopefully, as you become more educated about the marketing options available to you and how they work, you can decide if they are something you would like to pursue.
Measuring ROI
ROI is typically expressed in terms of a percentage. For instance, you might end up with a 500% return on your investment. A simple calculation to determine your home builder marketing ROI is to divide your net return on investment by the cost of your investment and multiply by 100.
If you spend a total of $1,000 on a marketing campaign, and you figure out that your net ROI is $5,000, you have a 500% ROI. Obviously, there is a lot of math that you have to do to get the numbers that you plug in. The net return on investment must also factor in ongoing maintenance costs, salaries, etc.
AI-powered digital assistants and text tools (discussed in further detail below) can increase your ROI dramatically, helping you grow your business and give home buyers a better buying experience.
Strategies for Improving Your Marketing ROI
Most home builder businesses rely on their website. A well-built, interactive website is a great place to store information that potential customers want to know, and it can showcase the different homes your company builds. But how do you get people to visit your website? That’s where home builder marketing strategies come in.
1. Attract Potential Customers to Your Website
Attract potential customers by investing in a blend of traditional and digital marketing campaigns. These could include:
- Offline advertising, such as in a local newspaper or on a billboard.
- Partner with businesses that reach out to a similar audience, such as a furniture store or landscaping company.
- Referral programs.
- Pay-per-click ads.
- Social media advertising.
- Independent listing sites.
- Write and publish optimized blog content.
- Send out an email newsletter.
2. Engage Website Visitors With an AI-Powered Digital Assistant
Once people are on your website, you want to keep them there, gather their contact information, and answer their questions. If you rely on a contact form or even a live chat feature, you could be missing out on a lot of engagement opportunities. Potential home buyers will visit your website at any time of the day or night, not just when your sales staff is available. If you invest in the power of AI technology, you can engage with your website visitors in real-time 24/7/365.
An AI-powered digital assistant is capable of identifying and qualifying leads and providing fast, real-time answers to questions through conversational interactions. This type of engagement saves your staff hundreds of hours of time. Plus, people tend to give their contact information more freely to a digital assistant than to a real person.
The AtlasRTX conversational AI tools can even translate in real-time, allowing you to serve people who speak other languages.
How valuable is an AI-powered digital assistant? Home builder companies get 46% more sales generated from digital assistant leads compared to leads generated from live chat. With that many more sales, your ROI is going to skyrocket!
3. Nurture Leads Using AI Text-Based Tools
When you have identified and qualified a lead, you can then focus your marketing campaign on nurturing your lead. AI technology helps save you money and be more effective in the nurturing process, too.
Text-based follow-up messages are automatically sent to your leads, allowing your sales team to build a relationship through text chat. Automated texting is proven to shorten sales cycles by up to 50%. Your sales team can focus their energies on the customers who are most likely to buy, allowing the AI technology to weed out the leads that are not ready yet.
You can personalize the entire nurturing process to suit your home builder marketing strategy. If you have a blog, send follow-up texts linking to relevant blog posts. Remind your lead about the ability to take virtual tours of homes on your website. Even send hyper-local follow-up campaigns, highlighting local school districts, community events, or other information that shows you know the neighborhood your potential customer is interested in.
Customers want their buying experience to be seamless, no matter which platform they are using. AI technology works with your existing software and website, helping tie all your investments together for that seamless experience that gets positive results.
4. Close the Deal With a Personalized Digital Experience
The personal touch from a real human will always be needed in the home buying sales process, but digital tools can help streamline the marketing and sales process, so your sales staff can step in at exactly the right time to complete the sale.
Besides AI-powered digital assistants and text tools, you can explore the value of using these digital tools:
- 3D interactive home tours
- Interactive floor plans
- Online pricing tools
- Videos, including testimonials from past customers
- Apps designed for tablets or iPads
- Virtual meetings with sales staff using platforms like FaceTime or Zoom.
A personalized home builder marketing campaign using AI automated texts can integrate all your digital tools into a single, centralized platform.
5. Care for the Homebuyer During and After the Home Building Process
You may think your targeted home builder marketing strategies stop after the sale is made, but there are still more ways to increase your ROI. Use AI text-based tools to help facilitate the sale, engage the buyer during the home-building process, and show you still care about them even after they have moved into their new home. Some examples of texts you could send at this point in the process include new home tips and reminders about service appointments they need to make.
Nurturing the customer after the sale builds brand affinity. If your home buyer knows someone else who needs a new home, they will be much more likely to refer them to you if you have made their buying experience as smooth and valuable as possible. You can encourage referrals with a program that offers discounts or some other incentive for successful referrals.
6. Analyze Feedback to Continue Home Builder Marketing Improvements
Your home builder marketing team is never finished. There are always new calculations to measure your ROI, and new marketing strategies to try out. Just when you think you have reached the best possible ROI, you may find a new tool that can increase it even more!
One of the ways home builder companies can improve their marketing and sales efforts is by gathering customer feedback. AI technology makes gathering feedback very easy. Conversational AI tools can prompt customer feedback and even ask open-ended questions that help you better understand your buyers’ experience. Not sure what to do with all the feedback you receive? Allow AI tools to summarize the feedback and analyze it for you. The insight you receive will be a great help as you make adjustments to your marketing strategies.
Invest in Home Builder Marketing Tools That Dramatically Increase Your ROI
Give AI-powered digital assistant and text tools a try, and watch your ROI increase. At AtlasRTX, we help home builder companies work more efficiently and meet their marketing needs in a cost-efficient manner. Our AI technology integrates into the online tools you already use and does an excellent job engaging potential customers, qualifying leads, and moving leads through the sales funnel. AI technology does not replace your staff, but it does relieve your staff from doing a lot of the nurturing work, so they can focus on making sales. This is an investment that is proven to increase sales, helping you make the most of your marketing budget.
If you are ready to grow your home builder business with AtlasRTX, try out a free demo. Learn how to integrate the AI digital assistant and text tools into your existing home builder marketing plan.