The homebuilding industry plays a significant role in alleviating the current housing shortage in the United States. But it’s also an increasingly competitive industry, making homebuilder marketing an important concept.
With the right marketing strategies, you can stand out from the crowd of homebuilders looking to attract buyers. You just have to know how to get it right.
New home marketing is complex, partly because you have so many tools at your disposal. This guide will cover them all, helping you create a homebuilder marketing strategy designed to consistently attract buyers and maximize your sales.
The 13 Major Homebuilder Marketing Channels To Leverage
The potential homebuilder marketing solutions at your disposal are almost endless, so the best place to start is to understand exactly which channels and tactics work best. For this industry, that includes:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Paid Search Engine Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Website Optimization
- Live or AI-Enabled Webchat
- Content Marketing
- Third-Party Listing Site Marketing
- SMS Text Marketing
- Print Media
- Out-of-Home Marketing
- Event-Based Marketing
- Word-of-Mouth
And, of course, many of these channels and tactics directly connect with each other. Let’s dig into each of them in more detail.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
What it is: The process of ensuring you appear as high as possible on search engines like Google and Bing. It involves both updating your website content to focus on relevant keywords and optimizing your Google Business Profile to appear in relevant local searches.
How it helps: Google is the world’s most visited website, and other search engines aren’t far behind. Strategic SEO allows you to ensure that when potential buyers search for your business or topics related to purchasing a new home, your website is among the top results.
Examples:
- SEO-optimized blog posts about topics relevant to homeowners.
- An optimized Google Business Profile with relevant information and positive reviews.
- Keyword-optimized videos published on YouTube.
2. Paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
What it is: The process of placing text-based ads on relevant search results. The goal is to blend in with the regular search results (other than a ‘sponsored’ tag). Paid search engine marketing is a PPC tactic, meaning your budget only gets charged when someone is interested enough to click on the ad.
How it helps: While SEO takes months to see results, SEM is immediate. As long as your ads and the website they link to are closely connected to the targeted keywords, you can get immense interest and traffic from potential homeowners using a search engine like Google in their customer journey.
Examples:
- Text-based, two-line ads promoting your homebuilding business in a keyword like “new homes in [city]”
- Visual display ads appearing on websites that are part of the Google Display Network.
3. Social Media Marketing
What it is: The ability to engage and convert your audience on the platforms where they spend most of their online time: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social media channels. Organic social media marketing refers to building a follower base with your business page for relevant, value-adding content, while paid social means placing ads on your network of choice based on hundreds of targeting parameters.
How it helps: Being active on social media means tapping into billions of consumers’ virtual conversations daily. It’s a great opportunity to engage your audience on a more human level, while also allowing you to push out and promote your website content to interested users.
Examples:
- Creating organic content, like testimonial videos, to share on your social media profiles.
- Collecting and re-posting user-generated social media content to build credibility and authenticity.
- Placing image or video-based ads on a network like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram.
4. Email Marketing
What it is: The strategic effort to follow up with potential homebuyers after they’ve expressed initial interest in working with you. While traditional email marketing consists of pushes to large consumer databases, more modern forms of this tactic focus more on thoughtful, relevant follow-ups with prospects already in your lead and customer database.
How it helps: Email marketing helps you stay in touch with your leads and keeps you top of mind after they encounter you and until they’re ready to commit. It’s also immensely targeted; for example, you can use it as digital marketing for custom homebuilders with messaging specifically focused on a demographic or interest-based segment.
Examples:
- A drip email campaign that sends three to five relevant follow-ups, starting a week after a new lead enters your database.
- An engagement campaign after the initial contract is signed with helpful tips and guides to stay engaged through the building process.
5. Website Optimization
What it is: Your website is the hub of all homebuilder marketing efforts. It’s where you introduce your brand and unique value to your buyers, showcase floorplans and housing models, and let them know about any next steps they can take. The more dynamic, engaging, and consistent your website is, the better.
How it helps: Potential homebuyers will gravitate toward your website. When they do, it’s your chance to convince them that buying a new home through you makes sense. Your website is also a core lead generation tool and plays a core role in many of the discussed tactics, like content marketing and search engine optimization.
6. Live or AI-Enabled Webchat
What it is: The ability to engage your audience the moment they visit your website. It most likely appears in a pop-up window when a user first visits your home page or other key pages. Many webchat providers also request contact information from anyone who wants to ask a question, adding a lead generation component to the equation.
How it helps: Around 73% of consumers find live chat the most satisfactory way of interacting with a company. That’s because it satisfies their need for an instant response while providing more in-depth conversational opportunities than most standard marketing and sales channels. AI-enabled webchats add another dimension, automating the process while providing a personalized, authentic chat experience.
Examples:
- A live chat with your sales or customer service team.
- A chatbot that provides automated answers to common questions.
- A hybrid model that can answer basic questions automatically but connects to your live team for more in-depth requests and conversations.
7. Content Marketing
What it is: The process of building visual and written content designed to add value for your audience. Rather than touting your homebuilding services, the goal is to build content that’s valuable enough for potential homebuyers to want to consume it.
How it helps: Today’s consumers are wary of advertising. They value authenticity over promotion. Content marketing helps you build that authenticity. It draws audiences to your website and other digital property, positioning you as the homebuilding and buying expert they want to trust with one of the biggest purchases of their lives.
Examples:
- Homebuying guides
- Home financing guides
- Blog posts with homebuying tips
- Virtual tours
8. Third-Party Listing Site Marketing
What it is: A strategic effort to expand your presence beyond your owned digital presence. Manage your listings on third-party websites like Zillow, Realtor.com, and Trulia to ensure a consistent brand across all your properties. You can even place some ads to increase visibility.
How it helps: Extending your marketing beyond your website expands your presence to the properties your audience prefers. Zillow, for example, has become the biggest real estate website in the United States and continues to rise in traffic. Going where your customers look for homes maximizes your visibility and increases your brand presence.
Examples:
- Consistent listings on external property sites.
- Keyword optimization to appear high on third-party site searches.
- Paid digital ads on third-party sites focused on real estate.
9. SMS Text Marketing
What it is: Like email marketing, SMS texting is largely designed to follow up on leads already in your database. It uses a central platform to send messages, ideally in a two-way capacity that enables responses to return and be addressed through the same platform.
How it helps: Text messages have to be shorter but have unique advantages: promotional SMS messages have a 98% open rate, and 60% of consumers read texts within five minutes of receiving them. As such, they’re especially beneficial for conversational marketing and messages that prompt immediate action (like registering for an event).
Examples:
- Text drip campaigns that share relevant bits of content.
- Post-contract campaigns designed to answer common questions.
- Campaigns during the building process that keep homebuyers apprised of the progress.
10. Print Media
What it is: Use physical media to get the word out about your homebuilding business or specific listings and new construction opportunities. Print marketing can happen as inserts in general publications, advertisements in relevant magazines, or direct mail marketing sent to prospects in your database.
How it helps: Print marketing has surprising staying power. It’s perhaps the best high-gloss way to promote your homebuilding business, with 75% of consumers saying that receiving a print advertisement made them feel special. They also increase brand recall, ideal for getting your business into your audience’s head before they commit to a new home.
Examples:
- A full-page ad in a magazine like Better Homes and Gardens.
- An insert with floor plans and current listings in local and regional newspapers.
- A brochure or postcard mailed to your current prospects for consideration.
11. Out-of-Home Marketing
What it is: Place your brand messaging in a physical environment your audience will encounter outside their homes. Typically, that means billboards, but you can also create out-of-home campaigns on bus shelters, airports, vehicle wraps, murals, and digital screens in malls and other gathering spaces.
How it helps: OOH is the ideal brand awareness play for your building business. More than 50% of consumers notice out-of-home advertisements, and that number increases when they encounter them in unique and unexpected ways. That’s a higher level of brand recall than any other channel, including digital.
Examples:
- A billboard advertising your new home constructions in the area.
- Airport advertising welcoming visitors while showcasing your contributions to the area’s living spaces.
- Digital screens showing videos and slideshows of the homes you’re building.
12. Event-Based Marketing
What it is: A strategic effort to market your business at trade shows, local events, and more. That might mean a booth at a local homebuilding conference, or a sponsorship at a community event that’s relevant and interesting to your target audience. You can even host your own event.
How it helps: Sometimes, the best way to engage potential homebuyers is to get in front of them. Especially at the higher level of custom homebuilder marketing, promoting your business on a personal level can add the credibility you need to get commitments on starting a build.
Examples:
- Sponsoring the local summer concert series
- Hosting an open house for your audience to walk through your model homes.
- Attending a homebuilder conference in your area.
13. Word-of–Mouth
What it is: Word-of-mouth and referral marketing means encouraging your audience to talk about your business (in a positive way, of course) among themselves. It typically involves tactics like engaging with your audience, amplifying user-generated content, sharing user reviews, and more.
How it helps: Hearing about a brand or business from your peers instantly increases credibility. In fact, one study found that word of mouth is the preferred way to learn about a business for most of your audience. It’s also how 75% of your audience will learn about you, so shaping the conversation can benefit you by building a more trusted, relevant brand image.
Examples:
- Encouraging reviews from your current homebuyers, then amplifying those reviews on your digital channels.
- Running a contest to generate user-generated content about your homes that you can share on social media.
7 Tips for Marketing Your Homebuilder Business
Now that you’re familiar with every relevant channel and tactic at your disposal, it’s time to tie the whole thing together. These tips can help you maximize your homebuilder sales through a more consistent homebuilder marketing strategy.
1. Create Your Builder Marketing Roadmap
A quick look at the above marketing ideas for homebuilders alone makes it clear: you need a comprehensive plan to truly succeed in attracting new customers. More specifically, you need a roadmap that aligns with the customer journey of potential homebuyers.
For example, tactics like social media marketing, print, and out-of-home advertising can drive initial awareness of your business and homebuilder services. From there, potential customers might Google your business, at which point effective SEO will get them to your website.
While there, content marketing ensures interest and generates leads you can follow up on via email and text. And once they’re happy customers, word-of-mouth marketing can restart the cycle with increased credibility.
Connecting these dots is only possible with a comprehensive roadmap. Start by outlining your goals, and how you expect to get there. An idea of the budget and resources available will also help. That’s how you can begin implementing the above tactics in a comprehensive, integrated effort to maximize sales.
2. Embrace Visual Media and Video
Most, if not all, of the above tactics depend on effective content that catches your audience’s eye and convinces them to take your intended action. The written word matters, but visuals become even more important from your website to social media and other types of builder advertising.
Potential homebuyers are considering one of the largest financial decisions of their lives. They need to be able to envision themselves in the home you’re building for them. Words can only do so much in getting those emotions across effectively.
Instead, you need visuals that range from compelling images to engaging, immersive videos. After all, 91% of consumers prefer visual content over words, and video is by far the most memorable type of brand content for audiences across demographics.
Visual content can enhance your website by showcasing your brand. It can become immersive as you integrate it into virtual tours. You can share it on social media, via email, and on other channels. You can even encourage new homeowners to share their own videos of the dream home you’ve built for them. The more visual your marketing, the better.
3. Plan Your Follow-Up Messaging
Homebuilder marketing cannot stop with getting your audience’s attention. After all, this is among the industries with the longest sales cycles, with prospective homebuyers sometimes taking years to go from initial awareness and interest to signing the contract and eventually moving into their new dream home.
That’s what makes follow-up messaging such a crucial piece of the homebuilder marketing equation. Planning how you’ll stay engaged and top of mind with your audience can help to ensure that when they’re ready to pull the trigger, your homebuilding business is top of mind.
Some of the above marketing tactics, like email and SMS texting, can help to accomplish that goal. Building an organic social media presence and encouraging your leads to follow you is another important step. But more than anything, it’s about planning those messages through.
What types of campaigns make the most sense for new web visitors? How does that change for leads, sales-qualified prospects, and new customers who are just waiting for their homes to be finished? Answering these questions, and understanding what types of channels make the most sense for different messaging, becomes a crucial part of the equation.
4. Leverage Sales and Marketing Automation
Even with a comprehensive plan, a long list of homebuilder marketing ideas and follow-ups like the above can look daunting. Without a full marketing department, it may seem impossible to execute every tactic and embrace any channel you need to in order to attract customers and grow your business.
Fortunately, the beauty of modern marketing is that much of it can be automated. In fact, embracing sales and marketing automation can become a key part of your promotional success. Opportunities include:
- Email and text automation, with drip campaigns firing dynamically based on specific triggers like a lead entering your database or a new client signing a contract.
- Social media automation, including options like scheduling individual posts ahead of time or dynamically optimizing your ad campaigns without a constant manual touch.
- Web chat automation, typically in the form of an AI-enabled chatbot that can answer common questions for your visitors and even learn to self-optimize its answers over time.
Leveraging these automations can go a long way toward achieving homebuilder marketing success. For example, a chatbot doesn’t just provide instant answers where possible but can also generate leads from every conversation users have with it. Those leads, in turn, can fire off your email and text automation to engage potential homebuying without requiring major manual resources on an ongoing basis.
5. Partner With Agencies Where Needed
In an ideal world, you can build and execute your entire homebuilder marketing strategy in-house. But getting to that point takes time, and having the right partners by your side can ease that journey for everyone involved.
Consider, for example, the benefits of partnering with a custom homebuilder marketing agency. The agency will have extensive industry experience and can leverage that experience into its strategic recommendations for your own marketing plan. That provides you with the foundation you need to learn what you need, which might ultimately lead to being able to execute your own marketing.
Working with a dedicated agency can also help you understand more about what homebuilder marketing solutions you might be able to benefit from. The above-mentioned conversational marketing, for instance, may require a texting platform. Work with your agency to learn about the platforms available to you, and how to choose one that matches your strategic goals and budget.
6. Focus on Consistency Over Volume
Even with a reliable agency by your side and automation at your disposal, homebuilder marketing can be a lot. For evidence, look no further than the 12 tactics listed as important above.
That’s why, especially when it comes to digital marketing for homebuilders, it helps to start small. Don’t start executing every single tactic you can at the same time. Stick with the foundation, which might be your website, SEO, social media, and some email follow-ups.
Starting with a few foundational tactics helps to minimize distractions. It also allows you to build a more consistent brand and messaging baseline that can ultimately apply to other tactics.
Once you’ve mastered your core tactics, expand the marketing horizon. Add other channels to the mix and focus on mastering those in turn. Over time, you can build a comprehensive, multi-channel campaign that pulls every lever you have to maximize sales.
7. Optimize Your Homebuilder Marketing Plan Over Time
Finally, it’s crucial to remember that marketing can never follow a set-and-forget approach. Even the most ubiquitous best practices may not apply to your specific situation, business, or audience.
That’s why any marketing for builders has to follow a continuous optimization approach. Follow your marketing roadmap and plan, judging both the overall strategy and individual channels by pre-defined marketing metrics. Then, check in on your tactics periodically to see what improvements you can make and how to optimize your marketing efforts over time.
For example, a monthly marketing review might find that certain messaging outperforms others. Or, you might come across recurring questions in your chatbot logs that deserve further exploration in the form of a content guide. You might find your social media ads outperforming your search ads in terms of lead generation.
Each of those and any other findings can be a cause for tweaks to improve your homebuilder marketing. With that continuous improvement mindset, you can ensure that every resource you spend on homebuilder marketing will ultimately lead to greater revenue and reliable business growth.
Ready To Optimize Your Homebuilder Marketing?
Homebuilder marketing is not easy. It’s certainly not simple, and it can quickly get confusing. But once you get it right, and build a truly integrated plan, few investments are more reliable in growing your business and attracting new clients.
That means integrating your preferred marketing channels, but it also means finding partners to work with you.
AtlasRTX, for instance, has established itself in the homebuilding industry through an AI-enabled chatbot that can engage website visitors and become part of your text messaging efforts. It also generates leads and increases sales conversions in the process. Ready to learn more? Request a demo to get started today.
