In marketing new homes, beware of repeating the tried and true, regardless of past results. The temptation to continue doing what worked before is almost irresistible. Whether it’s using your ‘go to’ fishing lure, driving the same route you’re used to driving, or repeating the same series of lucky steps to secure your luck hunting whitetail deer; People have a tendency to stick with the tried and true. Why do some religious systems cling to traditions and practices that feel so outdated and have no relevance to people today? It’s time to change the way you market new homes.
Builders are no different! Why do we still use marketing methods like mass direct mail that have a dependent failure rate of 99%? Why are we pleased that our sales team has a 95% failure rate when it comes to closing sales? Why do we accept that our sales teams typically only track 35-40% (if you’re lucky) of your hard-earned and paid dearly for traffic? Because? The Internet attracts your attention with new and incredible opportunities. Are you interested?
There is a whole new day upon us. New home marketing has changed so radically that many builders only acknowledge that their results have failed, few understand why. What happened? What changed? What do we do now?
marketing is changing
I think the fundamental premise behind most marketing has changed! We have spent decades crafting messages to deliver to our prospects. Those methods are known as outbound marketing. But guess what, your prospects aren’t listening…unless they want to. We have been relying on the disruptive marketing model, only using media to which we have become accustomed: television, direct mail, press, radio, etc. We ask questions like, “How can we make enough noise to be heard?” “What time do we run the ad to better reach our target audience?” “Should we publish in the Washington Post?” All legitimate questions, but not always the right ones. He is determined to convince potential buyers to choose his houses. Their trading is like mining for gold: the assumption is that if you move enough dirt, you’ll find some gold. It makes sense, right?
In this day of new home marketing, I think your challenge is to draw potential customers into your message, not the other way around. That is known as inbound marketing. Buyers are spoiled for choice and oh, they choose. They have time, information, quick and easy access, and variety on their side. They no longer have much tolerance for our marketing bias intruding on their lives. I call it selective marketing, and it simply means that the customer chooses what marketing stimulus he wants, when he wants it, and how he wants it. According to onlinevideowatch.com, the average YouTube user watches around 50 videos a month. According to Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-Founder of YouTube, “YouTube’s short and low-quality audience-generated videos attract about 20 million unique visitors per month. The average length of videos viewed is 2.5 minutes.” .
Today, consumers choose you… or not.
The dominance of the Internet in the last ten years took many builders by surprise. Even today, many do not have websites, let alone take advantage of the many other new forms of marketing opportunities: social media, blogging, portals, search engine optimization (SEO), social media optimization (SMO), email. electronic, online Public relations, listing sites, and broad-based sales sites like Craig’s List. Be careful though, the Internet is not an advertising medium in the same sense as the Washington Post or Time magazine. Actually, when it comes to reaching mass markets intrusively, the Internet is really bad. But that’s not the best way to use the Internet. That’s like using a GPS system to find something in an unfamiliar city without an address. Like the internet, GPS systems are much more efficient and capable of finding a needle in a haystack, but only if you know your needle.
Is it time to ditch the tried and true marketing methods?
The challenge, as stated in the opening paragraph, is knowing when to walk away from the accepted, occasionally tried and tested traditional marketing methods, and when to run. I once heard a story about a woman who always cut off the ends of her roast before cooking it. Someone asked her why she did it. “I’m not sure, my mom always did it, so I do it,” she replied. Her curiosity piqued, the woman called her mother and asked, “Why did you always cut off the end of a large roast before cooking it, Mom?” Her response, “my pan was too small.”
Resist the urge to repeat what you’ve always done because you always have.
Last summer, a client hired me to write copy for a series of 60-second radio spots we bought for a three-month multimedia campaign we were launching in July. My initial reaction was the tried and true: get a stopwatch and create the copy. Made! But then it occurred to me that maybe the 60 second ad was a bad idea. “Why not turn three months of 60-second commercials with a lot of fluff into three months of 10-second commercials that hit the mark, fast, furious, much more frequently and with exact target… whoosh, whoosh! I did it! I broke the mold and did it differently. You can too. And it worked!
Just some crazy thoughts: What if we build the houses our clients want, not the ones we want our clients to want? Let’s make our websites a dynamic experience of design, involvement and creativity. If I can go on the BMW website and build my Beamer with up to 130,000,000 possibilities, why can’t we do it for prospective homebuyers? How about we create a cooperative business in a new community and allow homebuyers to get involved creatively and financially and put up some sweat at the same time? Do you think their level of participation and acceptance would increase? Let’s offer to list our potential buyer’s house, the one they need to sell, on our website.
The Internet has opened up new worlds for us. But they are smaller, more focused, and less tolerant of marketing advances than ever. what do we do? How do we capitalize on this monumental opportunity? The advent of television opened up advertising and marketing to the masses in ways that were previously impossible. The Internet has presented us with micro-opportunities that we still don’t know how to reach. But, we must not only reach them, we must know what they want, how they want it and how they want the good news to be transmitted.
This is an example of the power of the Internet to reach micro-opportunities. In June 2007, Neal Schon (guitarist for the popular rock band Journey) was looking for a replacement for the band’s lead singer, Steve Perry. He was watching videos and saw a video of the band The Zoo on YouTube. Lead singer Arnel Pineda immediately captivated Schon and he emailed Pineda to audition. Arnel Pineda thought it was a joke and consequently ignored the query. It wasn’t a joke! Arnel Pineda debuted as lead singer for Journey on February 2. 21, 2008. The rest is history.
When you understand the almost limitless marketing power of the Internet and begin to harness it for your business value; you’ll open a marketing can you never want to close. Internet has the key to recover the market that you have lost. Yes, your audience is shrinking, but your opportunity is growing by leaps and bounds.