Month: August 2012

By BDX Guest Blogger, Carol Morgan, mRELEVANCE

Problem: you’ve created your website, blog and social media and have implemented search engine optimization, but you don’t know how to effectively measure your return on investment (ROI). Solution: Google Analytics. Yes, the answer really is that simple. Google Analytics is a free, easy to use tool offered by Google that allows you to filter your traffic to see the true impact of your efforts.

Once you’ve created an account, your Google Analytics report will show you graphs of your daily visits, average time on site, bounce rate, the geographical areas your visitors are from and more. Furthermore, Google Analytics recently launched social reporting which means you can now see the referrals to your website from social media, conversations on your social media sites, how your content is being shared socially and more. Both of these reports allow you to analyze your traffic to determine what your home buyers are actually looking at and looking for.

By becoming better educated about how home buyers are interacting with you on all of your online platforms, your company will be able to adjust or make changes to your plan to meet unforeseen needs and to continue to increase what is working. These tools essentially make you a smarter provider because you’ll know what your audience wants and how to get that to them.

For example, in 2008, we had a Florida home builder who needed to cut their marketing budget. And, even though they cut their budget by 85 percent over the next three years, traffic to their website tripled thanks to the information we gained from Google Analytics. Now that’s what we call a good ROI!

If you’re company wants to increase your ROI or if you’d like a walkthrough of what your Google Analytics report is trying to tell you, contact Marketing RELEVANCE.

Carol Flammer is managing partner of Marketing RELEVANCE, LLC, a Marketing, Communication, Interactive agency with offices in Atlanta and Chicago.

Jon Luther Receives His EO of the Year Award!

BDX was a proud sponsor of the Association Leadership Conference in New Orleans last week. We really enjoyed connecting with our current and future HBA partners.

The conference was a great mix of networking and educational opportunities. During the show it became apparent that HBAs across the country are all facing similar challenges. HBA’s are asking: How do we attract and retain members — the average member retention rate for HBA’s is 72%.  How do we generate revenue beyond our membership dues?

Will Nash, BDX and Diane Swenson, Maryland

The more we talked to HBA leadership, the more clear it became that BDX is in a great position to help these organizations through some of these challenges.

We’ve been working with our partners to provide a free listing website for their HBA, revenue sharing and builder education. For more information, click here.

 

Eleanor Bowman, BDX and David Ellis, Atlanta

The other big takeaway from the conference was that we are working with some really amazing people. It was so exciting to see so many of our partner HBA’s winnning awards and doing great work in their local communities.

Congratulations to Jon Luther (New Orleans) for winning Executive Officer of the Year and Earl McCloed (Columbia) for your Life Time Achievement Award! We are proud to know and work with both of you!

Thanks New Orleans friends for being such a great host of the week’s events!

For more information about the conference, you can visit: http://www.nahb.org/ali or follow the discussion on Twitter: #ALI12

Thanks again to everyone who participated for a great week — we’ll see you in Portland in 2013!

 

 

By BDX Guest Blogger, Carol Morgan, mRELEVANCE

The new Timeline layout for Facebook Pages has been around for a couple of months now, but many businesses still aren’t taking full advantage of the social media site’s redesign. Here are some ways your home building company could be using Facebook to build your brand:

  • Create a unique, relevant cover photo. Get creative with this critical space by using photos and collages of your homes and communities, photos of home buyers or highlight favorite features. Include your tagline or unique selling proposition, and make it fun.
  • Add content. The new timeline layout allows pages to go back and add dates of important company events. Pages can also choose what information they want to “highlight” or hide on their page. Page managers can now schedule posts for a future date, so feel free to plan posts for the future.  Just don’t forget to monitor your page!
  • Delegate. One of the most recent updates to Pages is the ability to assign administrative roles to the people who manage your page. The five roles include manager, content creator, moderator, advertiser and insights analyst. Descriptions of these roles can be easily found in the Admin Panel.
  • Promote it. You may have seen or gotten emails about the new Facebook Ads and Promoted Posts. These two options allow pages to pay Facebook to help increase their business’ reach. Businesses may create ads that encourage people to like their page or to view one of their posts, while promoted posts simply increase the reach of a specific post on your page.

The best way to acclimate yourself and your company with the new Facebook Timeline Pages design is to use it. By taking into account our suggestions of some of the design’s coolest features, and by playing around with the site, your home building business will be well on its way to improving your interaction with customers and potential buyers.

Carol Flammer is managing partner of Marketing RELEVANCE, LLC, a Marketing, Communication, Interactive agency with offices in Atlanta and Chicago. She is the author of “Social Media for Home Builders 2.0” published by BuilderBooks.