Builder Success

Hear it straight from the builder’s themselves – who’s having success and why.

I’m not sure if you’ve seen it yet, but Realtor.com is launching a new redesign of the Search Result pages.  Currently the site is only in beta with plans for a full launch later this week.  The Realtor.com Product Team has adjusted the layout to improve navigation and help consumers better manage the thousands of homes available via the MLS.

With the redesign they’ve also changed the layout to include a 300×250 ad position at the top of the page.  When I first saw this position I thought ‘this is the perfect place for video.’  The 300×250 ad position closely mirrors that of the 3:4 formats you’d see with traditional TVs.  The above the fold placement and proximity to content further peaked my interest.

I’m a fan of video ads because it’s captivating. And, when reaching a consumer who’s in the market video can help them picture the home they’re looking for and make them aware of amenities they may not have considered.

We often espouse the benefits of how display provides ‘consideration for search’ but video takes it to the next level by allowing advertisers to highlight multiple features.  Consider pans across home plans, green spaces and community amenities.  With an ad like this, I’ve changed the search from looking for a home to looking for a neighborhood or a lifestyle.

Moving beyond the value of ‘just a home’ is important for builders and developers as they try to differentiate their product from the re-sale market. Online video ads are an easy and cost effective way to achieve this goal – especially if the materials are already produced.

Brad Smith, our Director of Video production has done a great blog series on video best practices. When translating video to an ad there are a few best practices I’d encourage.

  1. The video should tell your story WITHOUT SOUND. A lot of publishers have restrictions on video ads to improve the user experience.  Can you imagine shopping for homes while a work only to be interrupted by a loud video ad popping up?  The video should work independent of sound and the VO should highlight new points.  Considered graphics to capture key elements.
  2. Maintain a consistent Call-To-Action.  I like using space at the bottom of the ad to provide a consistent CTA for my home shoppers.   Consumers should clearly know what action you want them to take and that maybe before the video ends.  On average consumers only watch about 50% of a video so having a consistent on-screen call to action is important.
  3. Keep your video ads short. The goal of the ad is to captivate and drive action. If you have a long format video you’re looking to drive traffic to consider a teaser video ad that directs the consumer to the full length video.  Keeping videos short also improves the load time for the ad and ensures that consumers will see your message instead moving onto the next page while it waits to load.

If you’ve run video ads in the past I’d be curious to learn about your experience and what worked and what didn’t. If you’ve not considered running video ads or would like more information about how to repurpose your existing videos for online marketing contact The BDX for more details.

For more information about this blog post or BDX Video ads, contact Thane Tennison, Advertising Manager or contact your local Representative.

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.

Banner Ad Retargeting —  it’s the hottest buzz word for online marketers and a growing trend amongst many players in the online space, but what exactly is it and how does it work?

Imagine spending your marketing dollars by only getting in front of people who have some knowledge of your brand. Banner Ad Retargeting does just that. Simply put, it allows you to concentrate and maximize all of your efforts on your current pool of consumers. This process is quick and painless, involving only one short line of code on your website. When a user visits your site, that single line of code drops a cookie onto the user’s computer which triggers an alert for the Retargeting campaign to activate. Once they begin visiting other websites, your banner ads will follow them across the internet, serving as constant reinforcement for your brand and a means for them to return to your site. For the building industry,  BDX has created the builder BeBack program solely meant to retarget YOUR traffic in order to increase lead conversion for your home-properties.

“Just how many websites will our Retargeting campaign run on?”

This is the single most common question I receive from our clients regarding BeBack. My answer to this question is remarkably simple: “How big is the Internet?” Without fail, the follow up question is, “and just how can I be sure that my banners will hit our users on relevant sites?” The answer to this question is just as simple. We will only retarget users on sites that they themselves visit, so in a way, users are ONLY shown banners on sites that are relevant to their interests and lifestyle. What’s fascinating is that by filtering through the thousands of domains where our ads have run I’ve noticed that the interest of one user is typically very similar to all of the others. By doing this it’s easy to paint a very robust picture of the online foot-print a typical home-shopper leaves across cyberspace.

For our own marketing efforts, NewHome Source.com runs several hundreds of thousands of impressions each month across a little more than 26,000 unique domains. Many of these impressions appear on major, nationally recognized websites like careerbuilder.com, toysrus.com, homes.com, facebook.com, eonline.com, petfinder.com, Zillow.com, and webMD.com. By looking at just these domain names I can almost see this person in my head. I can tell that our he/she is more than likely female, late 20’s to mid 30’s, has young children, and is very career driven. For our builders, can you imagine a more qualified home-shopper that you’d like to reach?

Filtering through these domains has given us additional insight into not only who the shopper is, but where they’re shopping and how often. For the last two months, roughly 25% of all of our view thru conversions have come as a result of banners located on other real-estate sites. This tells me two things. First, consumers in this phase of the purchasing process are shopping multiple websites; gathering data and considering all of their options. For advertisers, having a broad reach across these sites is essential to stay top of mind and drive awareness. This is one of the main reasons we launched the Builder Vertical Ad Network – to help builders maximize reach though a single point of contact with guaranteed results.

Second, advertisers should consider looking beyond just real estate websites when reaching their customers. If they didn’t, advertisers run the risk of ignoring potentially all conversion traffic from other sites (75% in our case). That’s the benefit of Be Back; it allows marketers to target the audience and not the website. This allows for a more efficient media spend while reaching your most valuable prospects especially as their online search takes them through sites ranging in scope from small builder websites to massive real estate search engines.

Below are a few interesting websites where you probably wouldn’t do a direct media buy, but have resulted in a click to lead conversion with BeBack. What’s even more interesting is that many times the ad will redirect to an area that has nothing to do with the market from which they shopped. For example the conversion off of OhioRunner.com came from a Philadelphia banner, meaning that consumer was likely looking for a home in Pennsylvania while still living in Ohio.

           

 

 

 

 

For more information about this blog post or BDX BeBack retargeting, contact Thane Tennison, Advertising Manager or contact your local  Representative.

BDX recently asked 3 experts in the industry what builders should consider as they follow-up with home buyer leads. Thanks to Mike Lyon, Meredith Oliver and Mike Moore for your words of wisdom. If you’re not following these leaders and learning from their experience helping builders sell new homes, you’re missing out. Here is their advice:

 ____________________________________________________________________________

It’s Time To Start Marketing and Selling Like It’s 2013

From Mike Lyon — www.doyouconvert.com

In 2005, builders didn’t have to think about how to manage their online leads. Shoot, we had people camping out waiting for homes and paying crazy prices! In 2010, many builders were struggling to pay their bills, let alone pay attention to anything happening online. Now, we finally see light at the end of the tunnel. All of the builders I work with are saying something to the effect of “We just had one of our best months ever”.

Pay close attention, you have a small window of opportunity. I would say 9-12 months. If you haven’t figured out how to create 25% of your sales from online sources a year from now, it is really going to hurt. The fact is, your website is the new model home. How have you staffed it? Are the lights on but nobody’s home?

Countless surveys show us that about half of sales agents don’t even respond to their online leads. These sales agents and their builders don’t understand that a lead with an effective nurturing process will set an appointment 25% of the time. And here is where it get’s really interesting – they will write a contract 30% of the time. So go steal some prospects from your competition! Start marketing (and selling) like it’s 2013!

Learn more about Mike at www.doyouconvert.com or follow him on Twitter @mikelyon

____________________________________________________________________________

The Need For Speed

From Meredith Oliver —  www.CreatingWOW.com

Speed! If you don’t respond fast enough to homebuyer leads, your prospective buyers will be furious. How fast is fast enough? You can’t be too fast. You can only be too slow.

Your goal should be to catch the person while they are still browsing the web for homes before they move on to another task and become preoccupied. You want to pull the person into your sales funnel quickly and efficiently so your ongoing follow-up plan has a chance to convert them from an online shopper to an in-person buyer.

Connect with Meredith at www.CreatingWOW.com  or follow her on Twitter @CreatingWOW

____________________________________________________________________________

Contact, Speed and Urgency Are Keys For Success

Mike Moore at http://mooreleadership.blogspot.com

Although there are several keys to converting sales leads into customers the most important are CONTACT and SPEED. A recent study revealed that between 40% to 50% of inbound leads are never contacted. A sales lead is a request for information and the faster you respond the higher your conversion rate from lead to customer. A Harvard business study results showed that companies who followed up within the first hour were 7 times more likely to convert a lead to a customer. Even if the lead was contacted at 1 hour the conversion rate dropped significantly. Time matters most.

So, URGENCY becomes the key to following up and converting leads to customers. I’ve found too many new home salespeople, sales managers and homebuilder’s view leads as secondary to foot traffic in their models. In this new age of business as consumers shift their shopping habits, this is a grave mistake that costs homebuilder’s sales and damages their reputation because of the lack of urgency in their response.

Connect with Mike at http://www.mooreleadership.blogspot.com/ and www.makingcustomers.wordpress.com

 

 

Congratulations to the 11 builders, remodelers and home building industry professionals who were honored yesterday as winners of the National Green Building Awards by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).

“These awards recognize the best and most innovative builders and remodelers in green building”, said NAHB Chairman Barry Rutenberg, a home builder from Gainesville, Fla. “The demand for green building is growing in leaps and bounds, and these winners set a great example of what can be accomplished in terms of sustainable and energy efficient building practices.”]

Individual Project Awards

Five single-family home projects were honored:

  • MGM Construction of San Francisco, for Project of the Year, Single-Family Custom Builder
  • Meritage Homes of Goodyear, Ariz., for Project of the Year, Single-Family Production Builder
  • Chandler Design-Build Inc. of Mebane, N.C., for Project of the Year, Single-Family Small Volume Builder
  • TC Legend Homes/Zero-Energy Plans LLC of Coupeville, Wash., for Project of the Year, Single-Family Concept and Research- Enterprise
  • Purdue University of West Lafayette, Ind., for Project of the Year, Single-Family Concept and Research- Academic

Two remodeling projects and one multifamily project were also honored:

  • Trifecta Construction Solutions of Fort Meyers, Fla., for Multifamily Project of the Year
  • G HOME by Rocking Horse Redevelopment of Phoenix, Ariz., for Remodeling Project of the Year Over $100,000
  • G HOME of Rocking Horse Redevelopment of Phoenix, Ariz., for Remodeling Project of the Year Under $100,000

Green Building Advocacy Awards

Two awards were given to individuals or organizations for their efforts in green building advocacy:

  • The Mungo Companies of Irmo, S.C. for Builder Advocate of the Year
  • G STREET of Scottsdale, Ariz., as Remodeler Advocate of the Year

NAHB also named T.W. Bailey, of WaterMark Custom Builders in Frisco, Texas the recipient of a special new award, the “NAHB Green Outstanding Contribution Award,” for his dedication and work to further green building education.

The awards were presented during the 14th annual National Green Building Conference held in Nashville, Tenn. BDX CEO, Tim Costello is speaking at the conference on a session titled “Marketing To The New Green Buyer”. Additonal details about the conference can be found here. To read the full press release about the award winners, click here.