As a home builder, your top priority is satisfying your customers. Creating a custom home suited to their exact needs and specifications can be a challenge, but you enjoy the hard work—and if they’re not happy, you’re not happy.
When it comes to marketing, however, you’ve found that reaching new customers can be a bigger struggle than building a home. New home builder marketing strategies are hard to come by, and you may be having difficulty putting together a cohesive, effective plan that allows you to reach your target audience without spending a fortune.
Get Google’s Attention by Blogging
It is no secret that I believe blogging is one of the best ways to get Google’s attention and there is plenty of good reason for that.
According to HubSpot, active blogs draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic and double the amount of referral traffic.
What do home builders blog about?
So I am guessing that you are convinced that blogging is worth it (because it is), but what on earth should you blog about?
By using the Google keyword tool, you should be able to make a list of what keywords to write about, but it isn’t as effective as you might think. The best thing to do is find out what your target audience are really looking for. You have to blog for people, not for Google.
Here is what you should be doing as a home builder
Create a Google+ business account, a Facebook fan page, and a Twitter profile. Don’t worry, the upkeep will take you less than 5 minutes per day. I would suggest getting a designer to make all of your social profiles look professional. The default generic looking ones will make your business look like an amateur.
Adding content to your social media profiles
Every time you add a new blog post to your website you should add the link to each of the social profiles. You can use a service such as Buffer to automatically post to your Twitter and Facebook accounts.
On top of your blog posts you should be adding about 2 updates per day. This can be anything from funny pictures, relevant quotes, links to other articles etc. You should be going this even if you don’t have any followers or fans. Google looks at your business’ overall social presence and factors that into your search ranking.
Website Design
Think of your marketing plan as a solar system and your website as the sun, the panelists suggested. Your marketing efforts around the Web, including social media, email campaigns, and other venues, should all direct shoppers back to a well-planned site.
Don’t offer site visitors the whole story, since that allows them to make a decision without you ever having the chance to contact them. Instead, hold some information back, such as pricing, and experiment with different calls to action to harvest email addresses or phone numbers to enable your sales team to follow-up with prospects.
For the same reason that most builders wouldn’t trust your average freelance writer to hang drywall, panelists suggested hiring professional writers to write website content; builders should also have their writers create content for blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, email blasts, and other outlets.
Make sure your online ads are staying in front of prospective buyers by placing “cookies” on their computer when they visit your site. Those cookies will then track the next few sites they visit—which are likely to be sites they visit often—and place your ads on those sites when they visit them again.
Incorporate a form into your website to garner information on what shoppers are looking for in a home. (How many beds and baths? Do they want a formal living room?) Then email them floor plans that fit their criteria.
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