10 Myths About New Home Sales Marketing

Missing the Mark?

If you are in new home sales and marketing it may feel like the world is changing. No one reads the newspaper anymore, big agencies promoting big media buys are going under, and the buying public at large seems to have turned a deaf ear to every promotion, every marketing message, and every initiative. Thousands of dollars are being poured in and a few drops of interest are coming out. Despite market hardships we’ve been through cycles before, but this… this feels new. Is the world changing?

It already has. The evolution of offline to online is not a work in progress anymore.

There are several tried and true rules of builder marketing that continue to pervade of landscape of every newspaper, every sales office, and every new home community website. But the world has moved on and left us behind. Here are the top ten myths homebuilder marketing still holds onto, and how to let go:

Myth # 1: Print an expensive, shiny brochure to hand out to every prospect. Aside from being an environmental nightmare, brochures are expensive ($5 - $10) each and are often created long before the doors of a sales office open. This means we are shooting blind with a message that we hope resonates with buyers. Brochures are also inflexible, creating a stagnate “tool” that does not give marketers a chance to respond to market trends.

Myth # 2: We control the message. We do not control the message. In increasing numbers, brands are being thrown to the online masses to devour and dissect in blogs, user ratings, and other peer generated content that prospects are relying on more and more in their decision making. Blogs like Socketsite and others are taking our cleverly crafted marketing messages and creating their own. Case in point: http://tinyurl.com/635cve.

Myth # 3: Flash! Nothing sells home online like Flash! Actually, nothing sells home online like buyers being able to find you when they type in “Atlanta Condos” or “San Jose real estate.” Flash makes sites harder to find for search engines and also offers no relationship building tool to keep them on your site. Lack of any substance beyond pretty flash animation leaves buyers bored and un-engaged, increasing your bounce rate, decreasing your opt-in, and reducing your ROI.

Myth # 4: No one buys homes on the internet. A high ranking marketing person recently said this to me and I will concede that she is right, no one writes earnest money deposits or signs contracts online (yet). However, it is estimated that at least 70% of potential home buyers start their search online and rule out potential new homes based on the online marketing presence. That means that many buyers are not even giving us the opportunity to sell them a home during a sales office visit. Many stages of the qualifying (price, location) and trial close process are now completed online, meaning that buyers are further down the sales process when they arrive at our sales office. Although buyers do not purchase online, they do buy in (or out) of our message.

Myth # 5: The only metrics that count are sales office traffic, sales, and closings. These metrics (traffic to include be-backs) are the traditional measure of the success of any given week for homebuilder marketing. The challenge with this logic is that it does not give us the information that enables us to replicate success. As new home sales marketing professionals, we need to to expand our ideas of conversion and metrics. Today’s buyer takes weeks, months, even more than a year to make a buying decision. We need to provide hard data about what buyers are responding to at each stage of their decision making process, not just sales visit and sale.

Myth # 6: Lifestyle photos and pithy tag lines sell homes. Last year a large homebuilder had a billboard on a major Bay Area freeway ($$$$) with a lifestyle photo of a young couple and the tagline “Life happens. Go with it.”

Enough said.

Myth # 7: More new traffic! More new leads! This will sell more homes. Traditional new home marketing focused heavily (and in some cases still does) on spending large media budgets on driving more, more, more new leads into the sales office. This made sense in the old days because buyers bought on the first visit, but it’s simply no longer true. We need to shift our marketing dollars to bringing existing prospects back into the sales office. Again. And again. And again. In a previous post I wrote about a builder who easily spent $45,000 for a direct mail campaign to a purchased list but balked at $500 for an email to their existing database. We need to focus on building relationships and trust with people in the middle of the sales funnel (warm leads) and a measured, disciplined approach to driving new leads into the top of the funnel (cold leads). The people most likely to buy this month (or this quarter) are already in your database.

Myth # 8: One Size Fits All. One of the cruelest of retail myths is equally cruel to new home marketing. Our newspaper ads, our eBlasts, our direct mail, our brochure - all targeted to a single message aimed at the broadest possible audience. Yet, within each community are several buyer profiles, each with their own emotional triggers. For example, a three bedroom/2 bath single story home might work equally well for young families and retirees, but these buying motives are very different. In trying to appeal to everyone, we connect with no one.

Myth # 9: I have an online marketing strategy. I have a web site and I use Postlets. Postlets is a great tool for getting your homes posted to several sites on the web where they can reach a larger audience, but it is only a tool. It is not a strategy. Your builder website, your new home email marketing campaign, your MLS listings. These are are tools, but without a comprehensive strategy with measurable goals and objectives it’s impossible to determine how effective your online efforts really are. Remembering that ROI refers not just to financial investment but also an investment of time, brand, reputation, and talent, an online strategy is crucial as a roadmap to reaching buyers online.

Myth # 10: Traditional new homes marketing is dead. Traditional marketing is not dead. New media offers us the tools to increase our effectiveness in traditional media, reduce wasted dollars on unproven messages, capture prospective buyers earlier in the decision making process (and ahead of our competition), minimize the market research cost and timeframe, target messages, segment and track marketing initiatives, and better understand our buyers. An integrated approach of new media + traditional media will lower overall marketing costs and eliminate the guesswork of developing messages that sell homes.

By Idea One Media