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

Marketing After the Web 2 0 Tsunami

Web 2.0 arrived and immediately redefined the way marketers function on the net. Marketing after the Tsunami better known as Web 2.0 now takes a lot more interaction. Marketers in the past were satisfied to co-exist in anonymity because it gave them the power to promote their products without exposing themselves. Web 2.0 has changed internet marketer's approach to delivering their products to the masses. It has definitely open the doors to some new marketing strategies, some good and some definitely bad. The question we need to answer is; Has Web 2.0's takeover of the marketing arena improved the business as a whole or opened internet marketing to the less skillful.

Internet marketing was base on a simple of foundation of generating traffic to your website using a well optimized website. The more people you could reach by using SEO methods or PPC, the more your business stood a chance to succeed. The use of certain eye catching headlines and visuals were also effective, but you had to get your audience to your site first before you could use those marketing methods. Once you got someone to your site you then had to make sure that your site had great content in order to create a repeat visitor. The foundation of the internet has not changed, You still need all those components to capture your visitors, but the approach has changed.

Web 2.0 has transform internet marketing by creating a social environment that gives marketers more visibility with their potential prospects. Social marketing has become the core of the web 2.0 movement. Powerhouse websites like My Space, Facebook, and You Tube has forced even the old school marketer to break down. Nowadays if you don't have one of the powerhouse websites in your marketing portfolio, chances are you are leaving money on the table. Making business or personal contacts using these site is a viral marketing tool that is unparallel to any other strategy. The only problem I have found with the Web 2.0 phenomenon is that your information is accessible to any and everyone. The negative aspects of having your information disclose, is the unsolicited intrusion from spammers who send fraudulent or sexually based ads. If you don't mind being flashed or spam occasionally then Web 2.0 is definitely a positive.

In conclusion I believe that Marketing After the Web 2.0 Tsunami has expanded the internet in a good way. Putting a face to your product or business is a win-win situation, the customer can feel more secure and at the same time you can brand yourself as a good marketer. For those of you who do not wish to get involved in Web 2.0 strategies, the internet marketing foundation is still in tact. Marketing techniques such as SEO, PPC, and email marketing are still the most effective internet marketing tools. If you are an old school marketer you should take add the new tactics to your current marketing to generate a marketing Tsunami of your own. The addition of social marketing strategies will not hurt the business but rather expand it to an even larger market.

By Marc Marseille

Companies Are Not Ready, Willing And Able For Marketing 2.0

Most companies looking at Social Media and Web 2.0 see it as a media channel to broadcast their messages into. This includes most Governments and Associations. This is the wrong reason to do it and the wrong strategy.

If your company is looking at engaging in the social channels, but simply wants to tell the gathered audience about their brands, messages, products and services, here's the one best piece of advice to make that happen: advertise on those channels.

You can do either mass advertising or you can target ads specifically to the types of people who might be more inclined to act on your messages. Companies like Facebook and Google offer these types of targeting. The common attitude is, "let's post our videos on YouTube," or "everyone's on Twitter, we should be on Twitter too," and what comes after is a closed, one-way broadcasting channel that does not engender the shared values of these social systems, including: commenting, being open to differing opinions, responding and - most importantly - making changes based on the feedback and conversation that is taking place.

This is the primary reason why most companies have epic fails on these channels: they're broadcasting not engaging, responding and adapting.

Don't ask for people's opinions or be in channels where that back and forth takes place and not do anything about it. It's insulting and it's a huge waste of both your time and the people who have connected to you.

A lot of companies talk about "opening up" or "letting the information free" but what it boils down to is a couple of inches more liberal than their traditional marketing and communications. Have you seen some of the topics of conversation listed at recent Government, Association, Marketing and Public Relations seminars? They hint at how open the topic will be, but the subtle undertones of the conference description and the speakers asked to present stink of, "how can your company understand what people are saying and how your company can control the chaos and broadcast into it."

It's the wrong way to be looking at things.

Here are the bigger questions your organization needs to be asking before entering these channels:

- Are we willing to not just listen, but to respond and adapt based on the back and forth?
- Are we willing to become active participants - not just in our channels but in the other channels and spaces as well?
- Are we willing to change the focus from being on our company to being about everybody - us, them and the entire community?
- Are we willing to be participants with just as much fervour and passion when it's not good for us, but good for the community or the industry as a whole?
- Are we willing to be open?
- Are we willing to be really, really open and transparent?

Individuals have an obvious and very real reason to be skeptical of brands and companies in the social media sphere. The majority of companies have done a very poor job of changing that perspective because - for the most part - they are simply using these tools to broadcast their messages in a uni-directional fashion.

Most companies see these channels as another mass media tool (after all, they are going where the masses are), this forces them to look at the wrong metrics (still), like how many people are seeing their message and what are they doing? Versus, who is seeing their messages, what are they feedbacking and how quickly can the company change their business to adapt and grow?

By Mitch Joel

Marketing in the World of the Web

Retailers will eventually recover from the consumption tailspin that threatens this holiday season. But quite apart from the recession, there are other, profound changes underway in the retail sector. As the evidence mounts about the power of social networks to reconfigure individual behavior, the crucial question facing industry is: How to leverage this phenomenon into actual profits?

The second generation of Internet ("Web 2.0") companies such as MySpace, Facebook, Linked/In and YouTube exploded upon the scene three years ago. Today, MySpace and Facebook together have more users than the entire U.S. population; and the online community concept is already becoming a powerful tool for everything from creating customer loyalty, to assistance in product design, to a sounding board for company strategy.

Corporations from IBM to Toyota and Johnson & Johnson have been rushing to establish their own affiliated social networks and bind their customers ever more closely. There isn't a smart company today that isn't implementing some kind of online community, wiki or blog strategy.

But companies with millions of members of online communities are now asking: What next? How do we sell them products and services, or mobilize them into massive de facto R&D, manufacturing and sales departments? We have been studying the challenge and have concluded that very few of the traditional techniques of classical marketing (call them Marketing 1.0), or even of eCommerce (Marketing 2.0) will work in the world of social networks. A very different set of tools, concepts and practices is needed. Call it Marketing 3.0. Here are five:

- From loyalty to attention. Before you can win consumer loyalty, you have to capture and reward consumer attention. Old propositions -- network television's tired offer of 22 minutes of canned sitcoms in exchange for eight minutes of untargeted commercials -- won't cut it. Consumers are demanding a better deal.

Some brands are starting to flirt with better exchange rates: Virgin Mobile gives a minute of free phone time for every minute of advertising a customer accepts. Ryan Air recently announced it would offer $15 coach tickets from the U.S. to Europe, subsidized by passenger attention to advertising and in-flight sales pitches.

Smart marketers will of necessity become obsessed with customer attention in the way they once obsessed over customer loyalty. The shrewd brands will create elaborate attention-rewards programs, and incentives to break through the noise and make that critical initial connection.

- From crowds to clouds. Once you get that attention -- once you generate heavy traffic to your site, gather a large league of "friends" on MySpace, or spawn a dedicated following on Twitter -- how do you monetize the crowd?

Smart brands are turning their crowds into "clouds": organic, self-forming and often self-governing communities of interest. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Frito-Lay and Harley-Davidson use their clouds as feedback loops to get better faster by obtaining good, timely, often brutally honest customer insights. And the members of clouds can become true believers; they don't just watch your commercials, they make them.

Right now, few companies are emotionally equipped to wring the best benefits of a cloud, because the most valuable voices out there usually belong to the malcontents. In the old model, customer-service departments aimed to placate or jettison disgruntled customers. In the cloud model, the idea is to cultivate and reward them. That's not an easy transition.

- From places to spaces. Consumers are increasingly organizing themselves into new communities -- not just the big generic social communities, but myriad idiosyncratic slices of narrow, passionate interest (i.e., BlackPlanet, Inpowr and MomsCafe).

These new market spaces, or "meganiches," may seem small, even strange at first. But when they're efficiently targeted, they can be highly responsive, lucrative and loyal. Well-established meganiche Web sites include Gamefaq.com for video gamers, Dpreview.com for digital photography aficionados, and Howardchui.com dedicated to mobile phone zealots.

With this shift toward self-organization by consumers, national advertising campaigns as we know them will increasingly become a waste of time and money for many companies. The trick for brands is to cohabit social spaces with these consumers. Social media, and its verb form, "friending," requires entirely new forms of advertising: bottom up instead of top down, personal rather than public, and subtle rather than full frontal.

- From memes to bemes. In the Age of Broadcast, good advertising could occasionally manufacture memes of tremendous social impact. Think of "Where's the Beef?" or "I can't believe I ate the whole thing." If you can't recall an irresistible or effective turn of phrase of late, it's because it is exceedingly difficult to spread a meme in today's fragmented media environment. Marketing 3.0 is now the science of devising and managing directed business memes: call them bemes. Bemes are sent by members of social communities to each other and typically contain a reward or exclusive offer, which, when redeemed, also results in a reward coupon for the sender. This encourages members of social communities to propagate a "viral" ad. One well-documented beme was "The Subservient Chicken" from Burger King.

Brute force marketing won't work inside social networks. The best online marketing now takes place among people who know and trust each other. Consider how rumors work. Like a rumor, a beme is a bit of useful information that rewards each person who passes it along. Want to be a sensation? Create a beme that consumers willingly accept and share with others.

- From silos to simultaneity. Too many retailers today persist in believing that online shopping is merely a virtual extension of real world shopping. That is a big mistake.

Rather, online and offline need to coexist, and we need to rethink how they relate. For example, to their surprise, companies like BestBuy (which even encourages customers to shop the aisles but buy online from in-store kiosks) and Macy's are discovering that physical retailing is a perfect way to move units online. That is, the physical world has become the showroom for the virtual realm.

Retailers now must reimagine a world where consumers experience products in stores but ultimately buy them on the Web: Stores are for experiences, the network is for inventories. And what in turn prepares potential customers for what to look for in stores? Online communities.

All of this suggests that Marketing 3.0 is not only different from its predecessors, but actively undermines them. If your marketing program fails to adapt to this new world, it won't just become irrelevant -- it will actually work against you.

By Tom Hayes and Michael S. Malone