New Home Marketing what-where-why-when

While recently reviewing some new home marketing ads and materials, I discovered a lot of incomplete information in the message.  Have you ever looked at an ad or website and discovered missing information? What is being offered? Are they new homes or used? Are they single family, townhomes, condos, or maybe converted apartments for sale? What is the price these homes? Is a price range at least mentioned somewhere in the message? Is the pricing drastically reduced from previous pricing? I have seen some new home marketing ads where it was obvious that the builder or developer assumed you knew everything.  They forget that people may be hearing or reading their company’s name or community name for the first time. Where is the community located? Is it a convenient address to anything? Why should I move or purchase a home at this subdivision?  Does the community or homes for sale have something that you can’t get in other neighborhoods or built by other builders? When should I buy? Are there incentives that may persuade the buyer to purchase now or very soon?

Some of these questions may be obvious or simple…but I have found a lot of marketing messages forgetting these basic concepts.

Does your marketing call to action?

“Visit our Sales Center and tour the decorated models”
“Call Us to set an appointment or ask us questions”
“Send us an email with your questions”

Does your builder or new home website and other online marketing efforts ask the shopper to do anything as the next step? Simply having a “Contact Us” page with an email form is not enough. There needs to be several call to actions on your website if you want them to take the next step.  If you are promoting on listing or other advertising websites and are able to control the images or ad copy, make sure you use some form of call to action. Assuming the consumer will click on your pretty logo without telling them to click and why to click is a mistake.

7 SEO TIPS for Homebuilders

I gave a seminar presentation at the International Builder Show last week in Vegas. It was titled Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Secrets revealed and demystified. The true secret…is not really secret at all. Most of the things I presented is available all over the Internet in the forms of tutorials, blogs and white papers. Google even tells you what to do to rank higher if you read their help topics. Do you have time to do it yourself? Do you want to do it yourself?

Find it on search engines

Another email in the inbox..”we can put you on first page of google”. This is such a misleading statement. I wonder how many times these sites and spammers get business from this claim.  First of all, isn’t the first page of Google..simply Google.com? The  last time I checked, there were no ads or links to anything outside of Google on that page. First page of search results? For what search term are they promising results? Is it organic or paid search?

If you have a big enough budget, you can get on the first page of your desired keyword search results on your own. Set-up adwords accounts and bid the phrase you desire. It may cost a lot of money, but it is possible to do it very quickly.

Social Media Sell Homes?

There are great comments on a post at AtlantaRealEstateForum about using social media to sell homes. Obviously Social Media is just a tool ( a lot of different tools ) to help market products. You goals may be to sell new homes, bank foreclosures, real estate owned homes, short sales, real estate, or just build exposure and branding for your company. Using sites like facebook and services like twitter, you can help drive traffic. Some of it will be direct traffic that can be measured.  Some of it will be  indirect where social media caused the site to be found easier.  How many people visit a website that was actually a blog  and they did not know it was a blog? How many clicked on a link that was a result of a twitter post feed?   Lots of ways to use social media to help you sell homes. Its still up to the agent, broker, or builder representative to actually sell the home. Rarely do you see a buyer come in ready to sign a contract without first being sold on the new home by someone.

Need help using social media and the Internet to market your homes? Contact Bo the Webguy today!

Home Builder SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Its building your website to perform better for searches relevant to the content you have on your website. It starts at the website. Your website is the foundation of your Internet marketing program. I recently ran across a website where a home builder was being charged for monthly SEO. The website was built and launched live on the Internet for marketing. Many simple things like description meta tags and alt tags had not been used. Many of the pages had the same exact title tags and often did not relate to the content on the page