Creative Real Estate Marketing Ideas for Homebuilders
As a homebuilder in an increasingly competitive market, getting ahead with your real estate marketing plan will give you an advantage on your competition and increase your value as a contractor. In much the same way you leverage creativity in your trade, you must be creative when it comes to your marketing.
Creative real estate marketing starts with a rock solid online presence and strategy and, once established, can be built up on the foundational level. Here are 8 creative real estate marketing tools you should be utilizing now.
1. Video
Video is a vital piece to your marketing puzzle, especially when it comes to helping prospective home buyers visualize their future home. Whether you’re in the custom home market or not, video content is a great way to help your clients better understand what it is you do and what makes you unique.
Leveraging video by making them personable, relatable, authentic, and unique to your brand helps build brand awareness and rapport in your industry. These articles below can guide you in the right direction to make fantastic video content:
- Three Videos Every B2B Website Should Have
- Six Types of Real Estate Video Marketing Ideas for Homebuilders
2. Optimized Landing Pages
Landing pages are where your online prospects “land” after reading through your content. This is your customer’s gateway into your sales funnel and where they are willing to enter your sales process with hopes of a return of more education about your brand or products.
Optimized landing pages improve the chances that a potential customer enters your sales funnel and draws their focus toward the important points about the offer presented them. Here are some resources on the value of optimized landing pages:
3. Use Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is far less scary than it may seem on the surface and can actually be an extremely valuable tool for identifying buying trends, behaviors, and interests of individuals and families seeking a quality homebuilder.
Marketing automation can (and should be) personalized and will help your leads matriculate through your sales funnel faster. This gives you the ability to nurture leads into sales and gives you crucial insights into individual buying behaviors. Marketing automation is more than drip emails and encapsulates a vast area of lead nurturing. Check out these useful references:
- Benefits of Marketing Automation vs. Email Marketing
- 5 Benefits of Marketing Automation
- Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing Automation
4. Social Media
An often overlooked aspect but highly important piece of your marketing puzzle is social media. There’s a high likelihood that your customers will start their search for a homebuilder by some form of social media, and your presence there could very well make the difference between getting a lead and losing a sale.
Knowing what to do with social media requires a bit of a learning curve to someone who may be new to it as more than a social platform. Business social media in conjunction with a quality attraction marketing campaign is a slightly different animal, but we’ve got a few key posts aimed at making your social media presence a fruitful one:
5. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising may seem unfamiliar and (if put in the wrong hands) very costly; however, PPC advertising done right is a primary structural piece of your attraction marketing efforts and can greatly improve your marketing ROI.
Two of the leading platforms for PPC ads are Facebook and Google with both performing admirably for myriad industries and are critical for the awareness stage of your buyer’s journey. Take a look at these resources for leveraging PPC to your advantage as a homebuilder:
6. Retargeting
Sometimes referred to as remarketing, retargeting deals largely with resurrecting forgotten leads who have either fallen out of your workflows or to heat up a lead gone cold. Retargeting focuses largely on marketing qualified leads or MQLs. MQLs have already been qualified for sales and have entered the consideration stage of their buying journey.
This is a great time to churn up that cold lead and get it back into your lead nurturing program. Here are some ways retargeting can help your leads heat back up:
- What are Marketing Qualified Leads and Why do They Matter?
- Using Lead Nurturing During the Consideration Stage of The Buyer’s Journey
7. Content and Inbound Marketing
Often used interchangeably, content or inbound marketing leverages your expertise and online presence as a hub of information and attracts potential customers to your brand. Unlike more traditional outbound marketing where leads were often untraceable, inbound gives you the power to track your leads from beginning to end. Check out these resources for yourself:
8. Email Marketing
As we mentioned previously, email marketing is an essential part of your lead nurturing process and can keep prospective customers in the loop with what’s going on in the housing industry and your company’s building endeavors. Like any tool in your marketing toolkit, email marketing has a place and a time in your buyer’s journey. Specifically, email marketing is geared towards the information hungry buyer during the attraction phase.
Nevertheless, email marketing is relevant throughout their journey. It can be even more critical in the middle of the funnel where leads tend to fall away. These resources below can give you a better understanding of how email marketing fits into a creative real estate marketing plan:
- Drip Email Marketing vs. Lead Nurturing Campaigns; When to Use Each
- How to Nurture Your Leads with Email Marketing
The landscape of the Internet is ever changing and Nicole has the energy and aptitude to keep Stevens & Tate Marketing out in front of the pack. She leads an enthusiastic team in strategic planning, development, search engine marketing, online promotions and advertising for the web.
