Features and tRends

(July 2010)

Integration is the Key to Marketing Home Products

A truly integrated marketing plan for home builders places emphasis
on digital forums to help build buzz – and sales

Even on a limited budget, builders can leverage Internet and conventional techniques to call attention to their work. This blend of traditional and new-school methods is sometimes referred to as integrated marketing.

The desire to reach people holistically requires the message to blend seamlessly between channels, particularly on the social-media front. A common misconception in the home-building community is that online is for a marketing response and offline is for branding via traditional channels. This is no longer the case, says Matt Buchenau, owner of 5Weight, a Denver-based Internet marketing firm. “My personal take on it is that social media presents a unique opportunity to build a sincere message for your business while you’re pursuing other marketing channels.”

An integrated marketing program is ultimately designed to help builders understand how, when and where their potential clients are most receptive to your messages. The emphasis on marketplace conversations encourages the use of interactive media. Different customers and socio-geographic markets will require a different blend of media platforms and approaches. Companies are required to genuinely understand their customers and prospects. How, when, and where they are most receptive to communicated messages?

I advise caution when approaching an integrated marketing plan that is heavy on social media. You have to realize that the medium is not the message. The news isn’t that you’re on Twitter any more. That was last years’ news. The time is now to proceed with a plan. The goal is to establish a meaningful connection, just as a good direct marketing campaign, a good print ad or a good radio commercial accomplishes. It’s not about the followers or Facebook fans.  It’s just another medium that requires careful planning to get a maximum return on investment.

Finding the Right Mix
Effectively reaching potential home buyers has become more difficult than ever before, says Wendy Cohen, president of PowerHouse Advisors, a business consulting and marketing communications firm based in Riverwoods, Ill. Cohen says the days of placing a full-page ad in the Sunday newspaper or putting up a billboard on the interstate and waiting for the phone to ring are long gone.

“Consumers are bombarded by ads every day. Builders and developers are struggling to find the right mix of media platforms to operate on and to find ways to effectively track leads,” says Cohen. She says the average Facebook member becomes a fan of perhaps one or two companies per month, yet is exposed to thousands of brands and messages during that same period.

What many builders don’t realize, says Cohen, is the wealth of materials they may already have that aren’t utilized to their full extent. “A print ad can also be a Web site banner ad. You can post that on Facebook to try and start a viral campaign. You can take your traditional marketing and implement aspects of that in the electronic scene,” she says.

However, Cohen advises builders not to rely too heavily on emerging digital platforms. “Home tours and print ads shouldn’t be abandoned, but it’s easy to see why someone would shy away from them. You can’t always tell if the ad did anything for you. But if you do a YouTube video and send out an electronic announcement you can see how much your traffic has increased,” she says, adding, “We use Google Analytics to measure traffic coming to us. We know where these people are coming from. We can, with some effort, measure our return.”

According to research firm The Marketing Democracy, some executives will mistakenly ‘whack’ a medium of the marketing mix because of reduced budgets.  However, these marketers are making wholesale cuts to whole channels and delivery methods in the process. Though traditional media outlets have certainly endued more than their fair share of cuts, other media in the marketing mix can really compensate for these cuts, especially in terms of the consumer behavior.  Judy Franks, founder and president of The Marketing Democracy, says social media is an outcome, and no single channel has a lock on the ’social’ nature of content. Franks cautions marketers to step back and realize that “most any medium can serve as the ‘originating’ medium in a journey that can take a great piece of content across channels and into vast networks of hearts and minds,” she says in the firm’s “Top 10 Integrated Marketing Trends: Beware of Hyperfocus” report.

Become Tech-Savvy
Should builders spend money on a promotional video with a full production crew? Probably not, given today’s market and the spread of low-budget, guerilla-style videos a la YouTube, says Geoff Graham, CEO of GuildQuality, an Atlanta-based consumer-satisfaction surveying firm. “But if it’s catchy and creative you can get away with that. We all know Google, Yelp, Kudzu. You can easily create sharable presentations and pictures on Flickr, but it requires some mild dorkiness with photos and uploading. Twitter (plus the mobile applications it has) tied in with your Facebook fan page also requires some serious work on your part but has a high, measurable return,” says Graham.

Blogging via common platforms such as Wordpress.com, as well as regular e-newsletters and news alerts are equally difficult to maintain but are a foundation of any integrated strategy, he says.

Graham says RSS feeds and other tools let your company populate its online presence with fresh content. Potential customers want to know more than just a star rating that a company might get or what your latest project looks like. Homeowners want to know what kinds of people have worked with you and what kind of experience they had.

Though Twitter and Facebook get most of the headlines, LinkedIn, a professional networking site, has also become a valuable marketing tool for custom builders. “I think LinkedIn has turned it up. It’s a source of quality traffic for us. We couldn’t build our business on it, but the zero cost we’ve put in (other than our time) it’s been great for us,” says Graham. He adds the service has dramatically improved the way they connect with people, largely through discussion groups. The program is also closely linked to Twitter; a simple click can allow users to post the same message on both platforms. 

“Twitter and Facebook are not strategies. They are tools. Tools are easy. Strategies are hard. The fundamental shift within the organization towards transparency, open communication and customer service is the bottom of the iceberg. Tweeting is just the tip.” — Geoff Graham, GuildQuality

“You never do just one thing. You take that video and put it on YouTube. Then you do a mailer or send out an e-mail, or have the video streaming in the house during your next showcase,” says Cohen. She advises builders to always keep themselves out in front of the marketplace and deliver on what they promise: “Your reputation is crucial. You can lose it all with one bad ‘tweet’ on Twitter.”

Corporate-speak and/or fluff on your outgoing communication, I think, is simply not effective. Conversational copy, as in a good sales letter, is better. But, more than any other medium, this demands clear, crisp concise communication. You have 140 characters to create compelling words that convey value and trust.

Don’t Forget the Basics
Social media can hugely effective in driving your message. However, tools such as press and media releases, lobbying, charitable and public events, advertorials, financial reports, promotional collateral and sponsorships are also platforms to deliver a positive image to potential clients. Internet marketing is important, says Buchenau, but no one (at least not now, anyway) is going to buy a property or a house solely online, sight unseen. The sheer complexity of the purchasing process and the gravity of the situation isn’t something that can properly be handled online.

Graham says despite all the new technology, the day-to-day research his firm conducts is decidedly old-school. “We do customer surveys on the phone every day. We get so much customer commentary, and it ends up being great fodder for Facebook and Twitter.”

Builders can apply the skills they’ve acquired in the Internet realm to their traditional practices. Finding the right person at your company to tie your marketing together is absolutely essential. “You have techies that aren’t marketing people and you have marketing people that aren’t techies,” says Graham. “You need someone that knows both sides of the equation. Simply dumping the work on your office assistant’s lap won’t do.”