In the summer of 2024, the home builder market faces significant challenges. Potential buyers are hesitating, waiting for clarity on pricing, interest rates, and economic conditions. This hesitation has led to a “Summer of Cold Feet” in the market, according to The Builder’s Daily.
So how can you survive and thrive?
With a marketing and sales strategy that attracts best-fit, in-market buyers based on data - not gut feelings. It’s never been more important to adopt a data-driven strategy. Right now is an opportunity for builders to refine their marketing strategies to attract and retain buyers more effectively.
And it’s a lot easier than you’d think.
This is exactly what Audience Town CRO John Peragine covered in his recent presentation at the Southeastern Builders Conference in Orlando, FL.
He covered the 4 steps to improving your home builder marketing strategy in 2024 - and you can learn them all here.
Big brands today know exactly what percentage of their marketing is working. They know exactly who is buying and why, and can even identify their best prospects proactively with consumer intelligence. Companies like Amazon wouldn't dominate the market without this knowledge.
The good news? The same data that drives their success is available to you, too.
To start, you need to collect and understand your data. Many home builders rely on outdated census reports, but these don’t capture current trends. Instead, focus on real-time data collection at every touchpoint of the customer journey. This approach allows you to observe and understand all opportunities for engagement.
So where can you get this data? Audience Town. We’re the only marketing analytics platform built just for homebuilders. We look at your marketing data, and compare it with our industry-leading database of consumer intelligence on more than 120M US households, to show you who’s looking at your properties…and who’s buying.
Actionable Steps:
It's all about understanding your customer journey, optimizing your marketing, and driving ROI.
With a solid understanding of your data, it’s time to execute your marketing plan. Since you use Audience Town, you know who’s looking and who’s booking.
Use Audience Town's platform to implement your strategies seamlessly across multiple channels.
Actionable Steps:
Now that you’ve got a data-driven strategy in place, it’s important to measure your success. Are your changes working?
This process used to be a pain. You’d have to go to 3+ different platforms, collect the data, and try to make it usable. Audience Town’s platform makes it seamless. You can easily see how your performance is changing in real-time, allowing you to track and analyze your campaign performance.
Even better, Audience Town enables you to dig into one of the most high-cost yet high-potential channels: Paid Search.
We released the Paid Search Live Table capability earlier this summer, and our customers have been blown away. For the first time ever, you can see the actual demographic and financial profile of visitors broken down by paid search keyword.
Here’s a screenshot that shows what that looks like:
Here’s a quick video that explains how it works:
With this actionable intelligence, you can go beyond Google Analytics and actually measure what matters.
Actionable Steps:
It’s not enough to track your performance. You need to be able to optimize your marketing efforts, and prove marketing wins!
And Audience Town is here to make you look like a rockstar. You can actually analyze ROI and optimize your marketing strategy with that data. Even better, you can prove what marketing is working - and what isn’t - and make a clear case for budget (as needed).
Below are just a few ways that current customers use Audience Town to optimize strategy and prove marketing wins.
Actionable Steps:
A marketer at one home builder wanted to raise awareness for their available properties in a prestigious new community; there, properties ranged from $600K-$1M+. They initially focused marketing efforts to attract a broad audience of buyers, so they crafted marketing copy and creative to highlight these $600,000 homes. Using Audience Town’s advanced financial insights, they could see that their keywords were attracting prospects who could have afforded the $600K homes. Seems like a win, right?
However, this builder only had one or two homes in that price range available. Most of their available inventory was priced over $1 million.
Their visitors would never be able to afford those properties. In other words: they were wasting advertising budget on buyers who simply were not a fit. They also worried that they were probably creating a somewhat negative experience for those prospective buyers who clicked on an ad for a $600K home, only to find most properties were $1M+.
So, they adjusted their keywords to focus on those that were attracting buyers who would be able to afford their available inventory. These new leads were able to afford the $1M homes, and overall conversions improved.
That’s the power of a data-backed marketing strategy. You can deliver provable marketing wins, improve ROI, and be a rockstar.
Audience Town arms you with better data insights and targeted actions, so you can attract more qualified leads, optimize your marketing spend, and ultimately drive more sales.
Start using Audience Town today to take your marketing to the next level. Book a quick, no-obligation demo today.
And if you’d like to download John’s presentation, you can do that here.