The home building business is a large market, currently pegged to be a $56bn industry. While that means that there’s a lot of potential for sales, this also means that it’s a very competitive space. With the rising number of people looking to build homes, it’s crucial to make your business stand out from the rest.
Marketing plays a big role in increasing your company’s presence: it’s what helps potential clients distinguish your company’s brand and value.
Marketing may not be as simple for home builders because client acquisition used to be done through word-of-mouth in neighbourhoods. Awareness of marketing skills may be limited because of the lack of exposure or available marketing knowledge. Likewise, the amount of money to be spent may also be a point of concern if you’re just starting to figure out your strategies for marketing or budgeting.
If you can relate to these, don’t worry. We’ve created this list of top marketing plans for home builders for those in the same boat as you. They’re creative, easy to digest, and budget-friendly with high return on your investment.
Tradiematepro’s 3 Top Marketing Ideas
- Establish a Web Presence
- Advertise
- Partner Up through Affiliate Marketing
Idea #1 – Establish a Web Presence
Nearly every customer’s path from Point A (having a problem) to Point Z (spending on a solution) involves the internet. If customers need a house built or a kitchen repaired, chances are they’ll use Google to look for the best solutions to their problems. Along the way, they’ll see multiple websites offering the exact services they need. They might see ratings, reviews, and recommendations to compare offers and quality of service before deciding.
Having a web presence ensures that customers don’t miss out on your solution by making you more visible.
We’ve prepared a few guidelines for creating your web presence.
1. Have a website
A website serves as an online landmark for your business. It literally puts you on the map of possible options as a prime home builder. Your actual existence is often determined by your online presence. Having your own website is the perfect first step to show that.
A website doesn’t need to be fancy or expensive.There are plenty of web hosting services available for those who are starting out. Their starter packages are affordable and come with templates, so designing won’t be much of a problem. Your website just needs to be neat, informative, and it needs to offer your customers a convenient way to take action. The first best thing you can do is make your service offerings really clear, then make your contact options such as email or direct line easy to find on your page.
You should also aim to rank on search engines. There are 3.5 billion searches per day on average, and thousands of those may be related to services like yours. You’d want to make sure that your website pops out on the front page any time a potential customer makes a search query. You can boost your ranking by using SEO analysers like Neil Patel’s free SEO analyser or SEM rush to gain insights into what you can improve on.
2. Be on social media
The rule of thumb is: be where your customers are. Nowadays, people don’t use social media only to interact with their friends, but also to look for solutions for their problems. Having a profile on Facebook, Instagram, and/or Twitter can make your business visible to people on these platforms.
Likewise, it’s important to engage customers when they make queries on your page. Having an attractive profile is one thing, but the best businesses on social interact with their fans and friends.
In addition to this, you should also post frequently to keep your page active. Note, however, that you should only be posting enough to keep customers engaged. Bombarding them with posts may produce the opposite result of what you want to achieve. Read more about posting frequency here.
Finally, your posts on social media should be both informative and creative. To stand out better, great businesses post social media content that appeals to their audience without being too sales-y. Think of it like an opportunity to give your business a voice: let people know you exist and are trustworthy, even if they don’t need your services just yet.
3. Monitor review sites
Review sites like Yelp index local businesses and allow their patrons to leave public reviews. Better reviews lead to a better reputation—and higher sales. Presence in these sites also shows the size of your customer base, which can be good because customers are more likely to trust in businesses that many others have trusted in the past. A strong presence on review sites creates social proof that your services are tried and tested.
Note that the feedback you receive on these sites is directly related to the quality of the service you provide. Don’t think about cheating review sites; instead, remind yourself and your staff that every little thing leaves an impression. One small miscommunication or mistake could spell the difference between notoriety and a sterling reputation.
Idea #2 – Advertise
Advertising in the Digital Age means having a mix of traditional media like fliers, billboards, or even television ads, and digital ads like social ads, Google ads, or website banners. Depending on where you are, you can gauge which media are more effective than others.
Oftentimes, the larger your ad budget, the more visible your business becomes. Putting in more money could get you more posters in high foot traffic locations. Similarly, it can boost your Facebook ads to a wider audience.
No matter how much you decide to spend on your ads, keep in mind that the main objective of your advertisements is conversion. It starts with trying to reach more people, but to maximize your budget, keep track of key advertising metrics that will generate sales.
If you’re on a limited budget or just starting out, digital ads allow for more precise targeting—you can hit warmer leads for a lower budget. Social ads, for example, can target people who are already looking for your products by filtering users who are interested in a specific product, service, or niche.
Here are a few best practices when advertising
- Be creative
- Know your audience
- Work with data
Be creative
Today, each user encounters an average of 5,000 ads a day—both offline and on the internet. As you can imagine, this makes advertising a very competitive space, and creativity an important factor to set you apart from the rest. You have to capture your viewers’ attention and lead them to your desired action without being vague.
Remember that marketing collaterals (whether traditional or digital) work best when they have fewer words. The message is delivered through a creative combination of pictures, logos, or icons that show a clear understanding of your customers’ problems. The synergy of these elements convey a stronger message.
Know your audience
Whether you’re advertising on traditional or digital spaces, knowing your target market makes it easier to find locations and features that resonate better with people who are more likely to convert into a sale. You can do a little bit of research on the possible backgrounds of your existing customers, and come up with a profile. You can then use the information you gathered to create a better targeting strategy for your ad campaigns.
Knowing your audience allows you to do A/B testing on the types of messages that your marketing materials should contain. The effectiveness of your campaign relies on how your audience understands and captures your message, so it’s best to get to know them early on.
Work with data
Running digital ads allows you to gather data about the performance of your campaigns more quickly. If you’ve been running an ad campaign for a week and aren’t getting leads or conversions, look at the data.
Maybe you need to spend a couple more dollars to boost your posts. Maybe your calls-to-action aren’t clear enough, so customers don’t engage as much as you’d want them to. Maybe your target audience is too broad or general. Your ad data shines a light on the trends and patterns that could spell your success
After poring over your data for insights, recalibrate your strategy to match what the numbers suggest. We recommend keeping an eye on vital statistics like budget, cost-per-action, reach, and ROI.
Idea # 3 – Partner Up through Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing that involves leveraging people who don’t work for your business, but are willing to convince their contacts in exchange for a commission. These affiliates can be former clients, real estate agents, landscapers, and other individuals with connections to a wider network of your potential clients. Friends and family can be affiliates too.
There is marketing power in a strong network, and everyone needs home building services once in a while. You can use your existing network to further grow your business—similar to word-of-mouth, except with a higher probability of conversion because there’s an actual exchange of value. The best part is, you will only have to pay them a commission once their referrals become your actual customers; you don’t have to worry about paying for dead-end leads.
To help you get your affiliate marketing plans off the ground, we’ve prepared some rules for harnessing the power of affiliate marketing.
1. Create smart incentives
It helps to know what incentives your affiliates would respond to. Past clients might want a small commission, whereas industry-adjacent partners might respond well if you offer discounts for their own clients. If you create specific incentive plans with a wide range of affiliates, then you’re sure to have the word out about your business in no time. Your desired outcome is a win-win situation for you and your affiliates.
2. Give your affiliates the information they need
Just like in any marketing initiative, information is vital. You want your affiliates to be knowledgeable about your company and your services, so they can use those to market to others. Their knowledge of your company and services will help them answer questions as well as any of your full-time employees.
It pays to have a brief but comprehensive guide to your services, so they can provide their network with perfect information. Anticipating FAQs may be valuable to you as well, so your affiliates can address reservations your prospects could possibly have.
3. Provide quality service
This goes without saying, but providing great service is the only way to make affiliate marketing work. Nobody would stake their name on you if your service were poor. You want your past clients and connections to vouch for your services, even brag about the quality of the work you have done for them.
Quality service is not only hinged on the work you produce but also in your level of servicing in terms of communication and follow-up customer support. These things matter a lot to customers. You don’t want to be the type of business that provides quality service but leaves their customers hanging when they have questions or need additional services.
Building a good relationship and loyalty will go a long way. You want to be the type of business that people are proud to have worked with.
4. Choose your affiliates wisely
The reputation game works both ways. Find affiliates who render quality service in turn, because your name will be tied up with theirs—you wouldn’t want to be associated with affiliates bearing a poor reputation. Potential customers who have already judged an affiliate as not reliable or credible will not believe anything the affiliate says.
Affiliate marketing is very powerful and its effects are exponential; you want to be on the right side of that power, or you will lose out.
Conclusion
These basic tools should be more than enough to get you started in marketing. It may be intimidating at first, and you might feel like you’re wasting resources and effort for marketing at times
The secret is patience; great marketing is an investment of both money and time for learning and improving over time. To have long lasting and repeat customers, you have to find them first.
Marketing is the best opportunity to get that first point of contact. Online platforms, specifically, allow you to stay connected with your customers before, during, and after you do business with them. Experiment with different media and campaigns to see what works best to expand your reach.
Go ahead and try them out! Every bit of time you spend in building your marketing strategy will produce incredible results when it comes to landing new clients.
