4 Ways to Use Audience Town to Improve Your Home Builder Marketing Strategy

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.

Step 1: Plan - Collect & Understand Your Data

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 Many home builders rely on outdated census reports, but these don’t capture current trends.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:

• Identify Key Channels: Understand where your leads are coming from—Google searches, Facebook ads, direct visits to your website, etc. Then, dive deeper to see what the average demographic and financial profile is of visitors who come from these channels. Are organic searches driving people who can actually afford your properties? You can answer this question with Audience Town’s brand new Site Referrer Live Table.
• Customer Journey Mapping: Track potential buyers' steps, from viewing floor plans online to visiting model homes and filling out contact forms. Recognize that the journey is often longer than expected. Many prospects are likely viewing your site months before they ever interact; we’re seeing time frames of 124 to 290 days from initial interest to form submission.

• ‍Data Segmentation: Segment your audience based on behaviors and preferences to tailor your marketing messages more effectively. With Audience Town, you can look at all visitors - not just form fillers - and tailor your marketing strategy more effectively. That way, you can convert more of those strangers who are just browsing into leads.

It's all about understanding your customer journey, optimizing your marketing, and driving ROI.

Step 2: Execute - Put Your Marketing Plan into Action

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:

• Multi-Channel Campaigns: Launch targeted campaigns on Google, Facebook, and other relevant platforms to reach potential buyers at different stages of their journey.
• Creative Customization: Use insights to create tailored ads and content that resonate with your audience. Highlight features like pet-friendly homes if data shows high interest.
• Consistent Messaging: Ensure your marketing messages are consistent across all channels to build a strong brand presence.

Step 3: Measure - Analyze Your Audiences & Keywords

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:

• Audience Analysis: Examine who is interacting with your ads and content. Are they first-time visitors or returning users? What are their demographics and interests?
• Keyword Performance: Identify which keywords are driving the most traffic and conversions. Optimize your keyword strategy accordingly.
• ROI Tracking: Measure the return on investment for each campaign. Determine which channels and strategies deliver the best results and allocate your budget accordingly.

Step 4: Optimize & Prove - Make Data-Driven Changes

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:

• Budget Reallocation: Shift your budget to channels and strategies that are driving the most new visitors and conversions. For example, if Facebook ads are performing better than Google search, allocate more resources to Facebook.
• Content Adjustment: Dynamically change your content to match buyer interests. If a significant portion of your audience has pets, feature pet-friendly amenities in your marketing materials.
• Performance Reporting: Use detailed reports to demonstrate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts to stakeholders. Highlight how your strategies are contributing to increased leads and sales.

So let’s bring it full-circle, and look at a real example of a customer who followed this plan-execute-optimize-prove model.

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.

Ready to get started?

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.