Word of mouth and referrals are the most popular sources for home builders to generate new leads. However, these sources can be unreliable and unpredictable.

When you rely on referrals alone to get more work, you’re in a reactive position – waiting for things to happen.

To stay ahead of the game, you need to be proactive with your lead generation efforts.

With our years of experience in building websites and marketing strategies for home builders, we have discovered these 7 proven marketing elements that are required for engaging prospects, converting them into leads, and get more business:

Don’t have time to read the full article? Watch the Video instead.

1) Ensure your branding is consistent

Homebuyers are more loyal to the brands they recognize. Any inconsistency in your brand may turn off your prospects.

This is why it’s important to ensure that every touchpoint or interaction you have with potential customers will get them excited about the experience they will have working for your business.

To make your brand consistent, you must keep an eye on the following aspects:

• Your logo and marketing materials should be visually appealing. If they look outdated, it’s likely time for a refresh.
• Your brand should reflect who you are as a company and the types of services you provide.
• Make your brand consistent across your website, social media accounts, and other channels.
• Everything from the color palette to fonts is consistent across all your platforms.

You can see, how having a consistent look, feel and voice is essential to building your credibility.

2) Build an engaging website

Your website is the most powerful tool in your marketing toolkit, especially for home builders. This is where your prospective clients will evaluate whether or not to do business with you.

Here are some useful tips for making your website engaging:

• Show them the type of homes you build, your services, and how unique your homes are
• High-quality pictures and videos of your past projects
• Video reviews of your happy customers
• Blog posts answering their common questions, objections, and queries
• The lifestyle you can bring to their life
• Clear call-to-action buttons (Schedule a call, Book Appointment, etc)
• Multiple ways to contact you (e.g. email, phone, live chat, social media)

A strong website is the backbone of every marketing activity you perform. This is not a place to cut corners. If you’re unsatisfied with the performance of your current website, feel free to book a quick 15-minute call with us.

3) Don’t save costs on images – Hire a professional

As a home builder, you can’t afford to save costs on images. Your leads and sales will increase significantly if you include high-quality photo galleries and videos on your website.

Hiring a professional photographer might seem like a big expense, but it’s worth every penny because your customers expect to see and inspect your work online before they ever make an appointment with you.

A professional photographer will take time to find the best angles of your projects and craft high-quality images and videos that are appealing to your prospects. It also helps to ensure brand consistency.

This is something you can’t do yourself or with your staff who aren’t trained in marketing photography techniques.

4) Showcase your best projects with videos

When you hire a professional to shoot videos and photos of your projects and your process, you can leverage their expertise in a variety of ways like:

Video Tours and Walk-Throughs

Video tours and walk-throughs are an engaging way to allow prospects to see your best home designs, floorplans, features, amenities, and more.

There is something very special about actually seeing how things come together from start to finish that may be hard to convey through photos alone.

Brand Intro and Culture Videos

Many home builders are taking their marketing game on by investing in branding and culture videos.

Brand videos are an excellent way to tell a company’s story and build on the idea of their culture. You can also highlight how your team operates, along with interviews with employees and partners to build credibility and trust between you and your prospects.

Customer Testimonials

Social proof is the best form of marketing.

Shoot video testimonials of your satisfied customers. Use these reviews to show your prospective clients what it’s like to work with you and how happy your past customers are with the dream house you’ve built for them.

You can repurpose these videos and share them on your social media and other marketing channels.

Aerial Videos and Drone Footage

People love being able to see how a home or project is built.

A 360-degree view of your projects is an impressive way to add value to your brand, and this can be accomplished through aerial videos.

Watching these video footage will make much more of an impression than just looking at maps and blueprints.

Your potential customers are on your website primarily to get more information. And videos are the best way to provide answers and educate them about your work.

5) Use Lead Magnets: Give them something useful for free

On your website, you can offer a downloadable lead magnet (or freebie) to entice the visitors to fill in their name and contact email.

Your lead magnet should be something that will appeal to your target audience. For example, if you are a renovation expert, you might offer a short guide on “5 Essential Things You Must Do For A Successful Home Renovation“.

Apart from the ebook guides, you can also use Design Range, Checklists, Buyers Guide, or anything that’s valuable and helps them make an informed decision before they hire a builder.

This is also an effective way to generate leads without spending extra money on buying new traffic.

Once they become a lead into your CRM, you can send them an automated email sequence that educates and nurture them further about your services, your building process and share the things you want them to know and take them closer to the sale.

6) Create high-converting landing pages

If you’re spending money on advertising or running an email campaign to get people on your website, it’s important to direct this traffic to a high-converting landing page, not to your home page or service page.

The purpose of a landing page is to convince your prospect to take only one particular action you want them to take and enter them into your sales process.

The goal of your landing page must be to give them a valuable resource for free in exchange for their name, email, and phone number.

As discussed in the above point, it can either be your design range, an ebook, buyers guide or checklist, etc.

The more compelling and optimized your landing page is, the higher chance it will convert more visitors into leads and sales as possible – which means MORE REVENUE!

7) Social Media, Paid Ads and SEO

Your social media and paid advertising are key to getting more people engaged and driving that traffic to your website and generate leads.

“Nearly nine out of ten NAHB members reported that they use social media to market their business” – as stated by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).

There are three ways you can generate more traffic to your website:

• Use pay-per-click advertising – Google Ads and Facebook Ads
• Use your social media business pages to share content, engage your prospects and start conversations with them to turn them into leads and appointments.
• Write helpful and meaningful content for your audience to drive organic traffic to your website which is called search engine optimization (SEO).

How can we help in marketing your business online?

We hope the information we shared in this article helps you create a better marketing strategy for your home building company.

We build custom websites and lead generation systems for home builders and we know exactly how to design a site that attracts prospects and converts into leads.

If you have questions or need to talk, you can book a 15-minute call with us. We would love to help you.