In the age of the internet homebuyer visual content is a must. After all, the brain craves visual information. At a bare minimum builders need to be leveraging exterior renderings and floor plans in their digital marketing campaigns. While the average rendering used to be enough to pique homebuyer interests, the standards have been raised. Today’s exterior renderings need to be truly photorealistic in order to appeal to the average homebuyer.
Once a homebuilder has used exterior renderings to gain the attention of a homebuyer, it is the floor plan that will make the buyer fall in love with that home. The living space defines what day-to-day life could look like for that homebuyer. So how does a builder ensure that they are putting their best foot forward when it comes to floor plans.
Here are 5 fundamental questions builders need to ask themselves when shopping for interactive floor plans .
Is it Color?
Does today’s homebuyer expect to turn on their tv and see black and white? How about their photographs? No? Then why would they want to see a floor plan in black and white?
Color makes a difference. Today’s consumer is constantly raising the bar on what quality visual content means. With full color floor plans builders can show more than just walls. They can better convey the flow and feel of the home by showing different flooring or better convey how rooms can be segmented. Most importantly though, is the warmth and emotional appeal that comes from adding color into any medium – it’s the excitement! Just like TV or photos, adding color to your floor plans takes great content and adds a sense of excitement. Let the experts work off of black and blue lines. Let buyers fall in love with color.
Is it Interactive?
Homebuilders everywhere are quickly adapting to the internet shopper by implementing interactive floor plans, allowing prospects to visually see how structural options impact the overall layout of the home. When it comes to interactive floor plans there are a litany of features that homebuilders should be exploring.
Some of the most popular are mirroring, furniture placement, hot spots and even the ability to format electrical and lighting. In the end, the right solution depends completely on your goals. As Bokka Group puts succinctly in their article about Personalized Marketing For New Home Builders, “Define your goals first and understand what factors influence your customers’ decisions.” With buyers pulling the industry towards ecommerce one feature that is becoming increasingly important is the ability for shoppers to understand the pricing of their selections and how that will impact their monthly mortgage payments.
Is it Mobile Friendly?
This goes without saying, but just as it is vital for websites to be supported on mobile, it is important that all of your digital marketing content performs well on all devices. With 61% of all website traffic coming from mobile devices, using tools that don’t look great on mobile can cause shoppers to leave builder websites. In addition to the overall look, it’s also important to ensure that both experience and usability are exceptional on mobile. Here are a couple of questions that are a must when it comes to interactive floor plans on mobile
- Do items expand and minimize intuitively to optimize screen space?
- Are buttons the right size? If buttons are too small they negatively impact usability. If buttons are too big they take up valuable screen space.
- Is the experience scrollable? Regardless of how your interactive floor plan is integrated into your marketing strategy, your shoppers will need to be able to scroll easily from your floor plans to the plan exteriors and other information.
Is it Data-Driven?
Today’s online shopper is looking for an experience that is as simple as possible. Their expectation is a personalized experience that allows them to quickly find what they are looking for. Understanding consumer data is critical to offering personalized experiences.
The first level of providing personalized experiences is being able to analyze data and understand what is popular and what is not so that builders can offer options that are most relevant to their market at prices that optimize their sales. At a more advanced level, floor plans can now begin to leverage AI so that each user’s shopping experience is catered to their demographic. AI can predict what options will engage buyers the most rapidly to provide a more satisfying catered shopping experience.
Is it all of the above?
Today’s shopper expects and demands more engagement in less time. This is succinctly put in diginomica’s post where they say,
“marketing is heading for another transformation. Organizations need to focus on orchestrating outcomes. The metrics now change. It means giving up Net Promoter Score (NPS) for Time to Value (TTV). It means creating new experience guidelines that includes the employee experience when delivering better outcomes.”
https://diginomica.com/meet-post-ai-consumer-says-salesforces-mathew-sweezey
Time to Value is is the amount of time it takes for shoppers to go from seeking information to the delivery of a valuable and meaningful solution.
While branding is still important to differentiate builders, buyers are most concerned with how quickly they can find, design, and buy products. Having the right interactive floor plan is a critical component in meeting the expectations of the internet and mobile shopper.
Learn more about Anewgo’s Interactive Floor Plans here: https://anewgosell.com/interiors/
