A New Go of New Home Sales!
with John and Anya
Episode 3, January 4, 2022
Formula for Success: Content + Data = Knowledge
The tried and true has been truly tried! Despite revolutionary changes, some basic principles from long ago are still keys to success today. Learn how to apply old world strategies to our new world environment.
Today, we’re talking about the formula for success in new home sales. The emergence of MarTech marketing at its basic core function is it connects buyers and sellers. Technology is not a threat. Technology improves these connections. We want to support homebuilder sales and marketing teams to succeed in this new technology world.
One thing that hasn’t changed is that marketing and sales are still going through the same marketing and sales cycle. There are basically four elements. There’s attracting the audience. There’s engaging the prospects. Then, there’s nurturing the leads and converting them into sales.
Traditionally, marketing had the first quadrant of that, which is attracting the audience. You probably remember the days where people used to send out flyers, mailers, billboards and newspaper ads. Marketing was attracting an audience and the way they measured success was, by how much foot traffic they got to their sales center. And then the next three steps were really the salespeople. And so the salespeople were the ones that engaged the prospects in sales center meetings. And if they really were able to connect with them, they were able to get them to fill out an appointment card.
Now, let us introduce you to the new side of new home sales and marketing. The new sales and marketing cycle starts online. So, we still have the same four steps attracting the audience, engaging the prospects, nurturing the leads, and converting the sales. But now marketing people are very concerned with website traffic, as opposed to foot traffic. One big change that’s happened because things have gone online, is marketing has moved more into the engagement side of things. The shoppers are now doing their own shopping, whether it’s designing or experiencing their homes and maybe even buying their homes online. What happens with engagement as they’re designing their homes and experiencing it, it generates that coveted data, that data feeds important analytics. If you allow customers to personalize homes online and they’re engaged, they register. When they register, not only do you get their personal contact information, but you get an idea of who they are by what they are doing.
Personalization allows engagement. Engagement generates data. The data feeds analytics and AI. AI in turn helps you generate new leads. And if you can create leads, you can really drive sales.
We have a right and left brain, the right brain is more the creative side, so marketers generally are right brain centric. They typically concentrate on visuals, the messaging, the branding: the creative part. Visuals is the natural language for everyone across all demographics, cultures, languages. So it is a natural way to connect buyers and sellers visually. The science part is on the left side of the brain, which is the technology guys: the data. What we need to do is to bring the right and left brains together. And that’s how consumers shop – they use both sides of their brain. And this is where MarTech brings it all together. You bring the right brain marketing and with the left brain technology together.
Marketers have done a lot of improvements on content interactivity but unfortunately, the marketing channels have largely remained non-interactive. Websites was the first transformation from print to digital.
Websites have not kept up with the interactive content. And one of the things that marketers need to understand is that you may be creating great form with interactive content, but you haven't created a great platform, which is the technology that it needs to be founded on.
Zillow provided a much better user interface for buyers to shop for existing homes and some new homes, even the sales centers have improved their interactivity with touch screen kiosks.
Technology has enabled forms to change both in your content (interactive instead of static) and your channel to lead to greater functionality. If you look at the hardware and software space, they function like pedals on a bicycle. As hardware changes, software changes as software improves, hardware improves. Marketing needs to get onto the MarTech bandwagon, to improve their forms because consumers are used to these changes.
So back to the original equation, which is about putting that content and data together to give you power. Technology-wise, at Anewgo we’re using our cloud rendering engine to convert that data to visual content and then back and forth. As customers engage with interactive content to design their dream homes, it generates data that will provide powerful synergy and amazing insights. The biggest mind shift for home builders has to be that as you build beautiful homes you want people to come see them and to touch them. But chances are, it’s not going to happen unless you have equally beautiful, engaging content online because that’s where it all starts. And if customers are not impressed with your content online, they’re not going to make it into your physical model home.
Consumers know what they want when they see it. They become visually engaged. And then if you give them an opportunity to fine tune their dream home with colors and options it creates data. That data is automatically translated into builder speak-ERPs so they know how to build this home and the real estate agent knows how to price it. MarTech translates builder-speak into buyer-speak and back to builder-speak instantaneously in real time, 24 /7, around the world.
This is where we are now. Finally all speaking the same language. Before this technology, we only had real estate agents who understood builder-speak and buyer-speak and served as translators and liaisons. But today, buyers don’t want to ride around with a real estate agent all weekend looking at empty farm fields and picking up brochures and trying to imagine the rest from blueprints. Instead, they want to see it and personalize it right at their fingertips on their own time.
That is why new home sales lose 85% of the people that are shopping for new. Now imagine if buyer is shopping from France and can’t even speak English? This is where visuals take over. And this is where our technology-a real time cloud rendering engine translates between builder and buyer-speak 24/7. Now people can shop for homes in the comfort of their own home, on their own time. And from a salesperson perspective-they just want to sell a new home, but don’t want to get into a debate between spouses about quartz countertops and marble and cabinet colors-instead, let customers decide on these things on their own-virtually.
This is where AI comes in. The AI is your virtual assistant in that it’s watching the shopping behavior of what your shoppers are doing. And so what happens if you set up your AI right, based on trigger events, it knows to send the right marketing automation to meet customers where they are and to provide matches and recommendations. And AI is not just about helping you convert sales, but it’s being able to process leads into good, bad and ugly. It’s also about improving your efficiency, spending less money to get those sales. It’s about optimization. I see twenty people looking at lot five-maybe I should raise the price on lot five. But there’s only two people looking at lot three-maybe I should move resources over here.
It's not necessarily about the number of leads, it's about the number of qualified leads.
As your customers go down that funnel of visualizing the home, selecting options, pricing it – they’re going down further into that funnel. And the further down a prospect goes, the more of a qualified lead they become because now they have self-qualified. So, instead of spending hours and hours, trying to figure out who is actually a good lead. Now you get the best pre-qualified leads. Salespeople spend less time chasing, and more time providing great customer service.
We want to help provide a much better customer experience. The bar is very low right now, and the customers are very dissatisfied. We want to support homebuilder sales and marketing teams to succeed in this new technology world. Now, if you look in your organization, you look at the marketing department, they’re probably sitting as far away as they can from the tech department. Marketing and technology are coming from two opposites, but in this day and age where we live both in the real world and in an online virtual world, we need to bring marketing and technology together.
The emergence of MarTech marketing at its basic core function is it connects buyers and sellers. Technology is not a threat. Technology improves these connections.
So the type of person that is going to be leading your marketing department in the future is going to look very different from the traditional marketing professional. What you need are the fundamental skills of a marketing person, but you need to be able to utilize the tools of technology. Our goal at Anewgo is to make technology easy. We want to bring it down to usability level similar to Facebook or Uber. We want to make buying new construction easy. We want to make it transparent, and we want to give the buyers the control over the buying process.
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