A New Go of New Home Sales!
with John and Anya
Episode 4, January 11, 2022
The MarTech Revolution: From Basic to Advanced Marketing
Marketing connects Buyers and Sellers. Technology improves those connections. Learn how this powerful combination can transform boring, basic Presentation Marketing into exciting, advanced Customized, Personalized, Experiential and Predictive Marketing!
Today we’re talking about the impending MarTech revolution. Marketing professionals have been craving something better and the MarTech revolution will allow us to advance from basic to advanced level marketing. MarTech is the merging of traditionally separate functions: Marketing and Technology to improve builder/buyer connections.
We want to empower builders because the role of marketing has expanded. It went from initially just attracting the audience and handing it-off to salespeople, to now engaging that buyer directly online.
Anewgo is evolving from just a traditional content company to a software tech company, to utilize technology to provide more interactive, immersive content. We want to take your wonderful marketing content and we’re making it functional for today’s consumer. And it’s done through apps. Technology allows content and channel enrichment to elevate one-way presentations to the much preferred two-way interactive collaboration online.
We want to improve customer experience through MarTech. Data powers MarTech. Data is the blessing and curse of new homes. It is the blessing because you have thousands of options to choose-from kitchen sink to homesite and everything else. The curse of that is there are so many options that it’s overwhelming and you can’t possibly see them all. MarTech shows you everything that’s possible, but in a way that resonates with you. So out of a million options, you’ll only see ten that resonate with you as a starting point. And the customer can then refine it.
We built our platform using Facebook’s programming framework, their whole guiding principle was to provide personalization at a massive scale online. That’s what we’re trying to provide for the new home industry, we want to show all the wonderful things that you have to offer, but let everyone design and experience it in a personalized way. Apps bring it all together. An app allows that generic content to be presented to you when you want it, how you want it, where you want it. It really optimizes new home marketing because it allows you to service thousands, if not millions of consumers, in a way that resonates with each one, without you having to create the content. Our real time Cloud Rendering Engine does the work for you – it renders that unique house personalized to buyer’s preferences within a couple of seconds on their smartphone.
We’re going to launch our marketplace in the spring of 2022, which will allow new home buyers to do that across hundreds of builders and thousands of communities and hundreds of thousands of options.
MarTech can drive these online buyers down a digital sales funnel 24/7. The one thing about MarTech is it enables the higher level marketing that most builders never even dreamed of. Most are still using presentation style marketing today-using static content on static websites. That content is generally created by the builder, which uses rendering companies.
Instead, we want to let the buyers create their own visualizations-on demand, 24/7 using our Cloud Rendering Engine. As they select options and colors they can see their design real time, from every angle and they can tour it and ultimately add it to their shopping cart. Interactivity enables builders to advance to the higher levels of marketing that are common in e-commerce businesses.
The next level is customization and personalization marketing. Personalization requires creating design apps so that the buyer can interact with designs vs static renderings.
The next level of marketing is experiential marketing because not only do you want to see what you’ve designed; you want to experience it. You want to take those Matterport-like virtual tours. You want to see it from all different directions. You want to see it with furnishings and different design styles.
At that point AI becomes the buyer's virtual buyer's agent. We’re not taking out the real estate agent, OSC or salespeople out of the equation. What we want to do is basically have your customers served to you on a silver platter.
And then the highest level of marketing is what we call predictive marketing. Predictive marketing takes all that data that buyers generated (by interacting with content online), plus all the data of other people that have shopped the neighborhood, from different parts of the world, and at different price points with different options. And now AI can make predictions about buyer’s preferences and choices and can make helpful recommendations based on all of this data.
You’ve already got them to select all of their options, colors and finishes. When they show up at the model home, they just need you to give them a test drive. They need you to make them feel that all of the things that they’ve experienced online match their expectations in the real world, so they can move forward confidently.
AI eliminates buyer fatigue and enables them to make choices easier without getting overwhelmed. As AI presents options to buyers, they can swipe left or right – training it to become smarter about your tastes in the process.
What’s the difference between customization marketing and personalization marketing? It seems like the same thing. At a very high level the content is designed by the user for the customization marketing, and it’s designed for the user in personalization marketing.
Customers start off with a customization of defining what they want. The personalization lets them refine what they want even further-making personal recommendations for them. AI not only captures your own behavior, but also behavior of users like you, it matches similar demographics and allows you to now customize based on the trends. And as you now personalize it, it feeds data back into the masses.
Traditionally, when buyers look for residential new construction, they must go website, by website, by website. They do a Google search to find builders in their area. As a builder, you have to pay to be ranked, but the big builders are always going to pay more for your name than you ever could. So, you’re never going to show up as number one, two or three-at least not consistently.
Buyers go website, to website, to website-we call this is silo marketing. You are basically siloed into each builder’s website, and each website is different. And of course, you can’t compare floor plans easily from one builder to the next. It’s like an Easter egg hunt in this crazy forest. And then the eggs are always moving-the information is never in the same place. You want all of your collected eggs in your personal Easter egg basket of favorites that go with you as you search for more.
And if you did want to save your preferences, imagine now you’d have to submit your information to four different websites. And then, they’re all calling you. That’s not the best customer experience. As a builder-you don’t get to see what is happening on your own website because the content is static so you can just see the pages that people viewed-but you can’t tell who the people are.
We want to turn static websites into active websites for builders-using web apps. That’s what you see with most e-commerce sites. They look and smell and feel just like a website, but they are web apps that work across any device, any browser. Amazon is a prime example. It looks like a website, but when you go to Amazon, you’ll see different content from all other users, because it’s personalized to you based on your preferences and past shopping behaviors. Plus, you then buy online.
So instead of going to the general website store, buyers have their own, MyHome web page-just like they have their own Facebook page, just like they have their own Amazon account or their own Netflix accounts. These can sit on the builder’s website, but they are embedded My Anewgo Home web apps. Because they are the buyers’ own website apps, the buyers are going to register because now they can save their favorites across hundreds of builders. On the buyer side, in this situation-as they browse and customize floor plans, content is dynamically generated on-the-fly using our Cloud Rending Engine. It’s unlike a traditional website where you may have to hire a website developer and spend tens of thousands of dollars and take months of building these pages.
So what happens on the buyer’s side is Mary has her own, MyHome website, Mike has his own MyHome website and they all have their own houses the way they designed them. And when they go into their favorites, they have all their favorites-from all different builders in one place. And when they come back tomorrow, they can start where they left-off. If they left-off customizing a home on the website and they go to a physical model home, they pick up from there. If they start-off on our new Anewgo home marketplace as a shopping place, when they go to the builder’s website-it picks up from there.
We want to go from being a salesperson to being a concierge. We want to deliver the product that the buyer has already decided on. Another thing about letting the buyers do their own thing on their website is you can see where they are with you in their customer journey. As a builder you can see how you’re ranked by your customers-for example you can see that Ali has you as her sixth favorite builder-so maybe you concentrate on prospects who marked you as a top three, instead of chasing leads that are not likely to convert. In this scenario instead of the buyers shopping the builders, the builders could then shop the buyers. Because now you know where you have a better chance, and you can reach out to prospects who favored you as a top choice with a personal outreach.
We want consumers to interact wherever they want-online and off, but the history goes with them-their history, favorites, designs, everything they’ve done needs to be digitally accessible. And, the transactions-if customer already designed everything, why wouldn’t the transactions be digitally there? Why would you have to pull out your paper contract form and mark up their choices when you already have it in a digital form ready to go? It’s all digitally stored in one place, easy to find for customer. And most importantly, for you, the builder, now you have a digital twin of your buyer’s home.
And then finally in this AI-driven online marketing world, the builder still needs to do marketing. They kick-off the process by showcasing some of the generic content on their websites, just as presentation marketing. Then shopper comes in and customizes the content, but it creates their own My Anewgo Home web app page. That’s where they’re going to reside. Now the OSC and the AI can assist whenever buyer needs help in that decision-making process.
The AI functions as both a virtual buyer’s agent, but also as a seller’s agent notifying the salesperson that buyer has narrowed it down to three homes here-and you’re in the top three. Maybe it’s time for you to jump in. With each interaction, just like on Facebook, the more personalized and better the customer experience. Round-the-clock, AI-assistants move thousands online shoppers down their own personal digital sales funnels. Builders basically wake-up to well-informed and serious leads!
The core definition of marketing is connecting buyers with sellers. Attracting the audience is not really connecting them, engagement connects buyers and sellers.
To learn more about Anewgo Marketplace please contact sara@anewgo.com or andrew@anewgo.com
PRESENTATION SLIDES
Email Me New Episodes
Join our private email list to receive reminders of new episode releases, exclusive content and market insights. Your contact information will not be shared with others and you can unsubscribe at any time.
We welcome everyone – whether you are a customer, competitor, partner or just interested in our New Homes industry. We hope that together, we can enlighten ourselves, strengthen our relationships, grow our industry and better service our customers.
Follow Anewgo on LinkedIn
Click to Connect with us on LinkedIn!
