5 Biggest Digital Marketing Mistakes That Home Builders Make

1. Not Measuring Success.

Every home builder has sales goals that they have to meet. Unfortunately, these sales goals often do not translate over to website analytics. Setting up and tracking conversion goals is a must for every home builder. Conversion goals allow companies to set KPIs and measure success.

Conversion tracking allows you to track your campaign down to the dollar spent if set up correctly. This allows home builders to better allocate their marketing budget based on which strategy is the highest performing.

This also allows a home builder to understand their true CPA (Cost Per Acquisition). The CPA is used to determine is a strategy is working or not thus maximizing their advertising dollars.

Here is an example of the transparency of conversion tracking in Google Analytics:

2. Not Tracking Phone Calls as a Lead Source

For a home builder to determine what their true cost per acquisition is for each marketing campaign, it is essential that call tracking is set up to track the source of each phone call.

If your company is spending money across 10 different advertising platforms but you don’t know which one is driving phone call leads, you are missing out on a large segment of your lead volume.

If you can determine which strategies are causing users to take action, you can reallocate ad spend to the more successful campaigns and eliminate those with low return on investment.

Whether you are taking out an ad in a newspaper, mailing out a direct mail piece or tracking the success of a Facebook or Google AdWords campaign, all of these things can be tracked with unique phone numbers and a call tracking system.

3. Waste Valuable Clicks

Eliminate click waste and optimize your campaigns. Keep your keyword sets tight and on-target. Do the research and learn what converts for your business. Don’t waste clicks on overly broad keyword sets just to spend your budget. If you don’t actively manage your campaign, it’s easy to spend money on wasted clicks and unqualified customers.

From A/B split testing ad copy, adding negative keywords, day parting, utilizing ad extensions appropriately, and many other variables, the success of an online advertising campaign is predicated on actively managing the advertising spend to maximize qualified leads (CPA).

Even something as simple as not setting the proper geographic targeting can sabotage the success of a campaign and spend money on unqualified clicks overseas.

One client who hired us to analyze their existing paid advertising campaign. The client was spending money to advertise a $1M+ home community. Due to the lack of negative keyword usage, the client was spending hundreds of dollars over the coarse of a month to keyword phrases dealing with “mobile homes for sale”.

Online advertising campaigns are a powerful and cost-effective solution for homebuilders, but only if they are managed appropriately.

4. Neglecting Social Media Marketing

If you are posting to Facebook and Instagram and expect that people are viewing your posts without paying for the viewership then you are not executing social media marketing correctly.

Social media is a great platform for home builders. Facebook & Instagram allow you to target users by age, interests, zip code, income level and many other granular variables that are not offered on Google.

Social media marketing can be utilized for everything from promoting video content to lead generation, event promotion, geo-fencing and increasing website traffic.

5. No Content Marketing Strategy

With more home builders reallocating their marketing budgets online from traditional media, the overall cost per click is increasing. The higher click cost trend is going to impact home builders and their bottom line. What most home builders do not fully utilize is a coherent content strategy that costs less and has a higher long-term impact.

Conversion Pipeline worked with a client who was promoting their senior living community. We implemented a paid advertising strategy that focused on social media and search engine marketing. What drove the most qualified leads were the blog posts we were doing for them each month.

About Conversion Pipeline

Conversion Pipeline is an award-winning home builder digital marketing agency founded in 2009. We believe in transparency and implementing digital marketing campaigns that work. We have a proven track record of designing, implementing, and optimizing digital campaigns that produce real ROI for home builders. Contact us for a free consultation.

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