Home Builder Show Trends

February 22, 2017 2:50 pm Published by admin

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Element-360 scours the planet looking for real estate marketers and internet marketers who are pushing the limits on lead generating strategies. Last week we performed our own internal performance analysis of all our campaigns combined across all communities and clients to see what outperformed. Additionally, we attended the International Builders Show last week and paneled a discussion on Google Analytics. It was interesting to confirm our findings against what others are reporting. Below are some of the main takeaways:

– CES (Consumer Electronic Show) for Homebuilders was one of our favorite topics covering the future of technology enabled homes.
– Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be used to predict your behavior and integrate technologies into your life to make it easier, such as: adjusting home climate, anticipating shade and lights as you come and go, kitchens with smart counters that charges cell phones and sync with screens for Amazon Alexa’s and Google Home devices.
– Security cameras with hard wired coax cable is a main differentiator for new smart homes compared to the retrofit alternatives that are wirelessly based. This is becoming more important based on cyber-attack trends.
– Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) this topic focused on landing page winners and was another favorite of ours.
– The CRO panel highlighted higher performing landing pages that had more to do with an emphasis strategy and was focused more on clear and detailed information about the communities outperforming more heavily emphasized brand aspirational emphasis strategies. This is something we can confirm from over 30 A/B landing page tests of our own in the past 12 months.
– Product focused ads performed better than amenity focused ads on the Zillow/Trulia ad platform
– How to Convert Online Leads, led by John Rymer, was another favorite of ours.
– Online leads need to be responded to within 10 minutes of registering for highest conversions.
– 30-40% of sales from two communities came from online leads. Both communities had an “online concierge” to help respond to the demands on online leads.
– Retargeting is where some of the highest quality leads are coming from. We can confirm this as a trend we are seeing too across multiple marketing channels.
– We had a chance to meet with our Zillow senior account manager and discuss the future direction of reporting on their side. Native advertising is a big emphasis with them, mainly due to the quick load time they are focused on. Thus, UTM tracking is reportedly not going to be supported regardless of the ad network you are serving ads through. Therefore, compromising the post click analytics available. This is something we are reviewing closely to get the edge on ad serving for the highest quality lead generation. That said, we are most interested in the app performance over anything else. I’m going to try and get a conversation with Spencer Rascoff to discuss his vision further here on this topic.

Next week we will be going to the Inman Connect in New York city to get an alternative view on how brokers are reporting success with their digital campaigns versus new home builders. Spencer Rascoff, Zillow CEO, will be the keynote. It will be interesting and insightful to scrub the findings from both conferences against our internal performance audit to further validate marketing opportunities and future potential experiments and A/B tests.

If you are interested in hearing more about marketing opportunities and strategies that are producing the highest results, please let us know. We would love the opportunity to help you.

Best regards,

The Element-360 Team