Too often, builders expect buyers to flock to their homes and communities without first laying the necessary groundwork for success. The old adage, “If you build it, they will come,” has stipulations, and those include marketing and sales teams working in tandem to ultimately discover what your buyers want. When those two teams weave a cohesive story, you can expect to deliver a superior brand experience for buyers.
Tap Into What Matters Most
Before we get into generating sales traffic, your sales and marketing teams need to gather and share preliminary intelligence for business development.
The sales team is your primary source of firsthand feedback from prospects and buyers that you can’t get anywhere else. If you’re not tapping into product and process feedback from your salespeople, start today.
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In addition, make sure to coach the sales team to ask the right questions and generate conversations that will deliver useful intel. Formal surveys are great, but often the most authentic, valuable feedback comes from open conversations between the sales team and your customers.
Builders that employ online sales counselors have the added advantage of having customer feedback at their fingertips in real time about what communities, floor plans, or quick move-in homes bring people through the door ... and their objections and hang-ups, too.
Marketing plays a role, as well, using modern practices such as social listening—monitoring and analyzing related or relevant social media content—to gather insights from your followers and those of your competition. Marketing also conducts competitive re-search and gathers relevant industry data to help form your messaging and brand.
Once you’re actively listening to the market and making product changes to reflect it, you’re on track to identifying your brand’s unique selling propositions (USPs)—the differentiators that address market demands. Your USPs should be outlined clearly for not only sales and marketing but also for the rest of the company to understand your unique qualities and how you stand out from your competition, as well as how you respond to market demands and changes better than them.
How You Say It
Your brand differentiators create consistency in the overall brand experience—and not just in what you say but how you say it. Messaging needs to be consistent from the early shopping phases to deep in the funnel.
Consistency is key to building trust in your brand. Develop and use clear talking points and meet regularly as a complete sales and marketing team. Then take it a step farther by clarifying your voice when telling your brand story and ensure all team members use the same level of enthusiasm.
Your brand differentiators should trickle into every piece of communication that goes out internally and externally, from marketing to close. Doing so will not only attract the right buyers, it will also give buyers the confidence they need to trust your brand from beginning to end.
Ali Quedenfeld is account group director and builder marketing manager at Group Two, in Philadelphia, a full-service marketing partner for home builders. Learn more at grouptwo.com.