MARKETING TOOLKIT

Proving That Your Marketing Works

Marketing is no longer a guessing game — it's a science that you continually test and measure against.

Every step along the buyer’s journey to their new construction home is also an opportunity for builders to check — not guess at — their marketing effectiveness. The results of your analysis determine what works, what doesn’t and where to put your dollars for maximum return on investment (ROI).

Prioritize your buyer data

Cut through the marketing noise straight to the data that helps you get more appointments and land more sales by narrowing your focus on the metrics that actually matter:

• Cost per lead (CPL): the amount of money spent to generate a lead
• Lead to appointment: the number of leads from a particular campaign who then took the next step to schedule a home tour or visit
• Appointment to sale: the number of those visitors who ultimately purchased a home
• Cost per sale (CPS): what you spent that resulted in business revenue

Try multi-touch marketing

Of all your marketing tactics, which touch point has the greatest influence on a buyer’s choice to book a tour and ultimately purchase a home? Rarely do buyers see a single ad for a home or community and decide on it right there and then. But all too often, builders credit a single campaign — typically the first or last one they ran — for bringing in a buyer.

Instead, qualified buyers are typically “touched” six to eight times, which might include seeing one of your billboards, visiting your website, browsing listing networks, engaging on social channels, receiving a direct mail or stopping by a sales center.

Multi-touch marketing attribution helps you:

• Reach more home shoppers.
• Identify the campaign(s) that helped them find you.
• Understand behavioral trends that convert them to buyers.
• Allocate budget based on data rather than guesses.

If you chose single-touch marketing, you’re probably missing out on channels that influence buyers’ decisions. You might be able to calculate a viable CPS, but you might be over- or under-attributing another channel.

By adopting a marketing attribution model that includes multiple touch points, you can draw a direct line between your communications and your conversions. It can also help your budget work smarter, not harder: Think about all those unopened emails, discarded direct mail pieces or unseen billboards — messages sent but not always received before a buyer converts.

Collect your buyer data

You’re already using a variety of ways to track your offline marketing tactics, but how do you track your digital marketing efforts? Tracking pixels and UTM codes are two easy ways to gather buyer insights and behavior and map them back to specific marketing tactics.

Tracking pixels

Tracking pixels on your Zillow Group listings, landing pages, contact forms, emails and newsletters provide website lead conversion data from customers who found your page directly from your Zillow and Trulia new construction listings.

A tracking pixel is an invisible 1-by-1-pixel graphic that tracks customer activities (think website visits, email opens, form submissions and sales conversions) to provide you with valuable, actionable marketing data, such as:

• Operating system and mobile device use
• Number of site visits
• Time of day the customer read the email or visited the website
• IP address, which provides data on the customer’s internet service provider and location
• What they looked at and clicked on (if you use multiple tracking pixels)
• Email or newsletter open rates

UTM codes

Which of your digital marketing campaigns reaches the most prospective buyers and brings them into your sales center? How can you do better at prompting buyers to act? Where should you allocate more of your budget?

Through Google Analytics or other tracking platforms, you can use UTM codes to accurately attribute your website traffic to a specific marketing campaign. Attach a UTM code to any custom URL that you place in an ad, post, email — anywhere you’re reaching buyers online — and get highly specific data about campaign performance.

UTM codes use five parameters to gather information about how effective a campaign is:

1. Source: the advertiser, site, publication, etc. sending traffic to your campaign (e.g., Facebook)
2. Medium: the advertising or marketing medium (e.g., “paid-social,” “banner-ad” or “email-newsletter”)
3. Campaign: the individual campaign name, slogan, promo code, etc. (e.g., “lakefront-2018”)
4. Term: keywords you’re already tagging in a paid search (e.g., “xyz-community”)
5. Content: keywords that differentiate similar content or links within the same ad in a paid search so you can A/B test your campaigns (e.g., “one-story-home-photo” vs. “two-story-home-photo”)

You can also easily repurpose a UTM code — or test the campaign’s efficacy — by simply changing a value in any one of the parameters for a new campaign. For example, changing the medium from “pay-per-click” to “paid-social.”

Interpret your buyer data

Analysis is the final step in determining how your channels performed and what changes you’ll make to ensure an efficient and optimized marketing spend. With the data to prove out your efforts and recommendations, it’s easier to get buy-in and support from your stakeholders.

Two efficient tools to interpret your data are Google Analytics and a CRM system; plus, both tools make it easy to review and analyze your data on a regular basis.

Google Analytics

Get buyer insights from the biggest search engine on the planet. Google Analytics is a powerhouse of comprehension information about how effective your website is as a marketing tool. After you establish your website goals, you’ll see conversion reports on how your pages performed and can even integrate Google Search Console to analyze user search data in granular detail.

Use Google Analytics to:

• Understand how people find and use your sites
• Get help interpreting your analyzed data
• Share your findings with stakeholders and decision-makers
• Organize and manage your data

Customer relationship management (CRM) system

A CRM is a powerful tool that benefits every member of your sales and marketing teams. Successfully engaged, a CRM helps you:

• Store and manage your customer information within a single database
• Attract, nurture and convert home shoppers
• Provide feedback on your most effective marketing campaigns
• Use insights to personalize your service to create a deeper, more meaningful buyer experience
• Stay in touch with past buyers to generate referrals and repeat business
• Automate repetitive tasks
• Connect to other powerful tools in your marketing tech stack

While the features and tools included in a CRM system will vary, each offers valuable ways to help you become successful. The best CRM is one you’ll actually use.

Marketing attribution takes careful thought, but it’s important and worth doing. Correct attribution and reporting will help you choose the right mix of channels over time then document and explain those choices to your decision-makers. Data-driven decisions are the easiest to justify — provided you have the right data and easy, reliable access to it.

Pro tip: Take a systematic approach to your marketing to define realistic goals, streamline your tactics and measure what works best for you. Revisit your goals and strategy on a regular basis.