There are many things to consider when hiring a marketing agency. You don't want to hire an agency only to find out they don't actually understand marketing for home builders. Partnering with the right agency to fit your needs is key. Read on to discover what factors to look for when deciding on hiring a marketing agency.
Reading time: 3 minutes
Level: Intermediate
Key Takeaways:
Outsourcing your marketing to a competent and specialized marketing agency is a smart move. Whether your goal is to attract more leads, have more buyers come to your showhomes, build a strong brand and presence online, or all of the above, a specialized agency will implement their best tactics for your needs. Plus, it will allow you to focus more on your in-house marketing efforts.
The way the modern homebuyer purchases a home has evolved. In fact, over 90% of buyers start their search for a home online. If you don't have a strong presence where they are, chances are those buyers will not come to you.
This leads us to our first point...
Knowledge of Your Target Audience
Finding a marketing agency that knows and understands your buyer personas is important. It's the key factor in knowing how to market to your prospective buyer. If you're buyer personas mainly consist of young, on-the-go professionals, they're probably looking for a low-maintenance home. A specialized marketing agency will take this information into account when creating and implementing your campaigns and strategies to accurately hit your targeted market.
Digital Marketing Strategies
The main goals of a specialized digital marketing strategy should include the following:
- increase website traffic, attracting potential home buyers to your website
- convert as many of those visitors into leads by gaining their permission to market to them
- to create valuable content that will answer your prospects’ questions, move them along their home buyer journey, and close them as a customer.
Content is the key ingredient to gain traction with your digital marketing. The end goal, however, is to convert website traffic into leads and customers.
A marketing agency that knows how to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time will get the greatest results for your marketing efforts.
Proven Strategy
When you're considering hiring a marketing agency make sure they are able to provide you with statistics proving the success other builders have had with their program. If they can't provide you with a basic outline of their strategies, chances are you won't get the results you need. A specialized home builder marketing agency will have a repeatable and proven systematic process for getting results.
Tracking Results
One thing that's critical to know before hiring a marketing agency is if they provide tracking outcomes in the form of reporting or not. This is the only way to know what is and isn’t working. The purpose of measuring each step of your marketing strategy is so you can look for ways to improve each one.
If they aren't giving you solid reporting regularly (and not just vanity metrics), then how do you know if your budget is well spent?
The five most important metrics you want to track every month include:
- Leads generated
- Customers converted
- Lead-to-customer conversion rate
- Customer cost per acquisition
- Marketing ROI
Hiring a marketing agency that provides these metrics is crucial to the success of your marketing program so you can identify and do more of what’s working!
Photo credits: handshake, strategy
