Don’t kill your marketing efforts just because it’s the off-season! Stand out from the crowd while your competitors go into marketing hibernation with these easy and effective ideas.
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Level: Intermediate
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1. Engage with Holiday-Theme Events
The off-season is a great time to engage with people on social media. You can share photos of Halloween or Christmas decor and ask people for their opinions on them. Or have your followers submit their own pictures! Don’t forget to use hashtags so your audience can easily find them.
You can also host holiday events in your show homes. Consider turning one of your show homes into a Haunted House and invite people to come visit through email and social posts. Or have a show home dedicated for pictures with Santa with beautiful Christmas decor. You can encourage people to take photos of the decor and post them on social to win a prize.
These ideas are a great way to showcase your home building company as well as engage with potential home buyers.
2. Grow Your Contacts List
Even if home buyers aren’t buying during the winter months, they’re still looking. In fact, many of them are doing a lot of research during the off-season in prepartion for moving during a 'nicer' time of year. This is a great time to grow and nurture your contacts list by offering them content they’ll love to engage with. Once they’re ready to buy, your home building company will be top of mind!
3. Ask for Testimonials
Check in with your customers and ask them to share their positive experience with others. Entice them to give a review or testimonial by giving them a free holiday basket or gift card. Send an email out to your customer contact list and post on your social channels, too. What better way to promote your home building business than with satisfied customer reviews?
4. Re-evaluate Your Marketing
The off-season is also a good time to re-evaluate your current marketing efforts. Look at the campaigns you ran in the current year. Can you improve on them? Take the opportunity to start brainstorming ideas for new campaigns during the down-time.
You should also take the time to re-evaluate the marketing information on your website. Are your blogs out-of-date? Refresh them with current information and republish them.
Are your calls to action (CTA for short) not performing as well as they should? Update their design! Or create an A/B split test and monitor which CTAs are enticing more people to click.
5. Create Holiday-Themed Content
People may not be thinking about buying a home in the dead of winter but that shouldn’t stop you from creating relevant content to keep them coming back to your website for more information! By creating seasonal content that speaks to your home buyer personas, you'll continue to build strong relationships — not only with your current audience but with new faces — that will continue during the off-season and cross over into your peak season from your outstanding content.
What kind of content you may ask? Post a blog about Christmas decorating ideas, winter home maintenance tips, or things to do around your city during the holidays. It's fun, light and will keep engagement up in your slower months.
6. Consider Running a Special Year-End or New Year Promotion
It may not be your busy season, but that doesn't mean you should stop trying to get new business! The promotion you run doesn't have to be big. You could offer a special upgrade package for the last X homes sold by the end of the year, then change it slightly to a new deal for the first X homes sold to kick off the new year.
People have all different kinds of timelines and lifestyles so your deal could be the motivation they need to get into a new home right away, regardless of the weather.
7. Have Fun!
Put a spin on your company logo by adding a Santa hat to it! Try adding Cobwebs during Halloween to the corners of your website for a spooky look. These little details can entice people to engage with your home building business even more since it adds a personal and unique touch. People will appreciate that your company has a sense of humour.
Have you implemented any of these ideas into your marketing strategy already? Have your competitors? It doesn’t take much effort to keep your marketing machine running smoothly through the downtime. Try one, or all of our ideas and you’ll reap the rewards when the market heats up again.
