Home Builder Marketing Tips & Ideas

There’s a massive difference between a “website” and an “optimized website.” The former does nothing more than convey information passively—while the latter utilizes best practices to persuade your website visitors to pick up the phone and call for a quote.

A website that’s optimized for a construction company consists of:

• Branding elements
• Highly persuasive content
• Images that evoke positive emotions
• A video that allows you to showcase your brand
• The hook, promise, story, proof
• Psychological elements

Studies have shown that you have around 1 second to capture the attention of a new website visitor and convey your value proposition. The above elements of an optimized website will quickly answer the following questions in the minds of a new website visitor:

• Why should I trust this construction company?
• How will they treat me?
• What’s unique about their construction business?
• Will they help me build the home of my dreams?

An optimized construction company website is the starting point for marketing your home building company, and it provides the rock-solid foundation that will accentuate all other marketing channels.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been around for a few decades. It’s the art (and science) of optimizing the various elements of your website to get Google to rank your website higher in the search results for specific keywords, such as “Seattle Home Builder.”

SEO also consists of getting other relevant websites to link back to yours—Google considers this a vote of confidence, and (generally speaking) the more “votes” (links) that your website has coming into it, the higher it will rank in the search results.

Content creation and SEO go hand-in-hand. For example, let’s say that your construction company now offers high-end backyard landscaping services that include BBQ pits, water features, lighting, and other elements.

In addition to creating a new page on your website that showcases the additional service that you’re offering—you should also develop a series of blog posts that specifically address particular pain points of people who are looking to take their mundane backyard and transform it into something magnificent.

For example, you could create a blog post that talks about “The Top 10 Luxury Backyard Designs” and showcases some of your former clients.

After you’ve posted the blog to your site, there’s an excellent chance that Google and the other search engines will showcase it when someone searches for “Luxury backyard design ideas” or a keyword variation thereof.

That website visitor who found your blog post in the Google search results could very well turn into a new paying client.

A chatbot is like an employee whose only job it is to answer any questions your website visitors might have in real-time—and do this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And do it with a smile on their little AI face.

Chatbots are computer programs that use machine learning and natural language processing (AI) to analyze a conversation and provide a relevant and intelligent response. Chatbot AI technology has advanced so much over the past few years that many chatbots are often confused with a live human being.

Here’s a great example of a chatbot in action:

At 10 pm on a Saturday, someone looking for a local Seattle contractor performs a Google search and finds your website. They want to renovate their home and are currently in the research phase.

The trouble with this scenario is that your office is closed, and nobody is around to answer any questions that website visitors might have.

Questions such as:

• Can you increase the size of my living room?
• How much does a typical luxury backyard cost?
• How long will it typically take to complete the job?
• Can I fit x, y, and z into my existing 1,000 sq ft backyard?

Since nobody is around to answer those questions (and more), the website visitor might bookmark your page (if you’re lucky) and then head on over to your competitor’s website to do the same.

However, suppose you have a chatbot installed on your website. In that case, your website visitor can chat with it as if it were a real-life human being. The chatbot will use artificial intelligence plus a reference library of information provided by you to answer all of the above questions and more—and even allow the website visitor to schedule a time to chat with one of your sales reps on Monday morning.

Marketing your home building company via social media offers many benefits, such as amplifying your brand, connecting with your audience, and driving new leads. If you’ve taken photos of completed jobs (you’re paying a professional photographer to do this, right?) consider uploading those to your Facebook or Instagram and certainly to Houzz to generate buzz and awareness.

When you interact with your audience on social media, it helps improve trust in your construction company and allows you to listen to their pain points, which will enable you to determine the best way to market to them in the future.

But to really make an impact on social platforms you absolutely must spend money to magnify your reach. These platforms offer many ways to boost your posts, and often they reduce the reach of posts that have not been boosted. You simply must play the game. Even as little as a few hundred dollars a month can make the difference.

You can also engage in paid advertising on social platforms. For example, sites like Facebook have powerful tools that will allow you to laser-target the demographic that will most likely wind up converting into a lead. You can target by age, ZIP Code, gender, special interests, and much more.