Your Shrinking Audience, Your Growing Opportunity
Brian Flook, MIRM

Brian Flook is president of Power Marketing & Advertising. Reach him at bflook@power-marketing.com

Beware the enticement to repeat the proven, regardless of the result. The temptation to continue doing what worked before is nearly irresistible. Whether it’s using your ‘go to’ fishing lure, driving the same route you’re used to driving, or repeating the same series of lucky steps to ensure your luck hunting whitetail deer; people have a tendency to stick to the tried and true.  Why do some religious systems hold on to traditions and practices that feel so outdated and have no relevance to people today?

Business is no different! Why do we continue to use marketing methods like bulk direct mail that have a dependable failure rate of 99%? Why are we satisfied that our sales team has a failure rate of 95% when it comes to closing sales?  Why do we accept that our sales teams generally only follow up with 35% - 40% (if your lucky) of the hard-earned traffic you paid dearly for? Why?

There’s an entirely new day upon us. New home marketing has changed so radically that many builders only recognize that their results have faltered; few understand why.  What happened? What changed? What do we do now? 

I believe the foundational premise behind most marketing has changed! We’ve spent decades crafting messages to deliver to our prospects. But guess what, they’re not listening … unless they want to. We’ve been relying on the interruptive model of spamming only using mediums we have grown accustomed to: television, direct mail, print, etc. We ask questions like, “How can we make enough noise to be heard?” “What time do we run the ad to best reach our target audience?” “Should we run in the Washington Post?” All legitimate questions, but not the correct ones. We’re determined to convince prospective buyers to choose our homes. Our marketing is like mining for gold – the assumption is that if you move enough dirt, you’ll find some gold. Makes sense, right?

In this present day of new home marketing, I believe our challenge is to bring the prospective customers to our message, not the opposite. Buyers have many choices and oh, do they choose. They have time, information, easy and quick access, and variety on their side. They no longer have a great deal of tolerance for our marketing preference to intrude into their lives. I call it selective marketing and simply stated it means the customer chooses the marketing stimulus they want, when they want it, and how they want it. According to onlinevideowatch.com, the average YouTube user watches around 50 videos a month. According to Chad Hurley, YouTube CEO and co-founder, “YouTube's short-form and low-quality, audience-generated videos are attracting about 20 million unique visitors a month. The average video length viewed is 2 1/2 minutes long.”

Today, consumers choose you … or not.

The prevalence of the Internet over the last ten years took many builders by surprise. Even today, many builders don’t even have websites, let alone take advantage of the many other new forms of marketing opportunity: social media, blogging, portals, search engine optimization, emailing, listing sites and broad based sales sites like Craig’s list. Be careful though, the Internet is not an advertising medium in the same sense as the Washington Post or Time Magazine. Actually, when it comes to reaching mass markets in an intrusive manner, the Internet is really bad. But that’s not the best way to use the Internet. It’s like using a GPS system to tour a city you don’t know without addresses. Like the Internet, GPS systems are much more efficient and capable of finding a needle in a haystack if you know your needle.

The challenge, as stated in the opening paragraph, is to know when to walk away from the accepted, occasionally proven, traditional marketing methods, and when to run. I once heard a story about a woman who always cut the ends off her roasts before she cooked them. Someone asked her one-day, why she did that. “I don’t know for sure, my mom always did it so I do it,” she replied. Her curiosity piqued, the woman called her mother and asked her, “why did you always cut the end off a roast before cooking it, mom?” Her reply, “my pan was too small.”

Resist the temptation to repeat what you’ve always done because you’ve always done it that way.

Last week, a client asked me to write copy for a 60-second radio spot they purchased for a three-month, multi-media campaign we are kicking off in July.  My initial reaction was the tried and true: get a stopwatch and craft the copy. Done!  But then over my vacation – that’s where I’m writing this from – it occurred to me that the 60-second spot was a bad idea. “Why not convert three months of 60-second commercials with a fair amount of fluff into three months worth of 10-second commercials that hit the point, fast, furious, and on target … wham bam! I did it; I broke the mold and did it differently. You can too.

Just a few crazy thoughts: How about we build the homes our customers’ want, not the ones we want our customers to want?  Let’s make our websites a dynamic experience of design, involvement and creativity. How about we create a cooperative venture in a new community and allow the homebuyers to become creatively and financially involved and throw in some sweat equity at the same time. Do you think their level of participation and buy-in would go up?  Let’s offer to list our potential buyer’s houses  - the one they need to sell – on our website.

The Internet has opened up new worlds to us. But they’re smaller, more focused, and less tolerant of marketing advances than ever. What do we do? How do we capitalize on this monumental opportunity? The advent of television opened advertising and marketing up to the masses in ways that up until then were impossible. The Internet has introduced us to micro-opportunities that we’ve yet to know how to reach. But, we must not only reach them, we must know what they want, how they want it, and how they want the good news delivered.

Then we win!

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