The housing marketing has improved, and people are choosing to build and renovate homes again. Is your company taking advantage of today's buyers looking for a home builder or contractor?

Most will use combination of marketing tactics, whether it's a website, social media, trade shows, or similar media, to convert leads into customers. But how do you take your home builder or contractor marketing strategy from ordinary to extra-ordinary?

Personalization is the answer. A more personalized experience for your prospects and customers that caters to their individual problems, interests, needs, and wants is a sure-fire way to keep people coming back for more information and convert them to a closed sale. Your contractor marketing strategy should reflect that focus on personalization, as well.

Your prospects come from may different demographics and budgets. Using a marketing strategy approach that's "one size fits all" will leave your company missing out on great leads. Instead, focus on your target audience and tailor your marketing specifically to this audience and to each individual. How do you personalize your website, you ask? Let's walk through it.

Create an optimized mobile experience.

As more buyers start their search for a home builder online or contractor on a mobile device, your website needs to be responsive to any device size; but that's basic. The National Association of Realtors  found that 90% of home buyers searched online at some point during their home buying process. In addition, the millenial demographic is one of the fastest growing home owner demographics, and these buyers are more than twice as likely to use a mobile device first when searching for homes or contractors.

Your website must be optimized for users on a mobile device. That means shorter paragraphs, shareable information, images that look good on a small screen, and lots of video that users can watch on-the-go. 

Create Buyer Personas.

Buyer personas help you "think like" your ideal customers. Let's take the married 50+ buyer persona. For them, your content will be vastly different than what would appear for a millennial buyer. They may be interested in the process, warranty, materials used to build the home. Millennials might care more about the finished product and timeline. The content you produce should be researched and will depend on your unique audience.

Make sure your website has a variety of ebooks, checklists, and white papers that can be used along the buyer's journey to educate your prospects. By creating a personalized website experience that showcases different content to different personas, and different content depending on how many times that person has visited your site, you can build trust and open the door to further communication with the visitor. You'll be seen as a thought leader, providing relevant information when the buyer needs it most - during their research.

Email Connection 

Home contractors can integrate personalization into emails as well.  When a prospect completes a form or reaches out directly via email, you have the opportunity to connect and personalize the conversation. Here you can provide value and nurture the lead until they become a customer.

• Add a personal email subject line - call out their name!
• Link to pages or videos your persona would be interested in or that will help them, based on what they've looked at before
• Send premium content that follows their original line of search on your site, but that they haven't seen yet.

Savvy Social Media Presence

Millennials are now the largest share of home buyers, a share that has grown consistently over the last 4 years according to the National Association of Realtors.

Simply having a Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profile is not enough anymore. Home contractors who actively in engage in social media are more likely to attract qualified leads. 

For example, millennial home buyers are tech savvy and don't like to be marketed to. They enjoy scrolling through Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter for renovation ideas, DYI projects, and home decor inspiration. Sharing your relevant, personalized content through social media channels will attract millennial buyers to your website, where they will find even more content that resonates.

Taking the time to personalize your interactions with a prospective home buyer lays the foundation of a great relationship. Techniques of inbound marketing for home builders, especially personalization, helps take their lead generation from ordinary to extraordinary.