Hottest Builder Online Promotions

Homebuilders have always invested in promotions and advertising. Just open your local Friday or Saturday Real Estate section and you can see all the great current print advertising and print promotions of homebuilders in your area. One of the ways good marketing departments and advertising agencies keep their work fresh is by constant exposure to ads. They don’t look at just the local newspaper, they also look at out-of-market papers for inspiration.

For the cost of a weekend subscription to newspapers in the top 10 markets ad agencies and larger marketing departments can keep abreast of current advertising and promotional trends. This can dramatically reduce the time and effort involved in developing “New” material. I’m not suggesting that they rip-off ideas and designs. However, this careful perusal of out-of-market advertising provides inspiration many advertising professionals. What it can’t do is tell you which ideas are effective as ads or as promotions.

What if there were a newspaper that was available in dozens of homebuilder markets that gave you strong clues about the relative effectiveness of advertising and promotions based upon the frequency with which homebuilders used the promotion. Guess what? It does exist. The top 4 out of the top 5 U.S. homebuilders operate in more than 40 markets, they all have good websites, and all manage promotions locally to some extent. So, if a homebuilder is running the same promotion in 25 or their 45 markets it stands to reason that either the promotion is highly effective or they just really like it. I would give them the benefit of the doubt.

So, if you want to find out what seems to be an effective promotion for homebuilders, all you have to do is spend a little time digging around on their websites. After you come up with a list of suspect promotions, go test them. Test the creative direction. Test email campaigns. Look at your own results. There’s no guarantee that what works for Pulte in 30 of their markets will work in yours, but it might be that you dramatically reduce the cost of finding out what will work in your own market. Let me help you get started:

http://www.pulte.com/

http://www.drhorton.com/

http://www.lennar.com/

http://centexhomes.com/

http://kbhomes.com/

Let me know what you think. Send me an email if you would like a copy of our own hottest promotions analysis: blair@realtyinfolinks.com.