Social Media and Offsite Builders

Too few offsite companies get the most from this powerful marketing tool. Here’s some advice for those who want to do better.

• Social media engagement can build trust with customers and lead to more sales, but only if your posts are well planned and executed.
• Make sure to involve salespeople when creating an editorial calendar, as they will have the best insight into customer needs.
• Use a combination of organic posts and paid advertising, and use tools provided by the social media platforms to track your results.

Nearly five billion people around the world use social media, according to Backlinko.com, a website that tracks social media statistics. Love it or hate it, social media is here to stay, and needs to play a part in the marketing plan of every offsite builder and manufacturer.

Social media involves a variety of platforms — familiar names like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X) and LinkedIn — that allow users to share ideas and information with one another. While nearly everyone uses at least one of these for personal reasons, they’re also very powerful marketing tools.

The business value of these platforms lies in the fact that users (builders and manufacturers for this purposes of this article) can create and share content that increases customer engagement and interaction in the form of likes, shares, comments and discussion. This interaction breeds trust and equity, which, in turn, can influence sales.

Blue Tangerine is a digital marketing agency in Tyrone, Georgia that specializes in helping homebuilders generate leads online. Greg Bray, Blue Tangerine’s President, says that social media should be a part of every builder’s marketing program. Good customer relationships help drive sales and social media, at its core, “is about creating those relationships,” Bray says.  

He says that the driving force behind every successful social media effort is a commitment to serving customers. “Social media is about providing value and isn’t all about you.” Rather, it’s about building a community with potential homebuyers and encouraging engagement with them.

Making a Commitment

Spencer Powell owns Builder Funnel, a remodeler and builder-focused digital marketing company in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Social media is not an end in and of itself, Powell says, and should be viewed as just one element of your overall marketing program. “Social media allows you to amplify your brand, and is a way for people to get a deeper understanding of you. It is where you can demonstrate your core values.”

Doing this effectively requires a dedicated budget. “Unless you invest both time and money in it, social media will not be a big lead generator for you,” Powell says. He adds that “consistency and cadence” of posts are fundamental, and that inconsistent posting is worse than no posting at all. “If people go to your Facebook page and see that your last post is a year old, they might assume you are out of business.”

Carol Morgan is Founder and President of Demin Marketing in Cartersville, Ga., a content marketing agency for builders and developers. Morgan also recommends consistent posts and adds that they will be most effective if they’re pre-planned. That means creating an editorial calendar of upcoming posts. “You don’t want to be asking yourself every week what you are going to post,” she says.

A good first step to an editorial calendar is to review the questions customers are asking. Morgan suggests involving your salespeople, who are in tune to their customers’ needs, so you can address those needs in your content. It’s also important that social media posts include visuals, as such posts will get more views, so make sure to collect your best photos and videos. 

What social media platform to choose will depend on your audience. You can post the similarly themed posts on different platforms, but remember that each platform is built to satisfy a specific viewing style.

“For instance, Instagram is more photo-based with very little text and a lot of hash tags (links that begin with # and let users click to view similar posts), whereas on Facebook, you can have more text and no hash tags,” Morgan explains. “And Twitter, now known as X, is a limited-character, word-based site.”

Bray believes that it’s also valuable for builders to maintain a presence on LinkedIn. Although LinkedIn is mostly for business-to-business networking, it allows potential customers to check you out and verify your company’s legitimacy.

Attracting Followers

There are two ways you can build followers through social media — organic and paid advertising, Bray says. Organic is when a company posts content that’s not sponsored. It’s written in a way that encourages followers to comment and to share the content with their networks.

Paid advertising allows you to promote your posts to a targeted audience. If you’re a modular company for example, and Facebook knows that a particular user has been looking at modular homes, the next time they log on they will see an ad for your company that lets them click through to your website or Facebook page.

Organic posting is best at nurturing existing followers by providing them with useful information. (One example might be a series of posts on how modular homes are manufactured.) Organic posts can also act as a lead generator, but paid ads will generate far more leads. “You have to pay to play,” Powell says. “Even if it is as little as $100 a month, you should really invest in paid advertising,” Morgan says.

Both Powell and Morgan agree that Facebook and Instagram are good foundational platforms to use. Powell’s company focuses on those two because they skew to older Baby Boomer and Gen X homebuyers.

“Do what makes sense for you in terms of taking on additional social platforms,” Morgan says. Social media takes time, and it is “better to do one well versus several poorly,” she adds.

Tracking Results

It’s important to track posts through data and metrics. That’s the only way to know what’s working.

Most social media platforms have built-in analytic tools to give you insights regarding customer engagement. These tools provide useful feedback that includes how many people clicked through to your website from your organic post or paid ad.

If you use Facebook or Instagram, Meta Business Suite can show you how many people viewed and interacted with your pages and posts, and will even categorize followers by age and sex. This tool can also provide a wealth of information on how your competition uses Facebook and Instagram. You can track their activity, see the size of their followers, find out how often they post, etc.

Effective use of social media will help your Google ranking. A company that’s seen as a subject matter expert will be featured closer to the top of a Google search result, and expertise is determined, in part, by traffic: the more traffic to your site, the more likely it will be featured in the top search results. Paid ads and organic posts on social media sites help your Google ranking by driving people to your site.

Google Analytics can track visitors to your company website, and will also show you what social media platforms they came from. The tool allows you to see visitors’ geographic origin, what they were seeking from your site, and whether they clicked through to seek more information or to schedule an appointment.

What to Post

Powell says a good rule to follow is to have a “commitment to content” by taking good photos and videos that answer questions and connect to your audience. “Photos and videos are a trust verifier,” he says.

On remodeling jobs, Powell has seen success with posts that show a home’s “before” and “after” photos. Remodelers and new-home builders alike can attract social media followers with posts that document the building process. Home tours and customer interviews perform well, Powell says. 

Bray says it’s also a good idea to encourage existing customers to post pictures and testimonials on their own social media about their project and their experience with the builder. These are seen as impartial and will go a long way towards encouraging prospects to check you out.

The bottom line is that social media needs to play a role in your overall marketing plan. You need to choose the appropriate platforms, establish a strategy, post with the aid of an editorial calendar, use compelling photos and video, and encourage customer involvement.

At the end of the day, social media is a place where trust and relationships are built through engagement with customers. It’s a phenomenon that has changed not just the way builders market, but also how everything is marketed.

Reed Dillon is a content brand specialist, marketing consultant and freelance writer that focusses on offsite and new construction. He is the owner of Creative Brand Content in Moneta, Virginia. Contact: [email protected]

Photos courtesy of Denim Marketing.