Halfway through September, days from the first official day of fall and the weather here in Baltimore has already turned crisp and cool. Sweater weather is upon us! I really enjoy writing this each week for selfish reasons. First, it forces me to actually read the bajillion newsletters to which I subscribe, and second it’s actually encouraged me to expand my news consumption from strictly digital marketing and website news into more market driven content as it pertains to new home building. Last week was the first week that I added a link to a home builder / real estate specific article and this week I’m adding one again.
CNBC has a whole section devoted to builder news and this article encapsulates a lot of the news that came out this week. Home builder sentiment hit an all time high, there’s increased demand for suburban housing and some of the publicly traded home builders are getting nice reviews and seeing increases in their value. Please take this quick summary with a grain of salt, as stocks and the economy are not my strong suite (though I did once take and pass the series 7 and whatever else you need to do to be licensed to sell stocks!) At any rate, I thought this news was of particular interest because it provides concrete evidence of what we have been seeing and hearing from our clients for months…the housing market is booming!
In the digital sphere, iOs 14 was released this week and it’s got some super cool new tricks up its sleeve, like widgets and pinned texts. While I consider myself to be an early adopter and quick learner, I’ve apparently reached that age where my kids know more than me and have to teach me the cool tricks. Shoutout to my Iz for the lesson in message pinning and how to personalize the stacks.
However, iOs 14 isn’t all fun and games, it’s also giving the people what they want…more privacy. But that’s not great news for us marketers. We’ve been talking about this for a bit, see CCPA here, and Google Chrome’s privacy changes here. 3rd party cookies and tracking as we once knew it is changing and pretty dramatically. From a privacy and consumer standpoint, this is a good thing. And for marketers, I have no doubt that solutions to the problem are underway and that if marketers are truly good at their jobs, it won’t be such a hurdle to overcome. As such, it’s always good for businesses to know when and how these changes are coming so you can make sure you ask the right questions of your marketing team.
The third item this week is one that is under a slow rollout from Google. Google My Business is adding new attributes for listings. We checked all GMB accounts for the clients we manage and these aren’t available to them yet. As we’ve mentioned before, GMB is a favorite of ours these days in terms of the results it can deliver for our clients. Taking advantage of all that it has to offer is incredibly helpful and we will be sure to implement these attributes as they become available to our clients. If we aren’t managing your GMB, make sure you add these attributes when they become available.
Thanks for reading this today. Have a great weekend and I’ll see you next week.
