Good news, I survived last weekend’s birthday party. Bad news, I’m now the mother of a 14 year old. This week marked her return to in person school alongside her younger sister who returned last week. And oh my god I do not miss this part of pre-pandemic life. Mornings are like a cat 5 hurricane inside my home and I’m in doing a happy dance that it’s Friday! Welcome to the freakin’ weekend! Before that’s official, here’s the top 3 news items from this week IMO.
The highlight’s this week are less announcements and more thought pieces on building a strong marketing program for your business. The focus is on 3 areas: ad personalization, email marketing, and the importance of storytelling as it relates to building a business.
Starting with the broadest of those topics, the narrative concept, the basis of this article is that developing a brand persona is central to building customer relationships and establishing brand loyalty. This quote stuck out to me:
“There’s no way that brands can sit on the sidelines right now. You’re potentially toast if you don’t weigh in. So it’s a needle that a lot of people are trying to thread right now.”
The idea here is that to be benign and take no positions, is to be left behind. That’s not to say a business has to take a stance on hot button issues and topics, but rather, there has to be a flavor to a brand. You need to provide memorable content, interactions, products or services to stay top of mind.
In that same vein, to cultivate customer relationships, personalizing your marketing is key. This is not just dear {first name} but rather a gathering of data points to create highly segmented marketing opportunities. For builders, this looks like understanding a customer’s price point, design aesthetic, geographic preferences, preferred amenities, and plan choices to provide a marketing experience that speaks directly to the individual. As this quote from the article sums up nicely:
“Relevance is a critical part of brand marketing strategy because people today are inundated with content on a daily basis and it can be overwhelming.”
An excellent and oft less used channel to provide such targeted marketing is email. This is actually a live web show replay that’s a little under an hour long, but is super interesting and informative for it’s take-aways. To name a few that come right at the top of the show:
- There are 3.9 billion daily email users
- 46% of email opens take place on mobile
- 73% of millennials prefer email as a form of communication
- There’s up to a 706% increase in revenue when emails are segmented and personalized
- 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement rates over the last 12 months.
For builders these numbers are super important. That millennial market is what some are attributing the increased demand in new homes to. They now have families and are at an age where moving into larger homes is desired.
When combined, these three articles and tactics can provide a powerful marketing plan for all brands and businesses. If you’d like to speak to us about how we can help you in any of these areas, we’d love to help!
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. I know I will!
