Oh hey it’s me, the broken record, here to tell you that once again this week has zoomed by. It was a good one too! Lots to be thankful for this week and many interesting conversations and goings on in the housing and marketing world. Data privacy, housing – 👍👎?, and SEO are top of mind this week once more. It does feel a little strange that these items seem to keep being at the forefront. Is it that phenomenon where when you buy a new car, suddenly you see a million of your make and model on the road when you never previously did? Or are these trends truly trends and everyone else sees it too? What do you think? At any rate, that’s what I’m writing about again.
WOOD YOU BUILD ME A HOME?
NAHB is giving the government the full court press on lumber shortages. And since that’s part of a larger problem, new home builders are pushing out their sales which is causing a drop in pending sales. This makes determining the actual market shortages a little difficult but Salty Balty is in the number two spot for shortages, so there’s that. However, while the PSI is down from January to February, is so far up on the charts starting in May/June of 2020 that I have a hard time getting worked up over that statistic. Once more begging the question, is the housing market going to keep going strong or are we awaiting some sort of collapse?
WHAT AM I TELLING YOU WITHOUT TELLING YOU?
A couple weeks ago I talked about the TikTok trend and writing exercise to tell someone something without actually saying it directly. And now I will employ this callback expertly to data privacy, contextual advertising, and how we as marketers can still target potential customers for our clients. Because the jury’s still out on the various new targeting protocols tech giants are working on to replace third party cookies.
Cookies let advertisers target potential customers through actions they take on the internet and then serve them ads in places that might have nothing to do with the content of the ad. For example, Google knows what websites you’ve been visiting and can see that you’re shopping for a new home. They also know that you frequent a fansite for Grey’s Anatomy looking for spoilers so now they will serve you a new home ad on the side of an article about whether or not April’s coming back. The ad has zero to do with Grey’s or April and everything to do with what you’ve been doing when you’re not reading Grey’s spoilers. Also stop reading spoilers and just wait. Oh that’s not you doing that, it me!
The other and old school way to reach customers is through them telling you that they’re looking to buy a new home without telling you. They do this by scrolling Zillow and looking at new homes, by reading news about the lumber shortage and mortgage prices and by visiting your site and giving you their information. Therefore you can place your ads in articles pertaining to new homes, making sure your Zillow feed is up and running, and making sure that your website is set up to provide what new home buyers are looking for and is full of conversion opportunities.
Take the info that buyers give you and use it to build out a complete buyer profile so you can target future buyers, while also making sure that you’re using internal and external emails to their fullest potential. Because email is the unsung hero of digital marketing and because it’s what the people want.
SE OH NO
Last week on Homefiniti and Beyond, we talked about SEO techniques that weren’t quite on the up and up that Google has tried to prevent from being effective. This week, what should arrive in my inbox but a link to an article listing 17 Black Hat SEO Techniques that can Harm a Campaign. I find it a fascinating subject and thought you might like to take a look at the practices that are frowned upon as there are none to few people out there who like to call themselves SEO experts that employ more than their fair share of these techniques. Super lame if you ask me, because while SEO is a complex and difficult beast, I do think it’s kind of an art form to be good at it. It’s mostly above my pay grade for sure, but I’m learning more about all the time and I’m super impressed with the research and skill that goes into making a website perform.
I’ll tell you this stuff is never boring. There’s so much to keep learning and doing and just when you think you’ve mastered it, the whole thing gets turned upside down and backwards for you to learn all over again. It’s like being a professional student. As Dennis likes to say, we win because we get to keep playing and for me that means I get to keep learning. Hopefully these write-up’s help you win by learning too! Have a great weekend, I’m dedicating what is supposed to be a sunny and warm Saturday to some late afternoon day drinking outside.
