226 Home Builder Marketing is All About the Math - Renee Stowe Jul 17 2024

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are excited to have joining us today, Renee Stowe. Renee is the Principal at Renee Stowe Marketing Solutions. Welcome, Renee. Thanks for being with us.

Renee Stowe: Thanks, Greg. So glad to be here.

Greg Bray: Well, Renee, let's start off and help people get to know you a little bit, especially there might be a couple who don't recognize the name. So, tell us a little bit about yourself and your history.

Renee Stowe: Absolutely. Thanks guys. So yes, I am Renee Stowe. That is [00:01:00] a new name to me. I'm recently remarried. In the industry here in at least central Texas, most people have known me as Renee McQuillan. But I am launching my new venture and Renee Stowe is the new name. I have been here in central Texas in the home building industry for just about 22 years now, and mainly in marketing. I did a run in sales for about four years. I'm excited to be here and talk to you guys about everything I've experienced.

Kevin Weitzel: All right. Before we get into that though, you get my question that comes right now, which is a slight change of my question too. Tell us something personal about yourself that has nothing to do with work or industry, or in your case, marriage.

Renee Stowe: Okay. So, I knew this question was coming, Kevin. And I tried really hard to think of a fun fact that was just wildly interesting. I think as it turns out, maybe I'm just kind of regular. I can tell you a little bit about me personally, but I'm not sure if it's going to qualify as interesting.

I'm a native Texan, fourth generation. [00:02:00] I know, especially with Austin being such a relocated area. Been here for my whole life. I'm a girl mom. I have two girls, nine and 16. They are amazing human beings also a lot, but as to be expected. I hold pretty firmly to kind of a life mantra and that is find the silver lining. It's always there, even if you have to dig for it sometimes, it's there.

Kevin Weitzel: So, speaking of silver linings, being that you're a fourth-generation native Texan.

Renee Stowe: Yes.

Kevin Weitzel: Is Pee Wee's bike in the basement of the Alamo or is there truly no basement in the Alamo?

Renee Stowe: Oh, it's there. It's definitely there.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, Renee, first of all, congratulations on getting married. That's always a big deal and a big choice. What got you interested and started in home building specifically? How did that come about?

Renee Stowe: You know, I was fresh out of college. I have a degree in marketing. I knew that's the direction I wanted to go, but honestly, I didn't [00:03:00] know anything about the home building industry. Obviously, I knew houses are being built out there in the world. Never even thought about where they came from. And just through a mutual connection, I was hired at Syntex Homes 22 years ago, in April of 2002. And I was a marketing coordinator and I was a baby and I didn't know anything, but I was taught by some amazing mentors. They taught me about marketing. They taught me about the industry.

But even more so than that, they guided my career path. I'm still on the path today that they kind of maybe had a vision for me and set out for me. But yeah, this was in the days before websites even existed, especially in our industry. Instead, we were having radio remotes and running Sunday newspaper ads. We had hand-colored renderings. Seriously, like colored them. And so, yeah, I have kind of seen it all and I've had to just grow and pivot and learn as fast as I can and keep up, and that's still the case today. You know, as soon as you think [00:04:00] you know, you don't know because it changes and you just got to learn and keep up.

Kevin Weitzel: Now, you know, those hand-colored renderings, being somebody that sells digital renderings. I still love it, and I'm not talking about just the colorized ones where they take a PDF and then they color it in digitally.

Renee Stowe: No.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm talking about where they're literally hand, like watercolor style. I still love those to this day, but those are so inefficient, and it would cost you so much in today's day and age to get done that it would be insane, but they're so beautiful.

Renee Stowe: I know. The advertising manager that kind of took me under his wing, I sat there and watched him for hours with the watercolor markers color it. And I remember telling a friend, I'm not sure, but I think part of my job is coloring. I don't know. The change from that moment to today is overwhelming.

Greg Bray: Well, Renee, you mentioned that you've now started Renee Stowe Marketing Solutions. Tell us a little bit more about what you're doing there, what got you interested in starting that, and who you're trying to serve and help.

Renee Stowe: Yeah. Again, 22 [00:05:00] years and all of the amazing experiences I've had, I got to the point to where I was like, I'm ready for the next big thing. My journey is so much, but when I decided to do this, I was ready for the next thing. I had so much experience and knowledge that I can be helping other businesses grow and achieve goals and come in and help them kind of strategize. And that's kind of where I feel like my niche is.

I don't have a menu of services that you just pick from and I give you a fee and you pay me. It's more of a partner, a marketing partner. And they can be small businesses that need to launch. They can be businesses that are established but need to grow and they know they need marketing, but they don't know exactly where to start or what to do or any of that.

That's what I enjoy is coming in, looking at the big picture, see what they're currently doing, what's working, what's not, helping them truly define and know exactly what their goal is and what they're working towards. I mean, that's the first step, what are you marketing if you don't know the goal? And then creating a strategy for them to do that.

The [00:06:00] clients that have worked with so far, you know, some of it is just a short-term kind of get you in line, get you going, and then hand it over. Sometimes it's a longer-term type situation. It can be project-based, it can be a special initiative, a launch of a division. Home building is my wheelhouse, obviously, that's where my network lies, and that's what I know like the back of my hand. But marketing fundamentals are marketing fundamentals, and that can span across many industries.

Kevin Weitzel: So, in a nutshell, you could help a company that's established kind of refine and hone in what they're doing all the way down to helping Hillbilly Carl get established from building houses out of the back of a truck to becoming a bona fide, recognizable and respected home builder?

Renee Stowe: Absolutely. I love the Hillbilly Carl.

Kevin Weitzel: Hillbilly Carl's everybody's friend. Who are you going to call when your toilet's busted? Hillbilly Carl.

Renee Stowe: That's almost the most rewarding. I love creating something, implementing it, and watching it happen. [00:07:00] That's what I loved about the company that I was with my recent experience in the home building industry is getting to do that, but I love the Hillbilly Carl. But yeah, a big home builder, they are launching into a new market. They don't have a marketing director yet. They aren't quite ready, but they know they need to get some momentum going. I can step in. It can be short-term. I can fill the void. I can help with the transition and pass it along. Or I can consult long-term and just make sure that getting off on the right foot. Any company, any industry, really.

Greg Bray: Hey, everybody. This is Greg from Blue Tangerine. And I just wanted to personally invite you to join Kevin and me at the upcoming Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit. It's going to be October 23rd and 24th in Raleigh, North Carolina. You do not want to miss this. We're going to have marketing education. We're going to have online sales counselor education. We're going to have networking, round table discussions, and of course, a whole lot of fun. So, make sure you get registered today and join us. You can get all the details at buildermarketingsummit.com. Can't wait to see you there.

Let's dive in a little deeper, Renee, into some of the things you've learned specifically about builders as you have seen some come and go in different directions and everything else. When you think about a builder and their marketing strategy, what are some of the things that kind of get in their way of getting started with a real marketing strategy, especially these folks that maybe don't have that in-house person yet, they're trying to maybe create something more and grow a little faster? What are some of the bumps that get in their way?

Renee Stowe: I'm going to say this about 27 times, [00:08:00] but it truly is having a very defined plan or strategy that starts with what your goals are. Is it a revenue thing? Is it a closing thing? Whatever it is, and then you back it up from there. What is it going to take to do that? Marketing is a big part of that, obviously. It's budget. You can look at it one of two ways. What is it going to take to get us here or what do I have to spend? The jury's out on that one. Not really, but for conversation's sake.

And then, you create the strategy. You create it at a big picture, a year long. You create it quarterly and you create it monthly. And then, every single thing you do that goes out the door, that's your checkpoint. You go back to that. If you're in line with that, and the messaging might be different in every channel that you're working within, but if it's always focused on what your original strategy was then you know you're going to be effective in everything that you're doing. And you're not going to get to the situation where you've been pulled in a million directions and you're just putting out fires. And then you have [00:09:00] disconnected messaging going out, and that's making even the greatest of campaigns ineffective.

Kevin Weitzel: You know, you actually said something that I think a lot of home builders missed the mark on and that is about budget. And it's funny that you, not funny, it's a poignant that you would say, what is it going to cost to do this? What do you need to spend to do this versus what are we hoping we can do within this budget? Because a lot of companies look at, well, here's what we want, and here's the harsh reality of what's in between. And then, here's like this middle ground. I like your philosophy better than just the, let's get bids to try to see what falls in our budget. You're coming at it as here's what you have to spend to do X, and here's the budget you've set for X and they're not the same. You need to find where that comfort zone is in the middle.

Renee Stowe: Yeah, exactly, Kevin. And that's something else that I could talk for hours about. But if you are tracking your data and you are truly keeping up with it, I used to track it weekly, at least monthly. And if you were truly looking at every single piece [00:10:00] of your data, your marketing spend to all of your digital, you're going to know exactly what it's going to cost. That's just math. It makes it very black and white when you're putting together a marketing budget against your marketing plan. This is what it costs. This is what our average cost per unit has been. This is our average conversion rate. It's literally just a mathematic formula.

Kevin Weitzel: Could you say that one more time? And the only reason I'm saying that is because you know, how many times I hear a builder say that, well, we want X number of leads. And it's like, okay, well, if you do SEO and PPC, and here's what you're generating, you can literally do what? The what? Sorry, it was an M word you said in there.

Renee Stowe: It's a mathematic equation.

Kevin Weitzel: It's a mathematical function. If you want X and you are spending Y. Well, then guess what? If you want Z, now you have to spend P to get Z, not what X was. Am I messing up the algebraic equation there?

Greg Bray: Yeah, the algebra just went way out the window, Kevin. But I think Renee put a key [00:11:00] caveat on all that, though, Kevin. She said, if you've been tracking your stuff so that you know your ratios and you know your numbers, then you can multiply it out, right? Renee, why aren't people doing a better job tracking their stuff?

Renee Stowe: It's hard. It's time-consuming. Sometimes you don't realize you need it until you're in the weeds and then you're like, Oh, if I had this information, I know it would make this easier. It would make this decision easier, it would make this budget creating easier. But you're so in the weeds as a marketing professional, especially in an industry like home building, to take the time to do it.

And then, the tools out there, you know, maybe that's what I should do. Maybe I should just create that tool because I did create it, but I did it manually myself. But I spent a lot of time, you know, searching. Even currently with AI, you know, either your CRM system speak to it and doesn't connect with it well, or Google Analytics doesn't connect with it well. And so, it's cumbersome. It took me probably a year of working on it in the midst of everything else to truly get it [00:12:00] tweaked and refined to be this machine. And I just kind of ultimately did it myself. I created it myself and now it just works. At GFO, we had it down to a science.

When I say you have to track everything, you truly have to track everything. Not just, what's my traffic? How are my campaigns performing? How many leads did I have and how many sales did I have? It's not that simple. There are so many other little details within that. How much are you spending? Yeah, that's a good one. Where is your traffic coming from? What are they doing when they get to your site? How many are converting to leads? How long did it take? How many days did it take them to convert to a lead? Where did those leads originate from? How many of those leads converted to an appointment? Where did those leads originate from? How many of those are showing up for their appointment? How many are not? What's that average? What is their demographic? How many of the appointments that showed up are actually buying? Why are they buying? What are they buying? All that, right?

So, if you know all that, not only do you know that if you spend [00:13:00] 1100 more dollars this month, you are going to get exactly this many sales. And it's not that every sale comes from marketing. That's a whole piece in the puzzle too. How many of our total sales come from a paid spend marketing effort? Let's say 50%. All right. So, I know that 1,100 dollars is going to get me four more sales, so we will see eight more sales this month.

It is monumental for forecasting, for annual planning, for looking ahead at next quarter and being like, we are off plan. We need eight more sales to make next quarter's numbers. So, are we going to put our effort into the 50 percent that's salespeople working it and, you know, getting out in the realtor offices? Or are we going to put 1200 more dollars in digital spend? It's just math and you can't argue it. It's math.

Kevin Weitzel: You were just speaking some spreadsheet love in Greg's ear right there.

Renee Stowe: Oh, I am a geek with the spreadsheets.

Kevin Weitzel: I could just see the columns in the rows forming, so he could think, how can I take these data [00:14:00] points and extract it from the website and put it into these? Oh my goodness, Greg, am I on point or what?

Greg Bray: I think Renee, some amazing questions in that list. And there's probably some people going, Oh, my goodness. I have no idea how to even get some of those numbers, and they haven't even tried.

Renee Stowe: And that's the other thing when we would have these, you know, conversations across the conference table, it was like, here's where I'm getting this information. Here's what it's based on. Here's the charts and graphs. I would get a lot of just glaze looks like, Renee and her charts and graphs again. Please stop. But it's facts. So, let's make a decision together. Do we trust the math? Do we want to do this? Yes. Okay. So, it's not like I'm just spewing out. Oh yeah, we're going to get five more sales if we spend this. It is kind of my gut instinct as well, but that comes with 20 years of doing it. But it's also math. It's black and white.

Kevin Weitzel: You can always trust the math. You might not like the results, but you can always trust the math.

Renee Stowe: Yeah. [00:15:00] Yeah.

Greg Bray: And Renee, it sounds like when I am kind of reading between the lines, is that you have had the experience of asking for more money and not being able to get it. And then you've had the experience of using this data to go ask for more money and getting a different response from the people holding the purse strings. Is that a fair analysis?

Renee Stowe: That's exactly right. And that's why I halt, dig in. I'm going to create this. I'm going to track every piece of information and I'm going to always know. Always. That goes to solving problems that you're having to. Traffic is down, we need more sales, sales are down. Let's spend more money. Okay. Spend more money. Traffic went up. Sales are still down. What's the problem? We spent the money.

If you've been tracking every single piece of this whole funnel along the way, you can dig in and find that maybe it was the traffic to lead conversion where we saw the dip. So, spending more money is not going to necessarily fix that. Maybe you go back to what are the ad campaigns you're running. What is the messaging? How is [00:16:00] your SEO performing? Then all of a sudden you fix that little space. Your traffic has stayed the same, but your lead conversion is up, which means your sales are up, which means you fixed the problem without having to just a knee-jerk reaction, spend more money. That's not always the answer.

Greg Bray: So, Renee, as you have this huge spreadsheet of data that you're kind of tracking and keeping in front of you, what's the first one you would look at in the morning when you come in? What's that one metric that you would really zero in on first?

Renee Stowe: It was all in front of me at that point, so I don't remember. I would look at how many leads came in and kind of go from there. That's kind of two-thirds of the way along in the funnel, right? See if anything drastic happened there. I would look at our website traffic. How many sales were written yesterday? And then, if anything looked off or out of whack at that point, then you dig into the layers there.

Greg Bray: So, if there's somebody listening today who's kind of struggling with this concept of we're not tracking much of [00:17:00] anything, where would you suggest they start? How do you get from zero to a hundred here without just overwhelming yourself and getting swamped?

Renee Stowe: You start by tracking what you already have. What do you have readily available to you? You know how much traffic you're getting, you probably know your leads, you probably know your sales. You start with what you have because that doesn't take as much time. And then you figure out where the holes are, where's the data missing that you don't have coming at you every day.

And then you just take them one at a time and you figure out where to get it, figure out a good process for it to systematically get to you daily, weekly, monthly, whatever you need, and then you just start plugging in the holes. And then once you have all the holes plugged in, you make it generate reports and tell you what you need to know without having to be manual. I mean, it got to the point where, bam, it's in front of me, I'm getting all the reports I need to know. So, owner calls me, hey, what's going on with this? I can tell you, how do we fix this? I can tell you.

Kevin Weitzel: So, every business has that key KPI [00:18:00] that they look at that just says, here is where the magic happens. And I'm going to give you an example of this. In the motorcycle world, they can count all the door bings that they have, everybody that walks through the door. They can click everybody that's ever asked for, how much is this motorcycle? How much is that? Or what's the payments like on this? None of that matters.

The KPI that actually matters when you walk into a motorcycle dealership, and it's probably the same, it actually is very much the same with the car dealership, is the sit-on factor. They have to log in to their CRM if the client sat on the bike. Because they know that once a client sits on the bike, that emotional connection hits in and they can start envisioning themselves riding down the road with the wind in their hair, or on their helmet, just going down the road.

And that's when the magic happens where when they can convert that person into, now I'm ready to buy. Let's look at the numbers. Let's run my credit. Let's take this thing home. That's a magic KPI. I'm not asking, is there a specific, that exact point because I'm sure it varies from builder to builder, but is there a KPI out there that you've seen in your [00:19:00] past that you can look at that one indicator that says, you know what? Sales are going to be good over this next quarter because of X.

Renee Stowe: Yeah. If I had my marketing hat on versus if I had my sales hat on, that answer might be a little different. I have some thoughts about that too, but it would have to be appointment count. Your average from how many appointments are made versus how many are kept should be pretty low. Most of the people that make appointments, show up. They have made a lot of effort at that point. They've gone to your website. They filled out something that says, Hey, please contact me. They communicated with an online sales consultant. They made an appointment for their family to take their time and drive to you. They walk through your door. They have to be significantly interested. And so, I guess the biggest KPI indicator for a great sales month ahead would be the number of appointments. From a marketing hat, I would say leads, but you would have to know a hundred percent that those were really quality leads.

Greg Bray: [00:20:00] When you look back now at the things that you understand, what is something that you wish you'd known a long time ago that would have helped you 10 or 15 years ago, move a little faster?

Renee Stowe: I don't know if this is going to directly answer your question, but if I have to think about my career in marketing, the thing that truly helped me the most was my time in sales. It was truly understanding the frontline trenches and the mentality and the emotional journey that the customer goes through to even walk through that door, much less to go through the process of buying a home. After the experience of truly being in sales for four years, that changed everything about how I market.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, that's the past. Let's look at the future. What trends do you see over the next, I don't know, let's go five years? Obviously, AI is where everybody's pointing to. Any other trends, is there something from outside of our industry that you're keeping your eye on to see, Hey, if this changes, this is what we need to be emulating. Or what trends are you seeing out there that you need to be paying attention to?

Renee Stowe: Yeah. I mean, [00:21:00] obviously, AI, right, but it's not just in the tools what we can make with it. I think it's a lot about what it can tell us about consumer behavior and demographics. It's gonna help us like hyper-personalize our messaging. You know, in the last five to six years, video has become massive, obviously. I think in the home building industry, that's so important. It's such a visual sale. So, the blend of what AI can do for us with video, I think it's going to be very cool. A lot so far has just with AI has been information, graphics, and combining stuff, but I think the use of it in video is going to be monumental.

Greg Bray: Well, Renee, do you have any kind of last words of marketing advice you'd like to leave with our listeners today?

Renee Stowe: Marketing in any industry that is fast-paced, high pressured, ever-changing, and fluctuating like the home building industry, it's just know your facts, trust your gut, slow down enough to [00:22:00] think through what the problem is, and where it originated versus the fire that was just dropped on your desk and make sure that you're spending your time solving the part of the problem that's really going to get what you and everyone else that's putting fire on your desk is wanting.

Greg Bray: Renee, if somebody wants to reach out and connect with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Renee Stowe: Yeah, thanks, Greg. So, you can get all of my contact information and all of the information about my services and my consulting company at reneesteowmarketing.com.

Greg Bray: Well, thank you so much, Renee, for spending some time with us today. We appreciate it. And thank you everybody for listening to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you. [00:23:00]