250 Personalizing Home Builder Marketing - Brian Newquist Jan 8 2025

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: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are excited to have joining us today, Brian Newquist. Brian is the VP of Operations at Kovach Marketing. Welcome Brian, thanks for being with us today.

Brian Newquist: Thanks for having me, Greg. Hey, Kevin.

Greg Bray: Well, Brian, let's start off by just helping people get to know a little bit about you. Give us that quick background overview about yourself.

Brian Newquist: The background overview. I've been with the company for quite a while, going on probably 20 years now. [00:01:00] Seen a lot change in that timeframe. I live in Newport Beach, father of three children. My spare time, I like to do a lot of camping and ride dirt bikes and go surf.

Kevin Weitzel: Like Husqvarna, like some vintage stuff or, you know, like a Bultaco?

Brian Newquist: Have we talked about this? I'm fixing up a 1980, my birth year Husky 390 CR right now, as we speak.

Kevin Weitzel: Nice. I'm a Bultaco guy myself.

Brian Newquist: Oh, wow. My buddy would love you. He has an old Bultaco. Very cool. Very cool.

Kevin Weitzel: Now are you doing any old vintage racing or is it just more of a hobby get out there and ride?

Brian Newquist: Uh, one of my buddies who's a way better mechanic than I am is helping me fix up and when I say helping me pretty much doing all the work for me on the engine work on the 1980 Husky. There's a vintage desert race coming up this spring that he's urging me to enter. So, possibly.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm jealous. Those are fun. Those are super fun.

Brian Newquist: Yeah, yeah. Biltwell is putting it on. They make like helmets and goggles and stuff like that.

Kevin Weitzel: Nice.

Brian Newquist: So, yeah, yeah, I'll keep you posted.

Greg Bray: Kevin's big into biking. So, it's [00:02:00] always good to make that connection for sure.

Brian Newquist: I didn't know that now we're gonna have to uh talk offline and compare notes and stuff like that.

Greg Bray: Well, Brian, you mentioned you've been with Kovach Marketing for a long time. What kind of got you started in this career journey of getting into marketing and especially into kind of the home building space?

Brian Newquist: So, let's see. Years ago, I was fresh out of college, and I was interviewing for a marketing position up in Los Angeles for National Geographic. I came this close to getting the job. They went with another candidate who had a couple years of experience under their belt. And I got an opportunity at Kovach Marketing, which I felt like was going to be temporary at first to be somewhat of a coordinator, aka delivery guy. Back then you had to sometimes deliver blueprints because they were too large to email, dating myself a little bit.

So, I started in that capacity and then just as I gained more and more experience, found obviously the home building industry to be fascinating, to be [00:03:00] very dynamic, constantly evolving and changing and busy. And at the end of the day, I feel like it's a very noble industry to be supporting. I mean, you are giving people, I don't know, it sounds cheesy, but making their dreams come true in some way in providing housing to families and those that need it, so.

Greg Bray: I don't think that's cheesy at all. I think that's a great reminder that it is a great industry to be involved with, because it is so personal to the consumer and buyer, and the impact on generational wealth that home ownership leads to, as well as all the memories and things that happen in a home. So, I think it's a great reminder of how important is. I like that word noble that you use too for that.

Brian Newquist: Yeah, thank you. It's really easy to kind of lose sight of that in the day-to-day, especially in the space that we inhabit, Greg and Kevin. It's a lot about data, it's a lot about results driven, it's a lot about how is this helping sales. But my favorite part is when I do catch glimpses of whether it's, you know, testimonials of homebuyers or are actually attending a lot of grand openings and things like that at the communities and [00:04:00] seeing kids with their parents at the, uh, potential of buying a new home. It really humanizes the whole thing.

And that's when, you know, if I start feeling, I don't know, overworked or burned out, I try and remind myself of why we're doing it. What I really enjoy is some of the charitable aspects that come with this industry that, you know, we've been involved with over the years too.

Kevin Weitzel: We've shared a few clients over the years, so we're aware of what you do. But for our listeners, can you kind of give an elevator pitch of what Kovach Marketing brings to the table?

Brian Newquist: Yeah. I mean, in a nutshell, we're a full-service marketing agency out of Newport Beach, California. We specialize in real estate with a specific focus on, first and foremost, the home builder. Over the years, we've found ourselves involved in the mortgage industry and then developer verticals. We've been around for a long time. We've been around for 30 years. That's a good amount of years for a marketing firm. With that, and I know Greg is very intimate with our journey too, we've had to adapt, we've had to pivot to make ourselves remain relevant [00:05:00] and to continue to bring savvy, cutting-edge, forward-thinking solutions to our clients.

At the same time, though, we've been able to enjoy those decades long relationships with, I mean, one of our clients, a home builder in California has been with us for 30 years. So, we think we've done a pretty good job, especially in the last decade or so of pivoting and becoming relevant in the digital age after having been so grounded in, I guess what you would deem a traditional marketing firm.

Greg Bray: Well, Brian, as you mentioned that you've had to pivot and obviously the needs of clients have changed over that time. The focus you mentioned going from traditional to digital and how much of that has evolved and changed. Although there's still a good piece of traditional, if we use that word, still out there. When you're starting with somebody brand new, what is kind of the first thing that you guys look at or the first area you focus on, regarding the marketing for a builder?

Brian Newquist: You know, it sounds like it'd be an obvious answer, but I think you just need to begin with listening, especially if it's a new relationship, [00:06:00] listening to what are the objectives of the potential client, or if you already have a relationship, what are the objectives of the opportunity in general? I feel like sometimes, let's just use the word agencies, kind of get a, not a bad rap, but they begin to upsell at the very beginning. They begin to offer every service that they can offer on the first engagement with a client.

We talk about this at length internally, and we do make a very conscientious effort to always take a more tailored approach of really trying to better understand our clients and their goals. We can't start solving problems if we don't know what's important to them, or what is the business priority? And I think this equates to longer lasting client relationships.

Because, let's just say from a billing perspective, I would rather have a lower level of billing and be successful and be offering just those services that they need to attain their goals rather than services that they might not need and I guess maximizing billing, but you just sacrifice the relationship. I've seen it happen, and I'd rather have, like I said, a [00:07:00] 30-year relationship than a fast burning, shorter relationship, if that makes sense.

Greg Bray: So Brian, when you are first looking at a builder's marketing programs, what are some of the elements that you review first and kind of focus on?

Brian Newquist: I mean, that's a great question. I think, you know, when evaluating a new clients existing marketing programs, we start by analyzing the brand, the brand messaging, the audience alignment, digital presence to ensure that they resonate with their target market. We look closely at the clarity and consistency of their brand messaging across, you know, whatever platforms they might have in place.

Are they telling a cohesive story that reflects their value propositions? Audience engagement metrics, I think, are also essential. And we start by examining analytics data on social, if they have an email campaigns, their website traffic to see kind of what's working and where engagement might be dropping off.

Greg Bray: Those are definitely key points to understand and start with. Is there a point where you decide okay, we're just gonna do branding and nothing else for somebody or we're gonna help them [00:08:00] with print versus something else. Are we going to do the digital piece? Are we going to recommend they work with somebody else on this particular piece or this tactic versus that tactic, or they should keep this part in-house? Where are some of those elements that make sense to do with you? Not that you can't do all of it, right? But it's hard to be a specialist in everything too, in today's world.

Brian Newquist: Absolutely. For sure. Great question. Yeah. We need to aid in that conversation on how they decide which part of their maybe, for instance, digital activities to manage in-house versus outsource to partners and agencies. Right? And so, I think it just goes back to assessing their goals and becoming intimate with what their goals are, internal strengths, you know, and growth plans when deciding let's talk from a digital perspective, talking about which digital activities to manage in-house versus outsource.

I think core competencies are key tasks outside of maybe their team's expertise, such as SEO. And Greg, you know, this web development, it's hard for a lot of these builders to handle that in-house. They [00:09:00] might not have developers on salary or even on staff. I think in that way, they can really benefit from an agency specialized skill set.

Outsourcing does provide flexibility and scalability in my opinion, allowing them to handle demand spikes without new hires and the fixed costs that come with that. Agencies often bring efficiencies and access to advanced tools that might be impractical to maintain internally. Ultimately, it becomes a hybrid approach. Leveraging agencies for more of the complex, fast-paced tasks and then in-house resources for consistency and control, strikes the ideal balances for most business and most home builder clients of ours.

Kevin Weitzel: Now you have discovery meeting after discovery meeting after discovery meeting with client after client after client. What mistakes are you seeing on a regular basis?

Brian Newquist: Great question. Mistakes that I see on a regular basis are challenges that often stricken home builders when they try to implement marketing strategy. Two kind of come to mind, one being sales collaboration and one [00:10:00] being new technology adoption or buy-in. I think that it's important to start any new marketing campaign with buy-in from the whole team and I can't tell you how often this doesn't successfully happen or isn't set up like that from the get go.

You know, if sales, for instance, for a home builder doesn't feel like the campaign will be effective that marketing is advocating or we don't get the feedback, you know, that's critical to its success. And it goes both ways. If marketing doesn't consult sales for feedback on performances and lead quality, for instance, we won't have the insights to make strategic decisions and our campaigns can't be successful.

The most successful client relationships, campaign sales goals that I see are when sales and marketing are really communicative with each other and very transparent. I feel like it's easy to attain and I can't tell you how often that falls short. That's one of the mistakes that a lot of builders are not taking into consideration.

Greg Bray: Do you find it difficult to get access to the sales team when you've been working on the marketing side so that you can get that feedback? [00:11:00] I know sometimes they're off in their own little world busy doing their thing.

Brian Newquist: No, totally. I do find it's hard and I've found it's hard maybe because the builder doesn't put a lot of priority on that or maybe the sales team isn't necessarily open to that for whatever reason, but the ones that are equates to the more successful relationships that I've been a part of.

We make an effort to really look at, you know, give us some sort of access to your CRM so we can see. We don't have to necessarily rely on the sales team to give us those numbers. We don't need admin access. We just need to take a look. Like, hey, we're running this digital marketing campaign or hey, we just sent this paid email out to a bunch of people. We want to see how effective it's been. When we do gain access like that, we're able to speak with the sales teams, it makes for a much better situation.

Kevin, back to your original question, I think another one of the areas sometimes builders, not overlook, but it comes in the way of new technology and this isn't news to any of us. [00:12:00] Traditionally in home building marketing, clients are a little hesitant, a little conservative to implement new technology or strategies until it's kind of reached market critical mass.

This can be great if you have a builder client willing to try new campaigns that their competition maybe isn't using, as it's a channel with less competition, you can have bigger impact. On the flip side, you have to spend a lot of time trying to convince your clients of all the benefits of recent technology compared to some of the other industries.

Greg Bray: So, Brian, as you work with. builders who are looking for that feedback and you're asking for data and looking for the reports and things, you're also, I'm sure, generating reports and providing information to them. Do you ever find that a lot of folks actually are not looking at the data and not paying as close of attention as you think maybe they could to benefit from all that work and reporting?

Brian Newquist: Sometimes, yeah. If you were to ask me that a decade ago, I'd say, yeah, definitely. Presently, there's more data available. I think there's more ways to [00:13:00] assess ROI, which I remember even when there's builders that didn't want to adopt social media, in general, cause it's like, show me that it can sell a house. Back then it was kind of like, well, it kind of couldn't. You just need to have a presence.

Now I think it's much easier and we're constantly trying to tie home sales back to some sort of the area or piece of the marketing matrix. But it depends on the company. It depends on is there a VP of marketing who's also overseeing sales, who doesn't have any support. The more robust teams, yeah, they have more time and might have more people to be able to generate those reports and look at those reports, and then translate those reports to whoever they're reporting to. So, it depends on the team, but I think present day, it's the best obviously, I've ever seen, which makes sense.

Greg Bray: So, if you've got somebody who's struggling to have the time to look at those reports consistently and things, and they were just two or three metrics that they really need to pay attention to, what would you recommend as those top metrics that are kind of most important things to be checking in on from a marketing perspective?

Brian Newquist: Each builder has unique [00:14:00] goals. Obviously, each builder's main goal is to maximize sales, but we believe the most effective approach is to start with sales conversions and work backwards. You know, for instance, if we know 2 percent of sales leads convert to home sales, we can determine exactly how many leads marketing needs to generate to meet those sales targets. Right?

From there we break down supporting metrics like click through rates, website impressions, engagement levels, all of which, you know, contribute to achieving these lead numbers. Tracking these metrics over time enables continuous optimization and greater impact, obviously, but allowing each campaign cycle to perform better than the last, you know, this data driven approach is kind of like what we try and sell to our clients.

We believe, and I think you'd agree is the only way to do it, it does nothing but sharpens kind of the marketing efficiency, but also creates a measurable path to, you know, achieving exponential growth across campaigns. It's never been easier to kind of avoid throwing good money after bad, to constantly, all right, that's not working. And you can tell it's not working rather quickly compared [00:15:00] to, you know, years ago. So, that's kind of how we approach it.

Greg Bray: I mean, Kevin, I know you've always been an advocate of knowing your numbers, and being able to backfill that pipeline way that Brian was talking about.

Kevin Weitzel: You absolutely have to know your numbers and not only know your numbers, but know what contributes to those numbers. If you know that your goal is to hit 50 sales, you can work the funnel backwards. But you have to know what's actually feeding and contributing to that pipeline in the funnel, what the touch points were. You know, how many times did they talk to an OSC? Did they see a billboard on the freeway? Billboard. Who's using billboards? Some companies do.

Are you using a CallRail type pathway to find out if your calls are coming from the internet or from your Facebook post or from anything else. I need to know where those attributes come from. But yes, if you aren't making decisions based off of data, then you are literally setting yourself up for failure in my opinion

Brian Newquist: 100% and it's never been more easy to have access to data and to leverage that.

Greg Bray: On the flip side, there's never been more of it, right, that we have to sort through. It's almost overwhelming sometimes.

Brian Newquist: Totally. [00:16:00]

Kevin Weitzel: So, a lot of times marketing people have this special ability. It's an innateness that they have in their soul, I think, that they can actually see things in the future. And it's not necessarily anything magical or mystical. It's that you watch trends, you know what's coming, you know what's globally happening. Is there any place that you look for any kind of inspiration as to the way you want to help focus a builder's pathway?

Brian Newquist: Yeah, sure. I mean, looking ahead, let's say to the next few years, I think there's several kind of key marketing trends to look out for or to watch. Personalization continues to gain traction. Consumers increasingly expect tailored experiences based on their preferences and behaviors. They're just kind of used to that, whether they're totally cognizant of it or not. We feel like this means builders should focus on delivering customized content, targeted messaging to engage potential buyers a little bit more effectively.

We feel that video marketing, obviously, preaching to the choir probably here, but is on the rise. [00:17:00] Even with short form content gaining popularity, builders can leverage social channels to showcase properties, share customer testimonials, provide virtual tours in an engaging way. And then there's so many different mediums that you can then leverage, let's call it an investment, whether it's an email, whether it's a digital marketing campaign, whether it's on your website.

But with how much consumers or people in general are confronted with on a day to day basis, it's just such a noisy world that you have to be as targeted as you can be, and you have to be dynamic and you have to be putting stuff out that grabs people's attention.

Greg Bray: Brian, when you say as targeted as you can be, can you give us an example of bad targeting versus good targeting that you've seen?

Brian Newquist: I've been very serious about segmentation over the years and whether that's builders setting themselves up from the beginning, or even if it's, you know, a new adoption, let's say of a CRM, but making sure that they're using it in a way where the information [00:18:00] that's being gathered is in a way where you can segment it. You can organize it in a way to where now, if they want to reach out to those subsets of people, they're doing it.

Like, are you talking to a first time home buyer? Are you talking to a move down? Rather than, Hey, I've got a couple thousand people and I'm just going to send a generic email address. Data shows us that if you're able to segment that list and curtail marketing messages just for those lists, the engagements is through the roof rather than if you're just, I'm going to throw a huge net out and see what happens.

Greg Bray: Well, Brian, for a builder who has been struggling to kind of get their marketing where they really want it to be, do you have any quick tips you could give them, something they should be looking at or paying attention to. You already kind of mentioned make sure that you're focusing your message on the audiences as best you can and not just being too broad. Any other tips that come to mind?

Brian Newquist: One key piece of advice I would leave listeners or builders or whomever I'm able to talk to is [00:19:00] to just always prioritize building genuine relationships with your audience. In the home building industry, this might mean actively listening to customers, understanding their needs, engaging with them in meaningful ways. I think that authenticity, not just in this industry, but just in the world, goes a long way.

Share your brand story. Years ago, that's what we would start with. A new sales office would go up. Okay, where's the brand story going? Where's the brand story going in the brochure? There's positioning statements and there's brand stories, and I feel like that's almost like falling by the wayside a little bit.

When customers feel valued and connected, they're more likely to trust your brand, and trust your brand when they're making important decisions about their future home, which is one of the might be the biggest purchasing decision of their life. By fostering these relationships, you're not only enhancing customer loyalty, you're creating community around your brand that could lead to long term success. Whether it's repeat buyers, whether it's referrals, whether it's telling their family they need to buy here, there's a real opportunity there in that sense.

Greg Bray: Well, Brian, we appreciate the time you spent with us today and the [00:20:00] things that you've shared. If somebody wants to learn more about Kovach Marketing or connect with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Brian Newquist: Yeah, you can visit our website, kovachmarketing.com or feel free to shoot me an email, Brian with an I at kovachmarketing.com.

Greg Bray: Well, thanks again, Brian. And thank you everybody for listening today 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.