253 Understanding Your Home Buyer Audience - John Peragine Jan 29 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're excited to have joining us today, John Peragine. John is the chief revenue officer and co-founder at Audience Town. Welcome, John. Thanks for being with us.

John Peragine: Yeah, welcome guys. Thank you. Happy to be here.

Greg Bray: Well, John, let's start off and just help people get to know you a little bit. Tell us just a little bit about yourself.

John Peragine: Cool. I am John Peragine like you said. Been working in digital, advertising and marketing technology for last [00:01:00] 25 years. Newer to the home builder marketing space for about the last six years. And then when I'm not at work, I'm either coaching my kids’ sports team, or on a bike or snowboard, hopefully somewhere having fun.

Kevin Weitzel: Oh, you said a magical word. You said bicycles. No, I'm just kidding. Hey, so John, before we get into everything with Audience Town, let's find out something personal about yourself that has nothing to do with work, the home building industry, or family. What do we got?

John Peragine: Alright, cool. So, that's a good one. I'm an endurance sports enthusiast. I've completed a couple of Ironman triathlons. I've run an ultra marathon. I've also completed the New York marathon. Those are some things about me. When we do like ice breaking questions kind of like this for new employees, we usually ask them what was the first concert they've been to. So I want to throw the question back at you guys. Greg and Kevin, what is the first concert you guys were ever at?

Kevin Weitzel: Greg?

Greg Bray: So, my first concert was Billy Joel, back in the 80s. [00:02:00]

Kevin Weitzel: I've got two firsts. One that I actually went and bought and paid for my own ticket, which was Journey, and Bryan Adams opened for them. However, before that, when I was about three years old, my brother and sister who were big old potheads drug me to Mountain, which was a rock band back in the early seventies, blasted my eardrums out because they had more wattage than you can shake a stick at. So, technically, my first concert was Mountain.

John Peragine: Wow. That's pretty cool. I don't remember my first concert, but one that I do remember that was close to my first concert was I went to see the Ramones on their farewell tour at the Stone Pony in New Jersey in 1993 or four. The Stone Pony is like an iconic place in New Jersey where Bruce Springsteen usually drops in, and he'll just like pop in and sing a couple of songs with random bands on stage. So, anyway, that's a little bit about me.

Greg Bray: Yeah. Well, we won't talk about what those concerts cost then versus now either. Right.

Kevin Weitzel: Night and dang. Alright. Now, so for your ultra distance stuff, for your Iron [00:03:00] Man, what is your bicycle? And number two, are you one of those Hoka shoe wearers? Are you wearing those big old moon shoes?

John Peragine: I wear Saucony’s. have run in a pair of Hoka's. They are comfortable, but I don't like them for really long distances. But yeah, a lot of people wear them. They have great marketing. They've done a really good job with marketing. And my bike, I ride a Trek road bike, but when I was doing triathlons, I had a Quintana Roo.

Kevin Weitzel: Oh, Quintana Roo. Great bike.

Greg Bray: Well, John, you mentioned that you've only been in home building for the last few years. What was kind of your journey of where you were before, and what got you focused on the home building industry?

John Peragine: Yeah, it's an interesting journey. So, I started my career right out of college in local tv ad sales as like an assistant, for a company called Telerep in 1999 in New York City. We were like the local rep firm for stations like WHDH Boston, like the local Fox affiliate, that kind of stuff.

I did that for about like nine months and then I was like, man, I got to get into digital. TV is just a little too slow for my speed. [00:04:00] So, I wound up moving laterally to cnn.com, which got me into digital in 99. And that was like the first year that CNN actually started selling digital ads. Everything prior to that was kind of given away as added value with TV. It got my feet wet in digital marketing and advertising.

And from there, I actually went to realtor.com. That's what got me first introduced to real estate marketing. I worked at realtor.com as an ad salesperson selling to national advertisers on Madison Avenue. So, like Verizon and AT&T and Lowe's and Home Depot, who were trying to target people that were on their moving journey. but not necessarily selling them homes. So, I was kind of like the other side of the realtor's business targeting people that spend a lot during that very concentrated three-month window, you know, pre, during, and post-move.

Fast forward to now, Ed and I, Ed Carey, who's the founder and CEO, him and I worked at two companies together prior to Audience Town, both in advertising technology and digital marketing. [00:05:00] What we saw was that there was an opportunity to kind of uplevel what was going on in real estate marketing. It seemed like a lot of what was happening was like 10 to 15 years behind, and other companies and industries were moving much faster and more advanced.

So, we said that hey, maybe there's an opportunity to bring what we're doing now and customize it for the real estate space because a home is quite different than, you know, purchasing a pair of Hoka shoes, or something like that, which might be more of a mindless purchase versus a very emotional purchase as a home. So, anyway, that's my journey. Started in TV, went to digital, kind of came round about marrying my realtor.com experience and then programmatic and data to get me to Audience Town now. So, 25 years ago, I would never have said, Oh, yeah, I'm going to be in home builder marketing technology, but this is where I am now. So, here we are.

Greg Bray: Well, John, give us that overview of Audience Town. Tell us a little bit more about the services you provide and who you're working with. [00:06:00]

John Peragine: Yeah, Audience Town, think of us as like a sales and marketing analytics platform. We really see us as a data and analytics company that provides three things. We provide insights through consumer attributes and consumer behaviors. We provide automation in ways to like action on the data that we provide. And then through actioning on those insights and data, you can see an uptick in performance.

Really, it goes to Google Analytics does a good job of telling you what goes on  the website. Let's say a thousand people came to your website, a hundred clicked, 10 converted. What we do is we'll tell you all the things about the 1000 people that came to your website the attributes, about the 100, and the 10 that actually filled out forms We're here to solve the problem of why are my clicks not converting? Why is the top of the funnel not feeding the bottom of the funnel?

Having standard click actions and CTR and things like that just don't give you [00:07:00] enough transparency into understanding if the audience actually matches the product that you're selling, and home builders sell different products at different price points at different life stages, right? There's first time home buyers,. There's step up products. There's 55 plus active adults. If you don't understand what's coming in at the top of the funnel, it's going to be really hard for you to optimize performance at the bottom.

We really help solve a lot of that and really are meant to provide a lot more transparency and aperture as to what's happening with our audiences. Not just that they're dog owners, but like, okay, Google is telling me the conversion came from search. Well, where did that consumer or future home buyer, where did they see our brand before. We're able to track everything back to the first view, which gives you a much better, clearer line as to what parts of the marketing are working.

Because someone might have been on your website 60 times [00:08:00] prior to them ever filling out a form or downloading a floor plan. But what you will see is the first action being the download and that's what the CRM or that's what Google Analytics is showing as the action, not all the stuff that happened prior, right? So, it's like, how can we help marketers see what the full attribution is truly as opposed to everything just being click-based. There's a lot of stuff that happens in the view that marketing teams are not getting credit for which they should.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, at the end of the summer I was at a summit, we actually co-host the Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit. It was in Raleigh this year. Anyway, somebody said a pretty interesting fact and that was that when they were looking at the more finite data points that they saw, when they were doing a case study for a builder, that the number of dogs, and not only the number of dogs, the average number of dogs, but the size of the dog even came into play.

That allowed them to change their marketing structure and their forward-facing outreach to include dogs in their imagery and in their videos and they saw an [00:09:00] uptick in their response rate. Can you expound on that because I don't remember who was the one that gave that factoid? It could have been you. I don't know. Was it you John?

John Peragine: Yeah, it must be a handsome bald guy from New Jersey. Maybe I don't know. Anyway, all kidding aside. This was a client of ours. Our marketer that was using our analytics platform, she was able to see that 61 percent of the traffic coming to her website were actually dog parents. She then saw that, hey, this is like a great way to connect the audience that is coming to the website heavily being dog owners with one of the floor plans that we have which actually offers an upgrade of a dog shower in the mud room. Let's try to connect the audience to the product that we believe is going to be more sellable to them. Let's like hook them emotionally.

So, she took the image that was like image 15 in the gallery and moved it up for this one specific community to the first image. So, [00:10:00] when you got to the website, you saw a happy family washing a dog in the mud room. What came out of it was deeper website engagements, the OSC saying when there were qualifying inbound traffic they were actually asking for this upgrade and wanted to learn more about the dog shower in the mudroom. Overall, there was just a much deeper engagement with the audience because they were able to match something that was knowable to the right product.

So, that's the one thing to take out of this is that there's a lot of information out there and a lot of these data points and attributes are knowable. We have them. If marketers are able to look at these things, they're able to make small little tweaks like that and see like a strong uptick in engagements that actually led to sales. So, it's a pretty cool thing.

Greg Bray: All right, John. Well, that opens the door to the big can of worms, right? How do you know that I have a dog? Where is this information coming from? It's a little creepy to some of us. So, [00:11:00] take us a little bit behind the curtain. How do you know who's got a dog and who doesn't?

John Peragine: That's a great question. Procter and Gamble knows that you have a dog too, and so does Unilever and Ford and BMW. A lot of this information is newer to home builders but has been used in other industries for the last 15 plus years. The way that this information is knowable is that, Audience Town has a database of roughly 280 million people in the US.

And what we do is we license data from hundreds of different sources. We bring on public and municipal data so that we know, like, John owns a place and doesn't rent a place. How? Because it's public data that we are bringing on board and matching back to digital devices. Then what we do is that we bring in lots of third-party and behavioral attributes, companies where we get financial data and other types of data that's obviously anonymized.

We're not saying, Hey, John Peragine owns a dog that's 60 pounds. We're saying ID one, two, three, four that's totally [00:12:00] anonymized, we know that this person's been on your website and here's the attributes about them. So, everything's being done in privacy-compliant ways. The data is coming from very trusted sources. Everything from Experian to Transgenia to Equifax to. Oracle and lots of other sources like that.

You'd be amazed on all the data that's out there from intense to pet ownership, to even vehicles that are owned, all the way through to actual property attributes of like what's the size of the home? What's the square footage? How many garages does it have? Do they own a minivan? Were they just building a minivan on Chrysler's website? So, there's lots of data points that are out there, and because we have a background in doing this for a lot of the companies that we mentioned, it's all done on match tables and anonymized.

Because at the core, all this data needs to be privacy compliant. That's really what we're doing. The data is being put together in ways that it could be used and utilized. Someone that's a user of our platform, they're able to see this data in [00:13:00] really beautiful charts that's bringing a lot more transparency on who their audiences are.

Because a lot of times land people are handing to the marketing team, here's our buyer profile years before the actual website is up or the models or people actually going into the sales center. In that period of time, a lot of the data can change from where the data originally came from, which is probably like a US census report that was being extrapolated forward to data like we have that just all based on real time digital signals.

The data changes quickly, especially in markets like we're in where there's large macro-economic conditions that shape the audiences differently based upon what year it is and what's happening in the world, and you need these kind of like real time signals to be able to react because you need to market in real-time to really capture that audience, so.

Kevin Weitzel: What's funny about all of this is that there are people out there, I'm not one of them, but there are people out there that are scared to death. They're like, oh, just big brother watching me. But what they [00:14:00] don't realize if they have a computer that has an IP address that's attached to everything you do. Every keystroke you make is tracked by something, somebody, somewhere, especially when we introduce the smartphone into the equation. Everywhere that phone goes, even if you turn off tracking by virtue of just the function of how those cell phones work, they still know where you are. So, serial killers, sorry, bad news. You're being tracked.

John Peragine: Yeah, and what's interesting is, you know, Google and Facebook know all this stuff too. What they do is they just put the marketers at a disadvantage because they remove all of this stuff. Audience Town is not an advertising platform. We're a reporting platform in essence. So, because we're not doing the advertising on one side and then the reporting because then there would be bias there. We are only doing the analysis and the reporting. So, you're able to report on all this stuff. What you're not able to do is target on things like that. And that's one of the reasons Google and Facebook removed a lot of those [00:15:00] targeting and reporting on any of that stuff because of that.

Greg Bray: John, I think it's fascinating to recognize how many different data points you really have. I mean, you talked about pets is just a great example of making a change, but you can start to understand the income levels to make sure you're targeting the right kind of buyer demographics. You can start to understand where people are coming from. And I love the way you explain the difference of Google Analytics is telling you what's happening on the website and what you're telling them is about the visitors. It's data about the visitors to the website.

Because I know sometimes when I've had conversations like, well, I don't need another analytics platform because I have Google Analytics, and I hardly have time to look at those reports as is. What do you say to the person who hardly has time to look at the reports anyway? And now you're trying to bring in a whole nother set of reports and data and things that I've got to process and understand.

John Peragine: That's a great question. So, we're not a replacement for Google Analytics, maybe one day, but Google's a pretty big company. It's gonna take a lot of time to try to replace them [00:16:00] totally. We're friends with Google. So, we look at it as like, you have Google Analytics and then you add Audience Town and one plus one equals three. Because Google Analytics is gonna track everything that's happening on your website from clicks and impressions, and then we're helping provide a lot of the transparency on what those audiences look like from a buyer profile.

We know a lot of clients are maybe smaller teams. They don't have an outsourced agency. What we do is we actually provide and bring the insights to them on a platter, in a way that helps them understand that, Hey. You should take a look at the last email because there has been a change in your traffic pattern, or there's been a change in your audience profile based upon what we're seeing from a certain zip code or from a certain attribute that's important.

So, for example, we did a case study with Miranda, a client of ours. And they used our data to see that they were selling homes in one community. The community had a starting price point of 600,000 and homes all the way up over a million. They were [00:17:00] advertising homes at the $600,000 point, but a lot of the homes at that price point were sold out. So, what you can see in our data was a very specific demographic, a very specific household income, a very specific credit score, a very specific ownership from an asset point of view, what kind of homes these people owned today in real time. And a lot of them matched to the $600,000 home.

When they start to analyze their search terms, because we overlay our data on search, refer, and all the website traffic, they were starting to see that, Oh man, the audience that we're bringing in from our outbound marketing aligns way closer to the $600,000 price point. No wonder we're not selling any of the million-dollar homes. So, what they did is they started to adjust they're marketing and they stopped advertising the $600,000 homes. They changed their creative to market the million-dollar homes. In our platform over the next three weeks, you can start to see the shape of the buyer profile change to align with what they were looking for, the million-dollar someone that could afford and purchase a [00:18:00] million dollar plus home in the areas that they were selling.

So, without having that data point, it was hard for them to really troubleshoot why this wasn't working from their standpoint. It worked before it's not working now. What's going on? Then they went into our data. They started to look at the search terms for this community. They started to look at the profile of what was coming in from the refer, even organic versus paid, it became obvious to them right away because they started to be able to see some of these really specific, asset and demo information that was like, Oh, we're missing the mark with it. And they made changes and then all of a sudden the homes started to sell again. So, that's one of the examples.

Kevin Weitzel: So, let's talk triathlon for a second. Given that I'm from Arizona, we have an area here called Ahwatukee that is known all over the place for having the highest concentration of triathletes and endurance athletes in the country. You know, we're even talking more so than Boulder, Colorado, some of those, you know, magnet places. So, when we have that high concentration, if you were building a community there, when land gets all these data tables, they could literally even plan [00:19:00] out their amenities. You know, why are you building a community swim pool when you could be building a community lap pool?

John Peragine: Yeah, exactly. So, part of the data that we have, I know we've mentioned a lot of financial data, but there's lots of interest-based data, wellness, sports, hobbies. And in that data, you can start to see, like, what's the difference between people. Is there a larger percentage of your audience that likes yoga versus doing some kind of endurance sport or running or hiking?

And that's where you can start to use the data to align audiences to the amenities that you have, right? Or maybe find out that there's an audience that you are attracting that isn't perfect for your properties, but maybe the next part of the build-out of that community, maybe you want to start to curate some of those future amenities or the styles of those homes based upon who's coming to your website now that you're just not communicating with.

Greg Bray: I love the examples you've given about how builders are able [00:20:00] to use the data to see, are we attracting the right audience, and the right audience for either the product or the community that we're, trying to put out there, or is the message we are sending out, you know, what audience is that message attracting, regardless of whether that's the right product because then we can change the message.

And it doesn't sound like it requires massive changes in some of these efforts on the marketing. I mean, you talked about just moving that order of images on a slideshow to make a big difference in the connection. I think that's fascinating that we can make just these small little adjustments can have a huge impact over time.

John Peragine: Yeah, they really do. You know, there's been a huge movement towards consumer first in many industries. The home building industry is moving in this direction and all of real estate is moving in this direction, and companies need the technology to be able to support that. Consumers are in control. Home builders and real estate marketers need to be able to have this information on hand. So, the more they know about their consumer, the better they can market to them. [00:21:00] Which will help them one, save money by not marketing to the wrong people, and then lastly, driving more sales. Because if you're putting better quality in at the top of the funnel, you should get better out at the bottom.

Greg Bray: So, John, what would you say to that marketer who's like, you know, this sounds pretty interesting. I could really use this data, but they've got to go convince the person who controls the budget, whoever that might be, that they really need more data. What kinds of things could you offer them that would help explain the power and the benefit to the person they've got to convince that this would be useful?

John Peragine: Yeah, what we usually like to do is give clients a demo and try to invite as many people into that demo as possible. Besides going through case studies and examples of how other builders are using it, you know, we do work with over 20 percent of the communities in the US right now. So, there are a lot of examples from different builders using the technology.

But most importantly, get your data in there. It's easy to get started. Get your data in [00:22:00] there and start to analyze your data versus data that we could show you in a demo. And then once clients start to see their data in there, it starts to like unlock ideas and thoughts and different ways for them to action. Beause they actually know their communities better than we do.

What we do is we know the consumer. So, when we start to bring this consumer information to them, they're able to start to connect dots pretty quickly. But the best way to do it is getting their information in there so they can connect the dots as quickly as possible. It means more to them when they see their data in it, as opposed to a demo account.

Greg Bray: Do you feel like builders are still behind in the sense of wanting this kind of data compared to other industries, or are we finally starting to recognize as an industry that we need to take advantage of tools like this?

John Peragine: I've been very, very encouraged with the conversations I've had over the last 18 months. It seems like there has been a turning of the tides, and a lot of smart people that are [00:23:00] curious about data. I think the real estate industry knows they kick off a lot of the data, that data is valuable to them. I think a lot of the data that they've used and valued in the past has been around maybe land or around property information, but not necessarily around the consumer.

So, I think there's been a real opening of curiosity of, like, we need to learn more about the consumer. Companies are hiring data analysts, and marketing teams are definitely leaning into understanding more about the consumer. It's definitely being spoken about from, the Builder 20, all the way down to smaller home builders that have smaller marketing teams also know that they need to have this to have a competitive advantage, right?

So, the more you can know about your consumer, you can have a competitive advantage. There were early adopters a couple of years ago, and now you see there's a movement towards getting your hands on this kind of stuff, which is really encouraging to us.

Greg Bray: Well, John, we appreciate you sharing so much insight and time with us today. I love again, those examples of simple changes that had a big [00:24:00] impact. Do you have any kind of last thoughts or words of advice you want to leave with our audience today?

John Peragine: Yeah, I guess the last thoughts are, all this information is knowable. It's available. It's easy to activate. It's not really a hard thing to do. I know data is kind of like a big, scary word, but we're a partner with Google. Within three clicks in Google Tag Manager, your account set up, so it's pretty easy, pretty simple. So, you don't need like a lot of lift. It's not taxing. It's meant to be easy and not taxing. With this big movement towards everything being consumer first and consumers in control, as a home builder marketer, the best thing you could do is understand as much about your consumer in real-time as possible.

Greg Bray: Well, John, if somebody wants to learn more and connect with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

John Peragine: Yeah, the best way to get in touch is go to audiencetown.com or you can just email me at john@audiencetown.com or find us at one of the events. We've been on the circuit. We love the circuit.

We love the Home Builder Digital [00:25:00] Marketing Summit, which was awesome in Raleigh this year. Our next big one will be the National Association of Home Builders, the IBS show in Vegas, where we will be announcing a really big announcement for us of a new feature. We're partnering with a very large data company to bring a lot of advancement to the space. There's going to be a big announcement there with us in Sales Central with Audience Town, a top 20 builder, and our other partner who's going to be partnering with us on new project. So, excited.

Greg Bray: Can't wait. And Kevin, look at that. People are learning about stuff here first, even before IBS.

Kevin Weitzel: Before it even happens. What? Anytime we can get the scoop on something. This is awesome.

John Peragine: You guys are getting the scoop.

Kevin Weitzel: Swing by Sales Central at IBS. Get it here right from the horse's mouth.

Greg Bray: Well, John, thanks again for spending time with us. 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 [00:26:00] you.