254 Innovative Home Builder Digital Marketing - Melissa Cervin Feb 5 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, Melissa Cervin. Melissa is the VP of Marketing at Lombardo Homes. Welcome, Melissa. Thanks for being with us.

Melissa Cervin: Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Greg Bray: Well, let's start off just getting to know a little bit about you. Give us that quick kind of background and overview about yourself.

Melissa Cervin: Well, currently I'm the VP of marketing for Lombardo Homes. I've been here with Lombardo for about 13 years, [00:01:00] but I have spent my entire career in the home building industry. I've been doing this now for about 25 years. I started accidentally as a temp job for a builder. Once I got that temp job, I just never left. I changed my major in college and here I stayed.

Kevin Weitzel: Before we jump further into that, we need to know some personal tidbit about you that has nothing to do with work, the homebuilding industry, or family.

Melissa Cervin: Okay. So, I actually love to work out. I was wildly intimidated by barbell and recently took that up. I'm small, I'm 4'11 and people tend to walk into a class and take one look at me and think, Well, she's a little girl, what does she have? So, my favorite thing to do is to 100 percent compete with everyone in class, and 9 times out of 10, I am able to blow most of the class away because I am wildly and unexpectedly strong. So, my favorite thing to do is to watch certain people walk in and know that they think they're going [00:02:00] to kill me and I'm able to do the opposite.

Kevin Weitzel: Now we talking like Olympic powerlifting, like, lean and jerk that kind of stuff or what?

Melissa Cervin: Yeah, it was that kind of stuff, you know, doing the barbell squats and whatever else. And typically there is some level of a high-intensity workout at the end, you know, 10 minute. So, my goal is to lift as much weight as possible. Now I'm not saying that when a man walks in, that I can lift more weight, but when you put a timer to it, and try to do the activities, I'm usually the first one done. I feel really weird about saying that, but it's a real thing. I love to do that.

Kevin Weitzel: What's funny is Greg doesn't even know this little factoid about me that I used to be like not a world record holder, but I used to do a lot of crunches. I did so many crunches that I blew up my abdominal wall and that's what gives me the appearance of having a beer gut.

Too many crunches. I overdid it.

Greg Bray: I thought you were going to say crunches like on potato chips or something, but.

Kevin Weitzel: No, I do those too.

Greg Bray: Well, Melissa, so obviously there's a competitive streak in there, okay, good to know.

Melissa Cervin: There is.

Greg Bray: Well, tell us a [00:03:00] little bit more about your journey beyond just, you got that temp job and you stayed, but what was it about home building that made you want to stay?

Melissa Cervin: Being in marketing, especially I love the fact that this job is 100 percent the same while never, ever, ever being the same. So, at the end of the day, the fundamentals of marketing is the same. I could go market any product for any company, really, because marketing is essentially the same. But my day, every single, day, or every single community that I open or model that I open, it's never the same. And there's something about that energy and activity. And having such a great understanding of marketing but not having the same day ever that I love. But there's also such an emotion to home building.

Again, when I was in school, I didn't expect to do this, and if I would have told younger me that this is what I was going to grow up and do for the [00:04:00] rest of my life, this isn't where I saw it, but I can't imagine doing anything else. And that's why I've just never left the industry, and I won't ever leave the industry.

Greg Bray: Well, Melissa, tell us a little more about Lombardo Homes, where you guys build, the type of buyers that you work with.

Melissa Cervin: Lombardo Homes has multiple divisions. We're in both Michigan and Missouri. The Detroit area in Michigan and in Missouri, we have a division in St. Louis and another one in Columbia, and we're opening one in Lake of the Ozarks right now.

We have everything from production homes, which is what we build primarily in Michigan to custom homes in Michigan. We're building from a million on up in our custom homes division and then down in the Missouri area, both of our divisions are custom homes divisions down there.

Greg Bray: Is that tricky for you as a marketer to have such a wide variety of product going on? How do you balance that?

Melissa Cervin: It is tricky to have a wide variety of product. It's [00:05:00] also really interesting because even though we're the same company, we're run more like franchises, so it is not uncommon for the different divisions to actually be going in different directions at the same time. I've literally had both of my division sales managers make a change in the same week to go exactly the opposite way and do different things at the same time. So, it's interesting to balance, but in some ways, it's no different than any of the communities we market where my divisions have different, personalities and you know those, and you learn those and you manage to them based on what the business is.

Kevin Weitzel: Now, we don't need to know any kind of numbers or anything, but do you have like separate budgets for like a first-time buyer-type home versus a million-dollar home? Is it like an 80/20 split is a 50/50 split? How do you decipher and differentiate?

Melissa Cervin: We actually have completely separate budgets. So, each division has a different business model, if you will, so [00:06:00] each, has a completely separate budget. So, yes, my budget for the completely custom in Michigan is very different than my budget for the production homes in Michigan. But then again, to even give you numbers, it's sort of difficult because, you know, our custom homes division only does about 40 homes a year where our production is doing, you know, 450 or 500 homes a year.

Kevin Weitzel: So, no cookies in the production homes, just in the custom homes.

Melissa Cervin: Exactly. Yeah. You only get water in our production, but you get soda in the custom.

Greg Bray: So Melissa, with that difference, how do you structure your team? It sounds like you're at corporate trying to serve these different divisions. Do you have people that work specifically with each one or do you treat them kind of like your a little agency with clients or how do you structure that?

Melissa Cervin: We run them by state, and then we do have different team members who specialize in some of the different divisions. So, my team answers rolls up to me, but I do have a marketing coordinator in St. Louis, or [00:07:00] in the Missouri, I should say, who is there, you know, boots on the ground. She gets to see, hear, feel all of the things that I don't day in and day out because I only visit once a month. So, she's there for the day-to-day.

And then in Michigan, I have an area marketing manager and two marketing coordinators that roll up. We basically divide out our divisions where we've got one that handles the custom home division, and then the two marketing coordinators divvy up all of our communities based on, we sort of have a westside/eastside set up to our footprint here. That's how we handle, the different tasks and the different communities within that.

Greg Bray: So as someone who has been working in home builder marketing for more than a year, how have you seen the evolution of the digital piece of your marketing over the last little bit of your career? Has that surprised you? Are you embracing it? Do you love it? Do you hate it? You know, tell us kind of your experience.

Melissa Cervin: I love it, and I actually love to tell this [00:08:00] story. It's so interesting when you have been doing this as long as I have and you talk to someone who's only been doing it maybe for a year or two or even five, when I think back to when I first started, my budget was actually significantly larger for less homes.

But back in my day, our number one tool to market new homes was the real estate section of the newspaper. I remember wholeheartedly spending a million dollars a year just fighting out for the front page of the real estate section with other builders. And there's so many people, if you've only been doing this for a year or two, what is the newspaper? I mean, in all seriousness.

It's interesting, too, because when you look back to the very beginning of my career, it was newspaper, it was weekend directional signs. We still get this answer a lot, it's not true, but people then really did say that they learned of our community through signage. Postcards, postcard mailers were a thing.

But when you think of all of these things, there was so little data. I had to rely on the fact that the [00:09:00] newspaper serviced this demographic and it had this many subscribers and a billboard. A hundred thousand people may pass it and maybe you could get a male/female skew, but. Radio stations, they'd have, you know, the station demographic and you just kind of had to hopefully find what fit the demographic you were looking for.

But there was no way to actually be able to tell were the people I wanted to reach, were they seeing my ad. Were they interacting with my ad? Did they take action on my ad? You had to use correlations. I ran an ad this weekend and my traffic was up 10 percent this weekend and therefore, newspaper must work. That's realistically, in a nutshell, how it worked back then.

Where today, first of all, a lot of those things are just antiquated and don't necessarily exist in our marketing world. But now, we have the ability to be so targeted in our marketing with almost everything we do. We can specify if we want information to go, you know, male or female if we want it to go to certain geo targets. We're beyond even, you know, zip [00:10:00] codes and things of that nature, like the old postcards.

But not only can we target exactly who our message is going to, but we have the ability to get information back from some of these tools that we're using because they are digital. So when people do interact with us, I know exactly who we're getting and you can get some of that real-time behavioral data. They're two completely different worlds and I'm actually really, really glad that I've had experience in both of them because I do love the technology.

I do embrace it, sometimes a little bit too much, because now I've got so much data that I'm in the world of, Okay, we didn't have data. So, I'm over here just like, yep, give me more. I want that. I want that. Now I have to figure out what am I doing with all this data. How am I disseminating it out to the rest of my team members so that we're able to use it all to make decisions on the business and whether or not we need to change some of our processes or product based on information we're getting?

But it's so exciting to actually be able to [00:11:00] target your marketing, especially when I know back in the day we had nothing like this. Like I look back and wonder sometimes how we sold houses because it was just such a throw a dart in the wall and hope it sticks.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah, because you're not just looking at, how many clicks you're getting to a page and how many opens you're getting into an email. I mean, you're looking at what colors are people selecting when they're using a visualizer. You're looking at what options are not only being chosen but which ones are being clicked on. So, they might be clicking on the gourmet kitchen, but if you're not converting to selling the gourmet kitchen, well, then something needs to change there. Is it the messaging? Is it the product? Is it the pricing? Whatever it may be, correct?

Melissa Cervin: Exactly. So, we did several years ago, roll out some interactive tools. We've got interactive site maps and floor plans and also our interactive design tool. Originally, when I first started down that pathway, it was really about customer experience. That's what drove the decision to go in that direction. We weren't even talking stats and data yet. It was just about sort of [00:12:00] improving engagement and improving that customer experience. And then from that, it was like, well, by the way, here's the information that's available.

So, I love using the interactive sitemaps as an example of how they impact our business. One of the opportunities that we have with interactive sitemaps is if we get these up on our website 30, 60, 90 days before we grand open a community, I have the ability to go in and see. Who's clicking on what home sites? I actually get a heat map, so I'm able to take that information and use it to help with setting lot premiums.

And again, there's some historical data. We know that large home sites or home sites are back to open space, you can set a higher lot premium on, but what happens when you have 10 home sites that are all exactly the same and they back to something that's maybe a little less desirable? Typically, you have a lower premium on them and typically you price them all the same. But now this tool allows me to see that of those 10 home sites, while on a site map, they all look the same to me for whatever reason lot [00:13:00] 130 is getting more clicks than all the rest of them. So, maybe I should price that one a little bit higher than the others. So, there's an opportunity in that.

But then, yes, I mean, sometimes I know in our market, we hear a lot, we have to have the one-and-a-half story and we've rolled it out under pressure. And then you've got this data now to show we don't need a one-and-a-half-story floor plan. No one's clicking on it. No one wants it. So, why are we maintaining it? Let's take that off of the lineup. So, it does, It gives you, like I said, that real-time behavioral data that you can use to then make decisions and even target your marketing with.

Greg Bray: So, Melissa, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the most people that are investing in these interactive tools are thinking of it from a sales perspective, not from a product research perspective like you just described. And the idea that you can get this intelligence about what your buyers are interested in, and it can actually make you money because you can tweak the lot premiums or [00:14:00] discontinue an option or add another option and things like that. I don't think most people are making those kinds of connections. I mean, Kevin, are you talking to builders that are doing it that way? Because I think this is kind of special what Melissa is talking about.

Kevin Weitzel: The forward thinkers truly do come at it with that equation. They know that, okay, we can now assess our option counts. We can assess our product offering. Because when you start getting that actual real-time feedback, it is something that can create an actionable item, completely. You can wipe out entire product lines if you really wanted to. I mean, you can determine what, nobody's buying cottages. Well, if they're not buying cottages and they're all only buying these giant McMansions, well, we need to concentrate on giant McMansions, you know?

I know that's an oversimplification, but it truly does come down to it. I'll give you a good example. Here's a great example, office, the den, homebuilders were showing that as an option. Now, a lot of homebuilders, with the number of people who work from home, show the den as the standard and the third bedroom, fourth bedroom, whatever in place of that, as the option.

Greg Bray: So Melissa, are there [00:15:00] other things that you're using from your web and marketing data that's driving product choices as opposed to just sales leads? The same way that you're using the types of click data and things that you're getting on the lots, are you driving down into specific options like Kevin was talking about and things like that, going back to the team and saying, Hey, stop making that and start making this.

Melissa Cervin: That again is what's so incredible and the best part. Like I keep reiterating this, but it's real-time. It's, as it's happening, so you can see trends coming and trends going. One example that I like to use is we were a little late to the ball game in the modern farmhouse elevation. You know, it was something that became really, really hot. We hadn't moved on it yet. And right about the time that we finally rolled it out, we've noticed that that trend is on its way out.

So, we've shifted focus and we're looking at some more contemporary elevations at this point because that's what's getting a lot of interaction at this point, but you can actually see how some of these [00:16:00] trends, you can see them starting, you can see them at their height, and then, you can be in the middle of it and go, wow, we're on the downhill of that.

Fireplaces is another great one. We've had this age-old argument, fireplaces and dining rooms. Again, historically, we're using, you know, sort of our gut and what we've done previously to drive decisions. And I'm not saying that there wasn't some statistical data behind it, but a lot of what we've done for many, many years was what we've done previously and gut.

Those are two things that took a really long time to go away, but the vast majority of Americans do not have the need for a formal dining room. They're not using it, or you can identify maybe certain demographics that do still want it while others don't. So, those are things that I can actually see through these tools. You have to have a fireplace. Who wouldn't want to not have a fireplace? Well, surprisingly, not everyone requires a fireplace anymore. But that was one of those like, oh, we can't possibly build a house without a fireplace.

Greg Bray: So, Melissa, [00:17:00] beyond then kind of the insights into product choices and desires, what other impacts have you seen from these tools just helping your buyers through their process and improving their experience as they interact with you guys?

Melissa Cervin: Well, I am going to say on my end, one of the things that I am grateful for, it translates into the customer experiences. Just having these interactive tools, it increases the time that our customers are spending on the website significantly. Sometimes it's doubling or even tripling how much time they're spending on our website. And while they're doing that, they're actually building their home. They're not just playing with a floor plan. Like, once you start clicking on these different things, you pick your lot and you start picking your options. Those options start making it their house and not just a floor plan so that process of becoming emotionally attached to the home starts. That is huge.

And then, it translates over, we actually have customers going all the way through and creating a brochure and either emailing it into a sales team member or walking into the sales [00:18:00] office with their brochure. So, they've already gone through the process of picking a home site, picking their floor plan, going through their options. So, that process of taking them from first meeting to contract, that cycle time has gotten shorter.

It has also helped from the design studio standpoint in that we are able to show colors and we show a handful of interior options as well, flooring, countertops, cabinets. So, even that process of making color selections, like those appointments have been able to get shorter because people, they've had time to talk about it. They hash out the arguments at home a little bit more, and when they come in, they're more comfortable with the decisions that they make and it doesn't take as long for them to finish that appointment and sign on their final selections.

Greg Bray: There's some people listening because believe it or not, there are some builders that don't have these tools yet. I know it might come as a shock that some haven't invested here. There's even some builders Kevin and I've looked at that still have black-and-white elevation drawings.

Kevin Weitzel: Stick drawings right out of their blueprints, [00:19:00] man. Oh, horrible.

Greg Bray: So Melissa, for the marketers who are saying, I want this, but I'm having trouble convincing the powers that be that control the budget to make some of the investments. What kind of advice would you give them in how to talk to senior leadership about the benefits of these types of interactive tools?

Melissa Cervin: I think there's a couple of things I would say. First of all, believe it or not, it took many years for me to battle to get to the point that we are. Marketing is always just fun and cool, so it gets dismissed a little bit. One of the reasons I love to be able to talk about this is, for some of the things we just laid out, especially that behavioral data, where you can talk about the impacts it has on the business.

And you start taking it from being a fun, cool tool for the customers, and there's so much involved just in that, like I talked about, them getting emotionally attached, cutting down on cycle time, getting them to contract sooner, getting them more comfortable with their options. There's so much in it from the customer standpoint, but then being able to talk to your [00:20:00] team about how this can actually impact your bottom line as a customer.

This isn't just fun and cool. This is actually one of our strongest business tools. If you can sort of build that out and show your team the ways in which it will impact the business and how you can actually start making really important decisions with actual black-and-white data, then it's easier to swallow the investment this is.

I would also say you need to build a plan where it's baby steps. If you are doing black-and-white drawings straight out of the plan right now, maybe your first step is going to color renderings, getting that photo-real rendering, and making that investment. Because it's really hard to jump from where you're at to the investment of going all the way to everything interactive. I think we all understand that not all companies are able to do that quickly or easily. So, make a 1-year plan or a 5-year plan where you add something new to it every year and take the baby steps, but just do each step right.

Kevin Weitzel: For builders that have multiple [00:21:00] models at a community, I would argue the opposite of that. In the fact that they don't have to worry about, can they make the decision? It's a very easy decision to make because financially, they're paying more for the dirt on one model home than it costs them to implement an entire digital package on all their models. So, yeah, unless you're that one weird builder that only operates out of a small sales center and they sell off to different locations. That's fine. Then my argument gets nullified.

However, if they've got multiple models, kill one of those models and fund your marketing team's digital assets. The proof is in the pudding. When it happens, you will see dessert on the table. Shorter sales cycles, in the form of higher profit margins, and more efficient leads. They're self-closing leads.

Melissa Cervin: Absolutely.

Greg Bray: Well, and I think that gets right down to the fact that marketing should generate a return, right? It shouldn't be an expense. It should be an investment that generates and pays for itself multiple times over. Melissa, do you guys have, with all your [00:22:00] data that you look at, are you able to then connect the actual sales back and say, hey, these sales came from these marketing campaigns? Are you guys all the way hooked in through the whole process?

Melissa Cervin: We're most of the way hooked into that process.

Greg Bray: Fair enough.

Melissa Cervin: So, we have made some changes in recent years to our CRM and we're in the process of looking for a new ERP, things of that nature. So, we sort of jumped in feet first and we're working back to connecting all the data and getting the right information into our CRM to be able to pull out all of the reports. I mean, that's really important to us.

It's funny. I was just talking with my division president this week about what reports we need to change and what information is still missing so that we can tie not just our interactive tools, but everything we're doing, you know, the UTours and being able to drill down to exactly what is working, what isn't working and where the holes are, and I would encourage everyone to do just that.

It does take time. Like I said, I am not perfect at it. But being able to look at these reports and say, okay, this is where the [00:23:00] interactive tools are really performing. You know, UTour has increased our traffic by this much. You know, interactive tools by this much. And then being able to turn that into that monetary number and be able to show that these tools are paying for themselves.

Greg Bray: Yeah, it's harder than you might think to connect all those data pieces together, isn't it? It takes some work.

Melissa Cervin: You know, it's funny, that's the part of this that I'm most eager to get, but it's hard because there's so many different things you have to rely on as far as information getting inputted in the right spot, the sales manager is putting things into the CRM, having the tools be able to talk to each other, which is probably my biggest frustration.

The more and more I get involved in all of the different things we're doing, everything is separate. So, unfortunately, there is a lot of manual work that has to go into pulling a lot of this data together to be able to get that information. Which is why it's so challenging.

Greg Bray: Yeah. In today's world, marketing has to make friends with IT.

Melissa Cervin: That is true. That is very, very true.

Greg Bray: Well, [00:24:00] Melissa, when you talk about your reports when you get in the office first thing, and there's just like two numbers you need to check from yesterday, what are those top two metrics that you're looking at, just first thing before you get into your day?

Melissa Cervin: So, they actually change all of the time. And I hope that this is not a right or wrong question 'cause if my division president's asking, he's gonna tell me traffic and I'm still arguing that traffic isn't physical traffic, everything online counts too. But it changes for me what those numbers are. lately, I love to look at my insights. So, going into those reports to see my insights from my interactive tools.

Not only tell me again, you know, what color options or structural options or floor plans people are looking at, but it also tells me actively who's on our website, like in that very moment and who has visited, like, just that snapshot of, you know, I can do whatever the last hour, the last 12 hours, the last 2 days. So, I love to look at that and see what's going on.

And then, I just recently started working with another company that allows me to look at some of [00:25:00] the data that goes into my different search terms. So, it helps me see the demographic of people that are actually on my website looking at my different communities, and then how that translates into the search terms I'm using for marketing for those communities. So, that's the stuff that I've been diving into most recently.

Kevin Weitzel: Not just the click and what did they touch, but the demographics of the people behind it.

Melissa Cervin: In a relationship that I've started here just over the summer allows me to kind of do that step before people start interacting with my tools. So, just being able to say, Hey, I had a thousand people that in the last 30 days that clicked into this community of those people, this is the breakdown of the demographic. It's your typical demographic information, male versus female and age, household income. But then it also gets into some of the nitty gritty, like activities that they like to do. Pet owners, if they have a dog or a cat or more than one of those, you know, down to whether or not they have [00:26:00] goldfish,

Kevin Weitzel: That's like Audience Town. They do that.

Melissa Cervin: Yep, Audience Town.

Kevin Weitzel: As you were talking, I'm like, that sounds just like Audience Town.

Melissa Cervin: Yeah. No, so it is Audience Town. And that was something that I fell into this summer and started with a conversation where I was like, well, that sounds really interesting. Please tell me more about that and here I am now a client. So, that's my new sort of fascinating thing. I can't really stay out of it. I love to go in there and see what's going on, see what I'm getting. And it gives me such a detail of my different communities.

You know, we go into these different communities and we create a community persona and a family and we know who our demographic is, but I love being able to go in and now I actually have proof or not of who that demographic is. And it gives me the ability to then change my marketing to target them more directly. You know, when you do have that person who has two plus dogs, all of a sudden, I want to talk more about the features in our home that cater to dogs, whether it be the big yards or the bark park amenity we have in that community, or the dog wash in the mudrooms.

It's very, very [00:27:00] interesting because it's almost like it's that step before they're interacting with my interactive tools where I'm getting that real live behavioral data on my tools. I can now see what they're looking at, so I can make sure if they think they're not interested and they want to go away, well, wait, let me change my marketing a little bit and get you back.

Kevin Weitzel: I love, this is my first time hearing it. Did you call it a bark park instead of a dog park?

Melissa Cervin: Yeah, it's a bark park.

Kevin Weitzel: I freaking love that, the bark park. Yeah, I'm heading over to the bark park. Lucy's got to go, you know.

That's cool.

Greg Bray: Well, Melissa, we appreciate you spending so much time with us today and sharing so freely. Do you have any last thoughts or words of advice you'd like to leave with those home building marketers out there today that are listening?

Melissa Cervin: I do. I will say that, and maybe I can say this because of my vintage age at this point, but you know, we say in this industry, I think it's widely known that in general, builders are slow to innovate, but quick to copy. The only regret I have is sometimes being slow to innovate and quick to [00:28:00] copy. Copying is comfortable because it's tried and true. You've seen other people do it. Take the chance, take the risk. You grow either way. If it's the right thing, you grow from it. If there's something that isn't exactly right in whatever that new innovation is or that risk that you take, you learn from that too.

But especially with some of the stuff, this was all new and revolutionary. Even going back just four or five years ago, I couldn't have imagined how quickly we would advance. And it was a little nerve-wracking, but I wish that in my career, I would have spent less time being concerned about the risks. Like, I've had very few risks that I've taken that haven't paid off. So, I wish I would have spent less time in that copy phase.

Kevin Weitzel: A very great person once said that you should get comfortable in the leading edge. You can avoid the bleeding edge and you can avoid the tail end, but be comfortable in that leading edge, and you will find a lot more success and faster moving to your goals.

Melissa Cervin: And that was a much more eloquent way of saying that, but exactly that. If there's anything I could say to anyone is [00:29:00] exactly that.

Kevin Weitzel: I just got to plug one of my best friends in the planet. I got to plug Stuart Platt on that.

Greg Bray: And you got called eloquent at the same time.

Kevin Weitzel: Yes. Yes. Oh my goodness. That doesn't happen with these sideburns.

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

Melissa Cervin: I am on LinkedIn, Melissa Cervin. You can reach out to me that way. Obviously email, I think we're all glued to it these days at mcervin@lombardohomes.com.

Greg Bray: Well, thanks again for Melissa, for being 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 you. [00:30:00]