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Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast Digital Marketing Podcast Hosted by Greg Bray and Kevin Weitzel

257 Exceptional Marketing Requires Adaptability - Tom Nelson

This week on The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast, Tom Nelson of NDG Communications joins Greg and Kevin to discuss why exceptional home builder digital marketing requires adaptability and open-mindedness. 

Unforeseen circumstances often impact the best marketing plans, so home builder digital marketers must be flexible. Tom says, “I've found two constants in new home marketing. One is the goal is always the same. I need more leads, more sales. I've been hearing that since the late nineties. In a good market or in a bad market, we need more leads, more sales. But the reality has been, we've never achieved those goals the same way twice. Every year, how we're doing it has to change because the technology is evolving, consumer preferences are evolving. Then you have black swan events like COVID and, you know, everything basically changes in that regard.”

It's impossible to plan for every scenario when it comes to marketing, so being receptive to change is the key to success. Tom says, “So, change is always inevitable in any growing organization, but in marketing, the technology is just going so fast. You just have to adapt. And anyone tells you they have all the answers is completely not being honest with you. It takes a lot of A/B testing, a lot of tinkering, a lot of trial and error, but you learn so much through the process. You have to embrace that as a marketer, the pretty picture is only one part of it. A good message is only part of it. There's just too many moving parts and pieces that all have to come together for success.”

Because there are so many variables at play, home builder digital marketing requires continual experimentation and adjustment. Tom says, “You know, I say marketing in today's world is a lot like golf. You know, you can be doing five things perfectly right and if you pick up your head, you're going to hit that ball poorly. Same sort of thing. There's so many nuances that, you know, you can get four things right and get one thing wrong, and then the marketing doesn't deliver the desired result. I think the thing that is a requirement of anybody in marketing right now is just continuous growth and learning, being open, being adaptable and always trying new things.”

Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about why flexibility is vital to successful home builder digital marketing.
 

About the Guest:

Tom founded NDG in 2002, growing it into a nationally recognized advertising and marketing agency serving homebuilders, developers, and real estate firms. For over two decades, he has played a pivotal role in shaping marketing strategies for builders and developers nationwide. In 2020, this experience inspired him to launch UTour, the leading platform for self-guided home tours in the new home industry. Recently inducted into NVBIA’s Hall of Fame, Tom is an active member of NAHB, NVBIA, MBIA, and WMSMC. He is also a regular speaker at industry events, including NAHB’s International Builders’ Show (IBS).

Transcript

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 today to have joining us Tom Nelson. Tom is the president of NDG Communications and he's also the founder of UTour that does the self guiding home tours. Welcome, Tom. Thanks for being with us. 

Tom Nelson: Thanks for having me. I appreciate being with you guys. 

Greg Bray: Well, Tom, let's start off and just give us the quick background and overview and tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Tom Nelson: Yeah, Tom Nelson, uh, like you mentioned. I own NDG [00:01:00] Communications. We're performance marketing firm. We've been working with home builders since really the late 90s, doing everything from brand strategy, lead generation to digital development. We founded and created UTour in 2020 right before the pandemic hit. Very blessed to have a lot of success there with that separate entity which we, uh, eventually sold to Zonda in August of 2023.

Kevin Weitzel: So, before we jump in anything further, we have to know some factoid about yourself that has nothing to do with work, family, or the home building industry. 

Tom Nelson: Okay. Well, most people don't know this. I grew up on a tobacco farm in Southern Maryland. I don't think I had air conditioning till I was 10 or 12 years old. My other fun fact that people seem to love is I played college football with Dan Quinn. He's the current head coach of the Washington Commanders.

Greg Bray: Does that get you any tickets?

Tom Nelson: I try not to be that guy that asks for favors and everything, but watching the success that he's had and, [00:02:00] uh, how he's turned the Commanders around and he's done that everywhere he's gone. It's just been really great to watch all of his hard work pay off. So, it's made football a lot of fun, obviously.

Kevin Weitzel: All right. Now I have to hear about this tobacco farm. Was this like a family farm or what was it? 

Tom Nelson: Yeah, it's a family farm in a small, small town called Chaptico in Maryland. We had a 500-acre tobacco farm. My father's one of 15 and all of my cousins and uncles and everything, we all worked the farm and that's kind of how we grew up. It was very retro in a lot of ways. You know, there's a lot of things we were living in the early eighties, growing up as a kid, late seventies, early eighties, that seemed very dated, uh, the way we were doing things. It's a very manual crop by hand, but taught me an awful lot of work ethic, taught me hard work, uh, family, all that good stuff.

I would work year round and in April, I would go to the tobacco market and sell my tobacco that my grandfather was gracious enough to give us all our little piece of land. And next thing you know, I'm 12 years old and I got three [00:03:00] grand. So, I had a new dirt bike every year. 

Kevin Weitzel: Nice. That's cool.

Greg Bray: Well, Tom, how do you go from picking tobacco to getting into marketing and even more specifically into home builder marketing?
 
Tom Nelson: Well, obviously, as I mentioned, I played football and that got me to college because I realized as much as I love the family and rural area and everything, I knew I did not want to be relying on the weather and all those things that happens in farming. And always was very much into the visual aspect of marketing. I have a graphic design degree that I haven't used in 25 years but, you know, just the whole thing of communications and advertising really took me early on and started my career in that and just kind of evolved from there. 

When I was 24, I became self employed doing marketing, graphic design. It was very, very early on. We're talking 1997, very early days of the internet, was starting to dabble in digital development. And my father in law was very gracious and let me [00:04:00] work out of his office space. He was a developer and came into my office one day, came upstairs and said, Hey, I just kicked two national home builders out of my community. I'm going to figure out how to build these houses myself, and you're going to help me sell and market them. And I was 24 years old and dumb and went, sounds great. Let's do it. 

Next thing you know, I'm going to planning commission meetings. I'm learning about construction draws. I sat in a sales trailer for six months. So, just really got to immerse myself in the business with him. Absolutely fell in love with it. Figured I could try to blend, you know, both of my interests of the whole marketing side along with the real estate side and that's kind of how the two kind of came together. 

Greg Bray: Well, tell us a little bit more about NDG Communications, the kind of services you guys are offering and who you choose to work with.

Tom Nelson: Sure. I mean, we basically focus on three main areas, you know, brand strategy. I would say, what you think of a traditional agency in terms of branding and collateral and messaging and all those [00:05:00] areas there. Lead generation, right? Digital marketing, same thing you do. As well as like, you know, the goal is how do we build the inbound marketing funnel, keep all of that going. 
The thing that's always interested me has always been on the prop tech side, the innovation side of it. You know, trying to talk to builders about a website in 1999, as you can imagine, was very difficult. I've always been interested on how we can use the technology to further the goal of the builder. We were building all different types of digital components, like, you know, sales center kiosks and touchscreens and, you know, we morphed into mobile applications.

And obviously, you know, with UTour the self guided tour application, it was always, was there a void that the technology could help us solve? Because it was always about achieving the goals of the builder. And in the case of UTour, I didn't invent self-guided tours. I just saw that there wasn't a really good platform for the builder's use of self-guided tour. So, I decided to take that and make it better. And so, that's kind of what we've always done.

And it's been just a lot of fun on the NDG [00:06:00] side, because when you're involved in all those areas, you're kind of in the trenches with the builder. You're living, breathing, and dying every week, just like they are. And it really just makes the creativity really thrive because you're always solving problems. 

Greg Bray: Well, Tom, the fact that you kind of mentioned so many different technology things I think really highlights where today's marketing really is. It's not just about graphic design anymore, right? Or something pretty. There's all these different tools. Tell us a little bit about what you've learned and seen in that journey of exploring all these different tools and the ways that marketing works today and some of the lessons you've seen come from that. 

Tom Nelson: Yeah, I mean, honestly, you got to think of yourself, the whole martech phrase comes to mind, you know, where you've got to be a blend of really being a technologist as well as a marketer. Because you can have all the best theories, you can write the best content in the world, if it's not going to the right person at the right time, that's where the technology comes into play, then it [00:07:00] really doesn't matter. So, you've got to have all these different moving parts and pieces that all work together. 

You know, I say marketing in today's world is a lot like golf. You know, you can be doing five things perfectly right and if you pick up your head, you're going to hit that ball poorly. Same sort of thing. There's so many nuances that, you know, you can get four things right and get one thing wrong, and then the marketing doesn't deliver the desired result. I think the thing that is a requirement of anybody in marketing right now is just continuous growth and learning, being open, being adaptable, and always trying new things.

Even though I'm dating myself here, I've mentioned I've been doing this since the late 90s. I've found two constants in new home marketing. One is the goal is always the same. I need more leads, more sales. I've been hearing that since the late nineties. In a good market or in a bad market, we need more leads, more sales. But the reality has been we've never achieved those goals the same way twice. Every year, how we're doing it has to [00:08:00] change because the technology is evolving, consumer preferences are evolving. Then you have black swan events like COVID and, you know, everything basically changes in that regard. 

So, change is always inevitable in any growing organization, but in marketing, the technology is just going so fast. You just have to adapt. And anyone tells you they have all the answers is completely not being honest with you. It takes a lot of A/B testing, a lot of tinkering, a lot of trial and error, but you learn so much through the process. You have to embrace that as a marketer. The pretty picture is only one part of it. A good message is only part of it. There's just too many moving parts and pieces that all have to come together for success. 

Kevin Weitzel: Tom, you bring up an interesting fact and that is that what builders say is that they want more leads and they want more sales. But I have like a little asterisk next to that because I don't think it should just be more leads. I think it should be more qualified leads. Too often builders forget about that qualified portion. Because just getting swings on your door doesn't mean that they're able to buy a home. You know, if you have [00:09:00] people that can't come up with a down or don't have an income, those leads are garbage.

Tom Nelson: Oh completely agree with you, but it's always a process, and how are you defining qualified, right? Because marketing defines qualified differently than sales does. And if we're truly talking mortgage loan qualification, it's a different story. I'm never going to get that through paid search. Right? So, it's a process of where we've got to bring in them and all your lead nurturing everything that goes into that to then validate, are you getting the right leads because a high enough percentage of those people you are finding out are qualified, are actually able to buy the home.

But, you know, when builders have said to us in the past, we want more leads. Well, that's obvious to me. I always ask them why. Why tells me what the real problem is, and 9 times out of 10, it's well, we need more sales. Okay. Why do we need more sales? Well, we haven't hit our sales goal. Okay, let's start unpacking why.

Because not saying that you don't need more leads. I'm not saying you don't. All I'm saying is if there's other problems down the funnel that [00:10:00] are going on, if I give you more leads, you're not going to convert them and all we did was lose time and money. So, you know, really wanted to understand the whys behind all of that.

Now, if it is you're kicking butt and taking names and you just want to step your foot on the gas and it's just about, you know, more. Hey, great. You know, that's an awesome option too. So, I don't want to imply that more leads is not what the builder needs. I just want to understand it a little bit more because if the reverse is true, you know like I said, we don't want to be throwing good money after bad. 

Greg Bray: Tom, I really like that golf analogy. Now, Kevin's the good golfer. I'm not the good golfer, but that idea of all the different parts and pieces that have to come together. I've had conversations, you know, about a particular technology, say like geofencing and a builder says, Oh, we tried that. It didn't work. It doesn't work. Or about a website. It's like, Oh, we don't get leads from our website, so it's not worth spending any money on, you know, or things like that. I just cringe when I hear these global judgments when it's like, well, it could be because you haven't done these other things or, you know, wrong message, [00:11:00] wrong audience, wrong focus, wrong whatever. How do you talk to builders who kind of throw out, you know, and dismiss certain tactics or technologies just out of the gate because they just, oh, I tried it. It didn't work, or it doesn't apply to us. 

Tom Nelson: Well, I just ask a lot more questions to kind of find out, you know, what was that event that they're basing that judgment off of. Because again, marketing is so much more complex. It's not black and white. We all want the easy button. We all know that if you want to get a speaking engagement, all you have to do is say seven secrets to this or three easy steps to that, right? We all want the shortcut. It's human nature to do that.

But I really want to understand why are you basically saying that? Because typically, there's a predetermined motivation that they basically have that they're trying to really push the narrative and just uses actually, Oh, we did that once. I never want to do that again. Yeah, unpack that for me. 

Our industry is unique. The first half of my career, nobody tracked a thing. And so, we were trying to present [00:12:00] reports and analytics and really trying to explain to a builder why I wanted to do UTM tracking 15 years ago, you know, was crazy town to them a little bit. We've gotten over that hump, but we've gone another extreme where the attribution makes all the decisions, which is a smart thing to do, except for the fact that 90 percent of the builders I see are only looking at last touch attribution. So, they don't have the full story.

So, what we really need to be doing as an industry is really adopting a multi-touch attribution models so that you can understand how all the various technologies are working together for the path. I think that's why you hear a lot of, well, that didn't work. Why? Because they're only looking at the last touch attribution. Well, you know, my data tells me, you know, they think they're making a decision based off data. My data tells me that that channel does not work. But really what they don't understand is, you know, most of the sites we see, it takes three visits to the site for a conversion. 

Well, what was the first touch that even made [00:13:00] that person aware of your community or your brand or whatever the case may be? That first touch is probably not what's recorded when they actually fill out the registration form because it wasn't the last thing that they basically saw. You know, that's why there's a lot of love given to remarketing campaigns, right? Because it's usually that remarketing that got them to come back. But we're ignoring how they get there in the first place.

Kevin Weitzel: My children, they're both 25 and almost 27 now. I told them as they were entering the workforce, I said, keep these two things in mind. One is that speaking or dealing with things in absolutes is a huge mistake. And two, always look at red flags of generalities. When you speak in a general term that like you were saying this didn't work, but why didn't it work is the more important question. Because just because it didn't work this one aspect if you change the narrative or change the delivery method, it could possibly be one of the most successful campaigns you've ever done.

Tom Nelson: Well, and to your point, I can give you guys a perfect example of that. Sometimes it's just like product market fit or place and [00:14:00] time. That's like saying, Hey, we're never using QR codes again cause they didn't work. Cause you're right when they first came out, they didn't really work for people, you know, and then after COVID, you know, it was like the whole change.

Well, what did we really learn from a QR code in the early onset? They were just misused, that people just didn't trust them after that. You know, you had to download a separate application to make them work. You know, once it got built into the iPhone and once people realized that, you know, if you hit that QR code, you better take that person to the destination of what they're trying to do and not just drop them to a homepage and let them navigate themselves.

Once those two things were addressed, QR codes are an excellent tool. But I think we would all agree that 10 years ago, if you were trying to talk about QR codes, people were like, Oh, those don't really work. So, sometimes it's like you're right that, you know, that builder may be saying that this didn't work for them. Absolutely. And they're accurate in that statement, but it doesn't mean you should turn it off because maybe other scenarios or market conditions had to change for it to be relevant again. 

Greg Bray: So, Tom, following that thread, [00:15:00] what are a couple of big mistakes that you see builders make, either like with their websites or their digital marketing or things that cause them not to work because they're just not getting it right? What are some of those common mistakes that you see out there? 

Tom Nelson: I see a lot of disconnect between what the C-suite thinks is going on versus what's really happening boots on the ground. But yet the boots on the ground are having a hard time convincing, you know, because, you know, the C-suite, you know, whether it's sales or marketing, it's like, well, that's just an excuse. There's a little bit of that disconnect. And there's truisms in our industry, of course, but there's a lot of nuance in our industry as well. And, you know, I mean, a buyer profile can change three times in the life of one community, right? There's a lot of things that can basically happen.

So, I think one is what we've been talking about this whole time are those deep-seated absolutes are one that I see an awful lot. Not listening enough to [00:16:00] what might be really truly going on at the point of sale. Again, overemphasis on attribution is another one that I mentioned. Because again, last-touch attribution just doesn't give you a big enough picture.

I also think, uh, another big one, I see an awful lot in our industry is just a lot of the assumptions that are made as something as simple as the weekly traffic report, right? This industry lives and dies every single week. And we look at that traffic report and you hear the conversations all the time. Hey, you got 10 leads. Why didn't you have a sale? 

Well, most of those reports are flawed because we all know that sale that showed up on that report was someone you talked to two weeks ago or three weeks ago, or who knows, it's not a correlation of that week. So, I also understand why we look at data on a weekly basis, but I think sometimes we put just a bit too much emphasis in what that weekly traffic reports because it's too finite of a data set. You know, and what ends up happening sometimes, you know, you knee-jerk react and just [00:17:00] start chasing things instead of really stepping back and analyzing what might be going on. 

Greg Bray: So, then what for you, Tom, are like the top two or three metrics or key performance indicators that you think builders should be looking at regularly and trusting as part of all that reporting?

Tom Nelson: Well, there's a lot of obvious ones that, you know, guys like us have talked about at nauseam, you know, online visits, leads, appointments, sales. I mean, obviously those. We look at all the advertising performance metrics, you know, as far as, you know, click-through rates, conversions, all that. Those are the obvious ones. Everybody needs to do that. 

There's a couple of others that I've always looked at. I look at a life cycle, meaning how long does it take on average to go from first contact to contract? And I'm going to look at that data per community. Because I get this all the time, oh, you know, this region is really, really struggling. You know, and I get these globalization requests of, hey, can you look at this market because it really seems to be struggling? And it does happen from time to [00:18:00] time. But if I look at a builder's presence in that market, what I often find it's not that everything in that market is struggling, it's like one community or two communities. So, I'm trying to unpack that. 

So, what I've always suggested in looking at data is, yes, we need to have corporate-wide conversion averages. We need to have, you know, region-based averages, but also look into and create things that impact those averages like location. I can have very similar product just a couple of miles away, but the quality of that location will greatly impact the conversion even if it's the same product and we see that a lot.
Construction status. You know, the conversion rates. Let's look at them, so I'm not trying to compare a coming soon community where I'm in a sales trailer in a dirt field with a community that's two years in with a model home and a clubhouse and performing. So, really just getting beyond just the top-level company aggregation data, which you need, but what makes that up, and I want to start [00:19:00] looking at things at a community basis.

I also want to be looking at things like community counts. If you hear, oh, my gosh, we're down, you know, 20 percent year over year from where we were last year. Well, did you have a lot of community closeouts last year? Where do you stand? Are we comparing apples to apples? That's the one uniqueness of home building is these communities get on boarded, right, and you've got to spend money. If it comes on board, we all know it's not best practice, but it happens every single year. We're going to launch this new community December 12th. Right?

So, guess what? I got to do a bunch of marketing work and spend a lot of dollars, you know, in Q4 that I'm probably not going to see that revenue until Q1 the following year. So, that's where annual budgets can be a bit of a challenge instead of, you know, life of project budgets. But, yeah, really, really bringing in some of the information related to the communities and how that impacts those numbers are one of the things that I would always recommend and what we always do.

Greg Bray: I love those reminders because it is different than a lot of other [00:20:00] businesses because the product kind of ebbs and flows in its availability and things that on the surface are the same aren't exactly the same. And it's not quite like if you're selling this pair of shoes, it's the same shoes, no matter where you ship it. It's kind of all the same thing and this is a little different, you know, as far as what somebody is getting. Like you said, even the same exact home a few miles apart, there's differences in the neighborhood and the amenities nearby and all those kinds of things that are there.

Tom Nelson: Absolutely. 

Kevin Weitzel: So, if you look at grocery stores. Safeway is a grocery store we have out here in the West Coast. I don't know if you guys have 'em in your area, but we have this grocery store called Safeway. They're related to Albertsons. They have one specific store in South Scottsdale on Chaparral and Hayden Road for all you people that are locals. It's called the Singles Safeway and it outperforms almost every Safeway in the state of Arizona. And why? Because it is in the right dirt. It is surrounded by lots of young professional singles. When you go shopping there, people aren't shopping in their Walmart pajamas.[00:21:00] 

They're shopping in their finest duds. They're wearing their GQ look clothes and they've got it all going on, and literally people go to this store just for the singles atmosphere. It's better than going to a singles bar. It really is. So, when you look at a grocery store, sure, Safeway could be a Safeway, but depending on where the dirt is, can determine the success and the viability of that product.

So, just like Tom was saying that, if you open up an Intel plant right next to a brand new community, there's a lot of engineering jobs in there. There's a lot of manufacturing jobs in there. Those are high-paying, high-caliber jobs. If you're offering a first-time startup home, you're missing the market. You need to be looking at that upper-tier, you know, management-type home. So, I get it. Single Safeway. If you ever come to Arizona, stop on by. 

Greg Bray: Not shopping for that anymore, Kevin. Not shopping for that. Oh, gosh. Well, Tom, appreciate the thoughts and insights. I just want to tap into some of your technology experience as well, just because learning all these different technologies for marketers and sales teams and everything could be a challenge sometimes. As someone who's had experience helping [00:22:00] teams investigate and implement new technology into their processes, what are some of the tips you would have for a builder who's exploring different types of tools and trying to decide which one they should go with and how they make that process work better?

Tom Nelson: Yeah, that's a great question. Honestly, it speaks to the origin story of UTour. I always say work from the inside out, not the outside in. You know, it's like, oh, I heard of this product or this service, let's go look at it. And I think that's the wrong framing. It's what problems do you have and is there something out there that might help us solve this problem?

I can't sit here and tell you if I'm going to be intellectually honest, I go, Hey, you know what? I really want to really own self-taught. What I was trying to do was in 2017, I was trying to solve a problem for one of our builder clients where, you know, no matter what we did, we couldn't get more than 35 percent of the online registrations to show up and hold an appointment with a salesperson. And so, I was just trying to solve a problem. 

So, we did a deep dive into their data. They allowed us to [00:23:00] survey their visitors, and we only asked the people that registered on their website but never toured anything. And we literally just asked them, why didn't you show up? You're interested in something. You volunteered your information. Why would you never come on-site and visit the sales center? And now this was 2017, so it's pre-COVID, so everybody had a commute and everything. They told us they couldn't get there from 10 to 6. They had commutes to work, and then on weekends they had kids' soccer games, and this, that, and the other, and that they were just too busy. So, convenience was the issue.
 
The other half of the people said I don't want to talk to a salesperson on the first visit. Now, we unpacked that question. It's not that they never wanted to talk to a salesperson. They just felt like they should be able to go see for themselves does it look as good in person as it does online? If it does, then they were ready to talk. Well, that got our wheels turning. Those are the two problems we had to solve for. 
So, as I'm doing the research and our team was research going, how can we solve this problem? You know, we stumbled upon a company called Rently that pretty much invented self-guiding tours in 2011, where they were [00:24:00] offering people to self-tour rental units in high-rise apartments after hours to address that convenience factor and the fact that they didn't want a high-pressure sales environment from a leasing agent, trying to get them to sign a rental contract. 

And I was thinking, hey, this technology could actually solve two of our problems here. So, they were the first call we reached out to. And yet, their process was built in a way to where it really only worked in the land of MDUs and rentals. It wasn't going to work the way, you know, new home sales are sold. So, we tried to convince them to take their technology and change the flow and the process and customize the platform as a one-off for home builders and they told us no and so did Tour24 and everybody else that we talked to trying to utilize that. 

And finally, we just threw up our hands and said, you know what? We still think that this is the best way to solve the problem. So, we ended up building the technology ourselves. But had there been a technology that previously existed that checked all the boxes, we absolutely would have [00:25:00] tried them?

So, back to your original question. I always say, what problem are you trying to solve for? Because if you go the other way and just say, well, let's evaluate the service, you're going to find something nobody's built the perfect product-market fix for all of your needs. Cause every builder has their own idiosyncrasies, their own nuances, their own needs, their differences. And in SaaS, no one's going to build a platform unless you custom-tailored it. I'm not talking about, Hey, this company is going to build a product or a solution for us exactly to our exact specification. But if you're just looking at different vendors and different platforms and technologies that are out there, it's gonna be very easy for you to find some go, well, this doesn't really apply to us.

But don't focus on that. Go, what is the problem this can solve for us? And if solving that problem with this technology offsets the things that it doesn't do that the way we would do it. That's where you determine your benefit there and go into trying to use technology to solve problems, not just evaluate the new [00:26:00] shiny services out there.

Greg Bray: Well, and I love the way, Tom, that you also went to the customers for insights into really defining the next layer of the question, right? You've got a business problem from your perspective, they're not showing up, but understanding their problem that stopped them from showing up was really the deeper insight into really finding that solution it sounds like.
 
Tom Nelson: You've got to get deeper and it takes away any sort of prejudices or biases or anything like that. Just, you know, what can we basically do? What can we really lean? And there's so much more to be gleaned from the people that don't buy from you than there are that do. I mean, don't get me wrong. That's the easy button. Talk to your own customers. Right? 

I think in home building, it's so hard for that because the buying cycle and the service cycle is so long. I mean, we have the longest cycle of any industry right, from the time they first signed a contract till delivery. And then you got your year one warranty and you know, you've got to keep these [00:27:00] people happy for so long. There's so many touch points, there are so many moving parts. It can be a challenge, you know, in talking to your existing customers, but you do have access to them, and it's the easiest one to do.
 
I don't think we, as an industry, take enough time to stop and ask those that have chosen not to proceed. There's a lot of valuable information we can glean for them because, again, we have a lot of pre-existing biases and preconceived notions that may have been true at one point in time. Back to the QR code example. You know, might have been true at one point in time, but conditions and things have changed to where we have to be a little bit more open-minded and revisit those. 

Greg Bray: Well, Tom, we really appreciate the time you spent with us today. It's been a great conversation. Do you have any last thoughts or words of advice you'd like to leave with our audience today before we wrap up?

Tom Nelson: Well, first of all, thank you guys for having me. It's always great when we get to talk to like-minded people that are living, breathing this stuff as well. So, I really appreciate the opportunity to do so. Back to the point I made earlier is [00:28:00] that the goal is always the same. If you're in this industry and you're a marketer, you're always going to be asked for how do you get more leads, more sales. Just be very open-minded and never stop learning. 

You know, we had a lot of people skeptical about self-tours. Oh my gosh, you know, we can't let someone in the house. People only buy a house because our salespeople are so great, or if we let them into our house, they're going to trash the place and steal everything. It would have been very easy to say, no, you know, that's not the right path to go down. But that said, we were able to work with some really great companies that were open minded that gave it a try.

And we just ran a report that looked at all last year, and we examined over 1000 communities and found that communities that had UTour installed sold 20 percent faster than those that didn't. Well, the thought process is we would have all missed out on this opportunity if we had just been closed-minded with those initial assumptions.

So, it's that open-mindedness, it's that trial and error that's going to have to happen. And you know, the way things work today, that's great that you're getting the wins today, [00:29:00] but don't be surprised if they don't work a year from now. So, that constant testing of your own beliefs and your own successes and just being adaptable.

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

Tom Nelson: Best way, just just go to our website. It's ndgcommunications.com. I know it's long, but type it in. I've been trying to buy ndg.com for 20 years. Hasn't happened. Or you can go to utourhomes.com or find me on LinkedIn and reach out. I'm pretty accessible. 

Greg Bray: Well, thanks again, Tom, for sharing with us today. 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. [00:30:00] 
 


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