260 Home Builder Digital Marketing Strategies - Jay Dixon Mar 19 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, Jay Dixon. Jay is the founding partner of AdsIntelligence Marketing. Welcome, Jay. Thanks for being with us.

Jay Dixon: Thanks for having me. 

Greg Bray: Well, Jay, let's start off and just get to know a little bit of your background. Give us that quick overview and introduction of yourself. 

Jay Dixon: Yeah, awesome. I am a little odd in that I knew what I wanted to do for my career when I was 13 years old. I saw a Tom [00:01:00] Hanks movie, Nothing in Common, where he was a creative director of an advertising agency. I don't know if you remember him throwing pencils up into the ceiling. It was part of his think-tank mentality, and I was always creative and knew that I wanted to utilize my creativity. My father was an entrepreneur, so that was kind of an easy, you know, sort of combination. 

So, yeah, I set myself on this path, approached the advertising industry through the creative side of things at the outset. Started my own company in 1995. Found my now business partner, Bruce Borcz, through a cold call. We started doing all their creative, as well as building up our own book of business. In the early 2000s, we decided to merge our two companies, and we created what was then called Borcz/Dixon, the two partners, and in 2018, we rebranded as AdsIntelligence. And that's kind of a whole other story. 

But really things took a turn for the [00:02:00] difference in the early 2000s when digital media arose. We were either lucky enough or smart enough to recognize that this was the future, and brought that skill set in-house, mainly because we were control freaks, and we didn't like outsourcing anything.

So, we brought that, and we've always been specializing in real estate advertising. I'd say about 90 percent of our clients are in the real estate industry. If it's sold or leased new construction, we've been involved in it, you know, multi-family, master-planned communities, national, regional builders, you name it, high-end condos, 55 plus, we've been doing it.

So, it's been exciting. That adoption of the digital media, concept in the early two thousands catapulted us as an agency. Where, in the great recession, many agencies didn't survive, we ended up thriving as a result and got really good at it. 

Kevin Weitzel: Well, we're going to come back to, [00:03:00] amongst many other topics, we're going to come back to that whole lack of wanting to give away any control and not wanting to outsource anything. Because that's very important in what you do, what Greg does, and what I do, as far as the market that we go after. So, but before we jump into any of that, can we find out an interesting factoid about yourself that has nothing to do with work, the industry, or family? 

Jay Dixon: Oh, wow. Nothing to do with work, industry, family. Sure. I grew up in Massachusetts and at an early age started skiing. Skied most of my life until I turned 21 when I met my wife, who refused to go on a cold-weather vacation. So, I gave up skiing for the better part of 30 years.

And in 2020, a good friend was putting together a trip of some guys to go skiing and said, you're getting back on the horse. So, since 2020, I've been back skiing. And as they, suggested, it was like riding a bike, and I kind of picked up right where I left off and have [00:04:00] enjoyed getting back into the sport again.

Kevin Weitzel: What's your poison? 

Jay Dixon: You think about, you know, the span of 30 years, I missed out on the technological revolution of parabolic skis. Getting back into it with the new technology was just kind of a wonder. I really haven't figured that part of it out.

Two years ago, the same group of guys, we went on a heli-skiing trip in British Columbia, Canada. Was about as far away from other human beings as you could possibly be, and it was a fabulous trip. I've bought all the equipment except for skis. And so, it's just easier to travel without bringing your skis. There's lots of great equipment to rent. So, yeah. 

Greg Bray: That's one of the ones where you take the helicopter to the top of the mountain. Is that what you mean by that? 

Jay Dixon: Oh, yeah. It was like planes, trains, and automobiles. And then when we finally got to the end of the road, literally got off the bus and a helicopter, a six-passenger helicopter transported about 30 of us 20, 30 [00:05:00] minutes helicopter ride out into the wilderness to this lodge that the only way to get there was either a snowcat or a helicopter. That was base camp, and then we'd go up into the mountains every day. And instead of taking a lift, you'd take a helicopter. 

Kevin Weitzel: That's cool. Well, at Whistler area, or where were you?

Jay Dixon: It was called Adamance. There's an outfit that operates about a half a dozen different, lodges. 

Kevin Weitzel: Cool.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, back to marketing Well, Jay, just give us that quick overview of your agency and the kind of services specifically that you guys are bringing to your clients today.

Jay Dixon: Sure. So, we consider ourselves a full-service advertising agency, again, specializing in the real estate industry, with a focus on digital media. So, we've got really sort of four different arms to this octopus, the primary one being the digital media team. Paid search, paid social, programmatic, SEO, and organic social are the kind of primary focuses.

We [00:06:00] also have a whole team of creatives, designers and web development. So, web development, we kind of consider another one of the divisions, where we're doing obviously design and programming of websites. We then also have just the account team.
 
Greg Bray: All right. Well, to Kevin's point that he made just a minute ago, you talked about control keeping things in-house. How do you talk to a prospective client about why they should be outsourcing some of their marketing and their digital support? What makes sense for like a home builder to keep on their team? What makes sense for them to partner? When do you kind of see those opportunities align?
 
Jay Dixon: Yeah. Well, I mean, the sky's the limit for doing it wrong. Even with, you know, coming up against other agencies who are managing digital media for real estate where real estate may not be their sole focus. And so, they tend to do things in a bucket that, you know, is sort of a one [00:07:00] size fits all. So, you get a little bit of that.

But more so, I think, outsourcing enables you to get a team of people for essentially the cost of maybe one, one and a half in-house people. So, and a lot of times individuals tend to specialize, you know, you might have a Meta business ad manager who specializes just in Meta, or a Google ad specialist, or an organic social media person. As opposed to having a full team of people for the price of one to one and a half individuals in-house, you get a full team of people when you're outsourcing who are industry experts, right?

And that's one of the things that as you guys know. Especially when it comes to real estate, we speak their language, we understand the acronyms and the nuances of sales cycles and where their pains are typically focused, and have ideas ready-made. As well as, have the ability to, on the fly, [00:08:00] collaborate and create solutions.

Kevin Weitzel: Wait a minute. So, you're going to sit there and tell me that a director of land development isn't as good as your team at possibly buying ads on Google or, you know, setting things up for Meta or building a website? 

Jay Dixon: They're likely not, Kevin. 

Kevin Weitzel: Oh, oh, oh. 

Jay Dixon: Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I think is really cool about this business is the innovation part. Clients are always asking us like, what's next? Like, what else can we do? And there are aspects of what we do that are just tried and true and they work. You know, that's kind of where we start. You know, I always say from a campaign strategy standpoint, we start with paid search. You know, it's people who are looking for what you have to sell.

We believe, I'll just say it right now, there is a secret sauce to paid search that many agencies don't understand. When I tell you what it is, hopefully you're like, yeah, duh, we get it. But it's amazing how many people don't. It's price, [00:09:00] product, location. If you cover those three things in your ad and you pre-qualify that traffic with those three areas, you're so far ahead of the game in terms of agencies that are maybe trying to trick prospects to get into the website because they just want a lot of traffic, but they don't necessarily understand how to qualify that traffic to get high-quality traffic. That's kind of the start. 

But like, let's get into the weeds for a second and talk about the innovation that comes with being a digital media agency in this world. At the beginning of our conversation, before we started recording, we were talking about who are the biggest competitors for our real estate clients. It's not other builders and developers, it's resales.

A report just came out last week that said that resales represented 7 out of 10 homes sold in the United States last year. Well, that's a decrease from the average [00:10:00] over the last 20 years of 9 and 10. So, what that really means is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent of a builder's competitors aren't other builders, they're resales. And yet we don't ever really talk about that or focus that in terms of our digital media strategies.

About this time last year, the head of my digital media team came to me with an idea and said, I think we can target resales through geofencing. Of course, you know, with geofencing, for years, we've been targeting other builders, competitors, you know, their models, their sales centers, maybe key places of industry. You know, if there's a big, you know, Boeing plant, like down the street, you know, we want to geofence that. 

But resales are hard because they come and go all the time. It actually started out, the concept was targeting, open houses. We realized that that was like way too narrow, but if we just did resales, we'll also get those Saturday open houses. And the numbers are really, really [00:11:00] small, but the technology is really, really cool in terms of our ability to hyper-target people who are physically touring your biggest competitor. 

Now, in any given week, it might be 2 to 5 people who are walking through there, but those 2 to 5 people are looking for something that is nearby in your location. We only target within a specific price range, so we're not diluting things that way. And product-wise, we can target either single families or townhomes or multifamily. So, it's an incredibly precise tool, but it's also very small. So, but it's innovative, right? 
And it's not something that anybody else that we know of is doing it. We created a systematic approach to be able to make it really easy. The honest truth of it is it's just a hook, right? It's something that's kind of cool. Builders are like, wow, you can do that. And we're like, well, yeah, we can do that and we can do, you know, all these other great [00:12:00] things. So, it's just a great way for us to introduce ourselves to prospective clients, who understand how cool that is that we can target that precisely. 

Greg Bray: So, Jay, you made a comment there about quality versus quantity of traffic. And you're making the example using the geofencing, which is really cool technology to really narrow your focus, right. And it's more about not necessarily getting thousands but getting the right two in there. As you try to measure that for builders, what are some of the things that you focus on as you're trying to say, are we getting just raw numbers, or are we getting quality? How do you guys try to drill down deeper into that and see the quality measure of the traffic?

Jay Dixon: Yeah, that's a great question. Right? It's been really hard. Oftentimes when you're sitting across the table from a CFO or CEO and they want you to substantiate the value of the investment they're making, right? How do you know that it's good quality? For most of my career for the past 20 plus years, [00:13:00] the answer has been it's a numbers game. The more traffic we get to the website, the more leads we'll get on the website, and the more leads you get, the more on-site traffic and sales. 

You know, to say that is kind of like wah. wah. Like, okay, that's the best you can do, is it's a numbers game. And forever that's the answer because all we can see through, the tools that we have available to us, whether it's within platform and Google ads, Meta business tools, Google analytics, you know, the web traffic and so forth is, our job for years has been to lead the horse to water. 

There's a disconnect between what happens online versus what's happening on-site and those offline conversions. And one of the sort of dirty little secrets about digital media that I'm happy to share with the audience here is only about 20 to 25 percent of all sales [00:14:00] originated as an online lead. We're all consumers and none of us want to be sold anything. So, we're very reticent to fill out that form and submit that information and be inundated with sales calls and pestered. We want to buy on our own terms. We want to control that scenario. 

A hundred percent of your sales touch the website at some point, we just know that, right? Whether it was the first contact or somewhere along the way, they touched the website. But 75 to 80 percent of your sales never filled out a form, never made a phone call that we can track. So, we're optimizing our campaigns based on a small fraction of the overall information. Does that make sense?

Greg Bray: Absolutely. And it's a great reminder too, because sometimes there's this idea of well, should I invest in a website because I'm not getting any website leads or I'm not getting very many? And yet, everybody is interacting online, even if that's [00:15:00] not the way that they finally connect with you, whether it's a call or drive in or or or whatever, they're still interacting online, it's still influencing them, and a poor quality experience there that doesn't have all the engagement tools and everything else is going to send them somewhere else if you're not careful.

Kevin Weitzel: And to your point, it still is a numbers game, but in a different capacity. If you're going to be bringing horses to water, bring the thirsty horses to water. You know, horses that just stand around and just want to chill aren't going to be customers for your water. The ones that are running around are the ones that are your customers for your water. You know, in the retail world, it's door swings.

So yeah, sure, we had X number of door swings, but you know that based on the number of door swings, that you'll have X number of people that will ask questions about the product. You'll have X number of people, even smaller percentage that is, that will ask, you know, what the pricing is. And then another smaller percentage that want to know how to get financed. And then that final fraction is those that are willing to buy, that do buy. So yeah, it's a question of getting those [00:16:00] thirsty horses. 

Jay Dixon: Wouldn't our advertising strategies be better optimized if we were optimizing to the sale versus just the online form fill? Like I said, 20 plus years of my career, all we've had available to us, other than conversations with the frontline salespeople and getting the anecdotal information about their buyers and how they found us when we all know that buyers are liars and they're going to tell you, they just drove by and saw the sign, we really only have information on a small fraction of them.

But imagine if we could optimize our campaigns, not to just traffic and not to just leads, but all the way through to sales and revenue. Thanks to the AI revolution or just the time has come, and thanks to, in part, Google Analytics 4 and their absolute failure in the name of privacy and the cookie [00:17:00] apocalypse that they've punted on, there are emerging analytics technologies that today enable us to see the complete journey. And not just the complete journey from a keyword all the way through to a sale, but the offline conversions. 

So, they have the ability, and without getting too technical for this crowd, they have the ability to, let's say that 80 percent of the sales that originate on-site at some point saw the website, touched the website, saw some form of propaganda advertising that convinced them to go to the website in the first place. But we have no visibility on that previously to they go on site, they fill out a registration card, and now they're in the builder's CRM.

When they hit the CRM, this advanced analytics technology has the ability to look backwards and see that customer's journey throughout their web experience. We're never going to get 100%, [00:18:00] but we're going to get closer to 80 to 90 percent of all sales and revenue will be able to see their full journey. 

There's two specific benefits to this technology. Number one, it's first-party data, so it's not being filtered through the Google machine. It's the builder's website traffic without any filtration. The other aspect of it is it's multi-touch attribution. So, it's not just first click. It's not just last click. It's every click weighted equally. And then over time, that equally weighted touch points begin to create a picture that will tell us not only what's creating good traffic, good quality traffic, to your point, Kevin, but what's creating sales. And it will tell us that back to the keyword or back to the campaign or back to the specific Facebook ad. And so we'll begin to optimize around [00:19:00] that, and the efficiencies created are, at a minimum, 30 percent.

 In the new home building industry that can cut one of two ways if you think about it, right? Because builders have a finite number of units they can sell every year, right? They set their sales goal for the year and they may not have the production capacity or the lots to sell 30 percent more homes with the same dollar amount invested in advertising year over year. But you know, swing it the other way and we could reduce their ad spend by 30 percent and sell the same number of homes as long as we're optimizing that advertising investment into what's driving sales versus what's driving traffic and leads. 

Greg Bray: So, Jay, as you've got a builder listening and you're talking about all these different tactics, we can do A, we can do B, we can do C. There's so many things, and they're sitting going, but I don't have the budgets of the big guys, you know, that are out there. I don't have the resources to maybe do [00:20:00] all of it. What type of advice would you give to that small, medium-sized builder who feels like they can't compete with the large nationals in the way that always show up at number one because they can buy their way there?

Jay Dixon: Yeah. Strategy. At AdsIntelligence, we're about singles and doubles. You know, we work with several national builders and we love what we get to do together. They don't necessarily have all of the answers and the greatest strategies. You know, sometimes it's just they're, you know, behemoths and they can bully their way through spend to areas.

I won't name names, but there's one who will literally buy the keyword home. So, if you search anything home. I know that they don't build in Alabama, for example, where we have lots of clients, but their ads will show up if you search new home Birmingham. You know, why are they doing that? Just because they have the ability to wildly spend. The smaller regional builders with constraints on budget, which virtually every client has, you know, needs to be [00:21:00] more strategic about how they implement their tactics. Right? 

So, the strategy is digital marketing. The tactics are paid search, number one. Maximize your opportunity with people who are looking for what you have to sell, and then go down the rung from there in terms of other tactics that you should be deploying. I think paid social would be next on the list. And then you can get into some of the smaller areas like geo fencing, which is relatively inexpensive. We work with mor
e small builders and developers than we do larger, obviously, you know, just the nature of things, but they get more than their fair share. 
Greg Bray: Jay, when you look around at industries outside of home building and new construction, what are some of the things you're seeing other folks do that builders maybe haven't quite embraced yet or are still kind of experimenting with that are kind of quote-unquote mainstream in some other industries?

Jay Dixon: We always get this challenge with a lot of our clients [00:22:00] about like, well, why aren't we doing this or that? It's because you're not Coke or McDonald's and they get enamored with again, what's next? What else is out there? Just because it's happening doesn't mean that you should be doing it, especially when you may not have budget to maximize the tools that are going to be the most effective for what you do. 

So, sometimes our job is protecting our clients from themselves because there is a lot of cool new things. Every day there's something else out there. Why aren't we doing TikTok? Well, there are reasons. Why aren't we, you know, utilizing this tool? I think the answer is so many things, I don't know if we have time to dive into all of them, but. 

Greg Bray: I think the most underutilized tactic is sponsoring college football bowl games. I don't know. I see some of these bowl games, it's like the 20 named word bowl game because of this long company sponsor. My family's like, when are they going to have the Blue Tangerine bowl? And I'm like, [00:23:00] what are you talking about? That's just not even a thing. Right. 

Jay Dixon: That's a great point. That probably is a piece that many builders and developers are missing. Digital media has in many ways simplified the game and it's boiled it down into what I feel are two distinct components, and it's lead generation and branding and awareness. And depending on what your goals are will depend on how you balance those two strategies.

I think the one that tends to get swept under the carpet more than it should be is branding and awareness. People buy what they know. No, we're not selling toothpaste that you're gonna, you know, pick up once a month at the supermarket, but branding and awareness is still a very important aspect of what we need to do for builders and developers for their overall marketing strategy. I think sometimes they tend to lean too heavily on their website and not enough outreach through traditional media, [00:24:00] whether it's billboard or television. 

We do a lot of CTV and streaming, but if I have the budget, I want to combine that with a cable buy. Because streaming and CTV can be a little bit of a black hole and a spray and pray kind of a method. It goes back to it's a numbers game, right? It's numbers of impressions. It's interesting that linear TV is now selling their products based on impressions, as opposed to gross rating points and eyeballs. You know, it speaks to the transition in the industry.

Those are things that people should be thinking about more so than just digital search and social. Those things are great, but they're more lead gen than they are branding and awareness. And when you're paid search ad, you know, your text ad shows up in a search result, you're going to have a better chance of somebody clicking on it if they're familiar with the brand name.
 
Kevin Weitzel: So, knowing that you have a little bit [00:25:00] more of an artist brain as compared to me. I'm more of a spreadsheet and data. That's all I care about. But where do you go for inspiration? Like, where are you personally going to garner your new ideas, to do your pre-testing before you start selling to your clients?

Jay Dixon: My team, we've assembled an amazing group of unbelievably talented people who part of the role that we ask of them is to stay on the bleeding edge. And then we've got some great clients who are willing to experiment and try the shiny new penny. But we don't always promote that, right?

I'll give you an example. Back in 2007, 2008 when social media was exploding, we had clients who were asking us to get involved in their organic social media. We were of the mindset of let's pump the brakes. Everybody's jumping into this [00:26:00] without any thought to strategy and even to what outcomes should look like. We did not want to lose clients because we could potentially fail at an unknown strategy with social media. 

Over time, in about 2011, 12, we started to kind of figure out what the right way to do it was. And with builders and developers, it was what I would call experiential content, where you're really kind of trying to convey what it's like to live somewhere. Where am I going to go get groceries? Where's the religious center that's appropriate for me? Where can I go to the movies? 

But back in 2007, 2008, it was just something that was so unproven and nobody really knew how to do it well, that we've said, we're going to let everyone else kind of stumble around for a couple of years. And we lost business as a result of it. We had existing clients who relied on us for the paid media [00:27:00] strategy and, you know, hired the PR agency that was doing their press releases to do their organic social and with limited success. And I just didn't want to jeopardize our relationships and our reputation on something that wasn't proven. 

So, we like to stay out in front and understand technology and get comfortable with it internally before we bring it to our clients and suggest that this is something new. But, you know, we've also, been willing to try and fail. An example of that would be reverse IP append email campaigns. The suppliers of that technology promise the world and we get very little in return and it just didn't work. But we had some clients we're willing to try it with. We'll be the first to tell you, let's pull the plug. This isn't working. Let's redirect our efforts to what is working. 

Greg Bray: Well, Jay, we appreciate you sharing so much of your thoughts and insights with us today. As we kind of wrap up, do you have any [00:28:00] last thoughts or words of advice you wanted to share with our audience? 

Jay Dixon: Last thoughts. Working with an agency who understands your business as opposed to a generalist is a smart move to make. Outsourcing versus insourcing, like we said at the beginning, allows you to get a team, very economically, of experts. As I said before, the sky's the limit for doing digital media for real estate incorrectly. There are a couple of proven strategies, and we have the ability to convert a floundering campaign into a successful campaign very quickly. Like you guys, we're very passionate about this industry and what we get to do. We love what we do. That as much as anything comes through with our relationships that we have.

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

Jay Dixon: [00:29:00] Adsintelligence.marketing is our web address. The other thing that's kind of unique about ads intelligence.marketing is myself and my other partners are the lead account executives, so we are involved in the daily business of our clients business. Yes, we have a support staff of account executives and the rest of our teams, but we are passionate and love what we do and love the relationships that we get to have and the conversations that we get to have.

One of the biggest things and why I was so excited to participate in your podcast today, Greg, was we see educating our clients as the biggest responsibility we have to them. This stuff is nebulous, right? You're spending money on advertising that's going out into the ether and that's scary. Understanding what's happening and why it's happening, whether it's successful or it fails, making sure our clients understand what's going on is the foundation of the trust that leads to [00:30:00] the long term relationships that we have built over the years. That's what I'm super passionate about. I've transitioned from a graphic designer, creative type to an analytics nerd, to a sales guy, and I love the conversations that we get to have as well as this one.
 
Greg Bray: Well, Jay, we appreciate, again, you 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 you. [00:31:00]