250.5 Bonus Episode: Key Touchpoints That Build Brand Trust CommVersion Webinar - Greg Bray and Kevin Weitzel Jan 13 2025

Nick Chitty: [00:00:00] Awesome. So thank you everyone for joining us. This afternoon's session, our final in our series before the new year of our home builder digital lead gen secrets. The theme of this afternoon's session is all [00:01:00] around building brand trust. So one of the key touch points to help build brand trust and drive sales.

I'm delighted this afternoon to be joined by two of the best in the business. We've got Greg Bray of Blue Tangerine and Kevin Weitzel of OutHouse, who both co host the The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. Before we begin, gentlemen delighted to have you both. Would you mind giving us a brief intro about you guys your work and anything else that might be interesting.

Greg Bray: Who's first, Nick?

Nick Chitty: You're first, Greg. You spoke first.

Greg Bray: All right. Hey, thanks so much for inviting me to join you today. I really appreciate that. For those who haven't met me, I am Greg. I'm with Blue Tangerine. We believe in helping builders create sales generating websites.

So, we help with website design, development, hosting, maintenance, and then all the things that drive traffic to the website online. So, things like search engine optimization, Google ads, things like that. Email marketing, geofencing, social media work, all of [00:02:00] that. But most importantly, I love just being part of this industry. It's really exciting to help people find the home that they want to live in. It's really a privilege to be a part of that and to help builders connect with their buyers.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Sounds just like my intro to the podcast. OutHouse is an outsourced services company for production and semi custom home builders.

We provide all the digital assets that would you, you would use to market and sell your homes online as well as drafting services and printed marketing collateral as well. We're based out of Phoenix, Arizona.

Nick Chitty: Perfect. I'm actually going to start. I'm going to piggyback slightly off of some content that we discussed at the digital marketing summit back in October.

One thing that really resonated with me and some of my peers was this notion of personalization at scale. So it became clear with a number of the speakers that was a hot theme for 2024 and projected [00:03:00] for 2025. So I wanted to start opening up discussion with why do you guys believe, or do you believe at all that personalization of the homebuyers digital experience is important?

And second to that, what could be some practical ways for marketers and builders to incorporate that as part of their their strategy? Greg, you spoke first last time. I'm going to let Kevin, Kevin take the lead on, on this one.

Kevin Weitzel: I think in today's tech savvy world even boomers can handle the most basic operations on a smartphone.

And when you're looking at the buyer's journey. You can go and look at picture after picture of homes, but when you can configure your floor plan, when you can configure the color schemes of your home all it will it's so much more engaging and people will emotionally connect to that product much more so than they would if they were just flipping through a catalog sheet.

Greg Bray: And I think Nick, when you talk about personalization, that word can mean a lot of different things to different [00:04:00] people.

Sometimes people say, oh, we want to make the website personal. So we wanted to say, hi, Nick, welcome, and that's, that's very personal, right? But it's really not helping you in your journey. And so when I think of personalization, it's about how do we provide The kinds of tools and experiences that allow the buyer to decide what they want to do next to take their own journey.

Instead of being forced down a standard path of, I do this, then I do that, then I learned about this, but instead let them weave through your content, let them decide what they want to engage with. Kevin talked about. Customizing, interactive floor plans. That's a great example of personalization, right?

Because I get to build the home the way I want it and then bring that to a salesperson at some point and say, hey, this is what I'm looking for. This is what I'm interested in. And when we allow them to control that journey. That becomes personal to them and it allows them to work through it. So we can get into personalization type things [00:05:00] like, oh, the website starts to show them different things based on the stuff they've looked at in the past, which is, there's technologies coming along those lines.

They're really intriguing and interesting, but ultimately, I think personalization is all about giving them control when they want to talk to you, how they want to talk about it, what information they need access to right now to help them take the next step forward.

Nick Chitty: I think that's interesting because if we link it back to this notion of.

The topic for this session around trust the ability for prospective buyers to be able to make that decision and how to feel in control. I think ultimately plays into that, right? It feels as though they have autonomy over how the process goes. It can be guided through, of course. But naturally by feeling as though they have some sort of impact.

I think it makes them feel more secure in the nature of their buying process. And as we know, it's a substantial process and substantial purchase. Yeah, I think that's an interesting way to look at things. And I [00:06:00] guess on that then when we. speak about some of the tech that can be deployed or implemented or some of the practicalities, Greg, as you touched on then, as we look to shift towards Allowing a buyer enablement.

I think we've seen an emerging trend off immersive technology and embracing towards this kind of personalized or rather bespoke website experience. So have you guys got any insight into what technologies people have used successfully on the websites to accomplish this? And what might be some examples of how they leveraged?

Greg Bray: I think the one that Kevin mentioned about the interactive floor plans is a really. Powerful one. It's something that allows somebody to really build out a home the way that they want to. It's something that gives them a lot more control. But I think also, it's even gets into the idea of.

The technology is about letting somebody tour a home on their own schedule, schedule an appointment, without having to reach out and talk [00:07:00] people. I don't know. People don't like to talk to other people until they absolutely have to. It feels like sometimes. And so everything we can do to help them move down that journey, deciding when they want to talk instead of putting up that roadblock, you can go no further until you talk to a salesperson.

Roadblock, right? If we can move that as far down the process as possible, including even getting into the full buy online type of opportunities that are out there and people are experimenting with and are coming. I think that's really. In my mind, how we engage them is give them the ability to do some of these things aren't very complicated.

Scheduling an appointment is something that is not very complicated to do. You just have to have a calendar that's being managed and put some links to it. There's lots of tools out there that are not expensive to do something like that, but it can be really powerful. control of the process.

Kevin Weitzel: Nick, is it all right if I quote somebody?

Of course you can. I'm going to quote John Burns and I quote this. I've must've quoted this a dozen times on our podcast. [00:08:00] He said if you're still doing business today, the way you did it 10 years ago, you won't be relevant or even in business 10 years from now. And keep in mind, I heard that quote from him 10 years ago.

Technology has, That timeline has just shrunk to a sliver, a fraction of time, so builders to think that you can still put up a static, elevation stick drawing or a static floor plan or just a community map with no real time status of lots, you're fooling yourselves and I've got this invisible crystal ball that crystal ball says.

You will be acquired or gone forced out of business if you keep doing things that way and it's true because the buyers expect it Home buyers expect to be able to utilize those technologies You know if you were gonna go to her home and you could look at an enter now type technology where you can literally walk through an Entire home on your own without having to deal with a Sales guy like me.

Most people would take that opportunity. So if you're not even providing that, you're literally putting up [00:09:00] roadblocks from your clients, your potential buyers, to be able to even buy your product or even wanting to buy your product.

Greg Bray: And Nick, just to piggyback on that a little bit, We are trained by other industries, other websites, and what we expect as consumers to be out there, there, there was a time a few years ago where something like an online chat was really unique and new and very few people had it except these really big, e commerce sites or something that's become something that's pretty ubiquitous now in a lot of.

A lot of places that we even start to look for it. I've got a question. Is there somewhere I can chat really quick, and start to look at that and whether we like the technology or not in the home building industry, our buyers are being trained by everybody else on how website should work, the kinds of response times I should expect and those types of things.

And so when we don't have that, We, there's a disconnect for them. We're out of date, we're [00:10:00] out of touch, we're not accessible, whatever it is. And so I move on. I don't fight through it very often unless you've got the one home in the one spot and it's the only thing that would ever work for me, and I already know that I don't fight through that.

And you might miss out the opportunity for the conversation.

Nick Chitty: To pay devil's advocate, then that's what and good for larger builders. But if you were, a small or to mid-size builder. How would you look about prioritizing some of the things you talked about there are the other technologies?

Where would you need who you look for in terms of market trends and what would be that thought process?

Greg Bray: You're talking about like this idea that oh, maybe person doesn't have the budget or can't afford some of these things or everything else yeah, exactly I'm gonna be honest. I think that's an excuse for most of these technologies are just Not that crazy expensive compared to what builders spend on a model home compared to what they spend on land investments and everything else.

Just the sale from 1 incremental home pays for an awful lot of this technology. It really does. And yeah, you [00:11:00] can't implement all of it all at once and you have to prioritize. I completely agree with that because there's other implications. You don't just. Buy some software and magically it fixes the world for you.

You have to learn how to use it and how to train people and make sure it's the right fit and all those kinds of things for your situations. But this idea that we just can't because we're too small, honestly, I think the small ones have the advantage of being able to move faster and try things faster and be able to experiment because they don't have all the layers of training and all the ideas, Oh, I have to deploy this out to, to a hundred different salespeople or two, right?

It's like the person who wants to deploy it to two has got a real advantage to be able to practice and see if it works and how it helps. And they get a huge return on that investment really quickly, potentially.

Kevin Weitzel: It is. It's a short sighted, it's a short sighted investment approach. If you're just looking at hoping for the best and we can't afford it, but we'll build this model home for people to come into for the cost of the dirt alone for one model home, just the carry cost that dirt, [00:12:00] you could pay for every digital asset you could dream of for that whole community.

Nick Chitty: That's my answer to key for budget questions there. Guys moving on then in terms of. Discussing the strategies or some more specific strategies to help brand trust. I'm actually going to do a question that we've got from the audience. So I don't know where we can have that on the screen.

Kevin Weitzel: Oh, looks like Nick might be freezing. Nick. I see 1 question over there. That's basically it's what do you think the biggest shift in digital marketing trends for home builders will be in 2025.

Great Kevin. I think you should answer that, Greg. I asked the question on behalf of Nick. I think you should ask this one, answer this one.

Greg Bray: Biggest shift in digital marketing trends? I think the biggest shift that I hope is happening is that builders recognize that they have to be investing in digital marketing.

There's still too many of them that think that way. That they just don't get it. They just don't think it's important. It, it needs to be [00:13:00] the core of your marketing. Again, I know you've still got to have the marketing for the things like the signage and some of those types of things that go along with the physical locations.

But otherwise digital needs to be the primary focus. And if it's not yet, then I don't know if that's a trend or it's like a, a. planned obsolescence. But that's where you need to be. You need to be investing in digital. You need to recognize that's where your buyers are starting and where they're looking.

And if you don't impress them and aren't findable online they're going to bypass you and move on to the next one.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm going to go just a slightly different speed on that one. And this is coming from a person that literally makes a living selling digital assets to homebuilders. Don't depend 100 percent on your digital assets.

Yes, you need them, implement them, your customers expect them. But if you make that the end result goal and eliminate the human coefficient, then you are setting yourselves up for disappointing. A lot of [00:14:00] clients, a good example. Here's a great example, actually good, great. When home builders just put a generic bot chat bot on their website, That frustrates a lot of buyers.

That frustrates me as a consumer. I can't stand the generic bot that just answers the generic questions. And all it is just a fact finding mission to find your email and your phone number so they can have somebody reach out to you real time chat and having a human coefficient in that equation is.

Very important. So definitely utilize, but don't depend and lean on exclusively your digital assets.

Greg Bray: I won't fight over that, Kevin. I'll accept that.

Nick Chitty: Sorry about that. I don't know what's happened. I don't know what's happened. We're HQ's are failing me. Hopefully you can hear me now. The next theme, I guess, was asking or discussing, attempting to answer the question of. Why we think brand trust is important. So the overarching theme of the session, but why would brand trust be important to builders and for people looking to [00:15:00] buy a new home

Kevin Weitzel: From a production standpoint for, from a, just a surface area outlook, when you look at something as simple as a site map, you can put a static site map on your website.

However, if you have an interactive site map that shows real time lot status of what homes can be built or what homes are built, you're giving a real time view. to that potential buyer o they could be moving into by a car lot, t on the cars to let you kn ones are gone. You don't full heartedly.

You want cul de sac. That's your d find out that it's been s horrible customer service experience. It's transparency.

Greg Bray: I love the word transparency that Kevin said. I think that's a big part of trust sometimes is in the building industry because we deal with it every day. We forget how Rare.

It is for one of our customers to actually buy a home. They don't do it very often. And quite often the homes we're selling them don't even exist yet. Yeah, there's [00:16:00] inventory and models and things that are out there but often the home they're buying doesn't even really exist. And so there's this huge trust of, can you actually deliver what you've promised?

That you're going to deliver, right? Will you really do what you say you're going to do? Because I'm about to spend more money on this than I spent on anything else, probably in my life for most of us. And make a huge commitment and I don't want to get halfway through the bill process and discover I made a mistake or that you can't get the job done or whatever else it might be.

That's scary. So it's all about trust, isn't it? To get somebody to take that leap of, I want to work with you because I believe you that you can do this for me, right? That's trust. That's what trust is. And so everything we do starts that trust journey. And it begins on the website before they've ever talked to us.

And like Kevin said, one of the ways to ruin trust is to have inaccurate information. Because as soon as one thing's wrong, what else is wrong? Becomes the question. What else do I [00:17:00] have to verify everything now? Because I can't believe what I'm seeing here on this website. That's a huge trust killer in my opinion.

Nick Chitty: I think that's a great point, Greg. And I like to look at things. As when we're thinking about buying a new home, there are two, two sides of the equation. There's firstly, why should I buy a new home? To begin with, why should I buy a complete new home as opposed to working with a broker and looking into the MLS.

And the second thing is, Why should I buy a new home with you guys? And I think those are the two questions that as part of our digital footprint Everyone should be trying to respond to and for me that's where trust becomes imperative Is that answer of a we can guide you through that first process and be where the right people To make that vision a reality for you and make you comfortable in that decision pathway I think we've got a poll that we wanted to just put out To the audience and apologies again for the connection issues.

Hopefully things are a slightly more stable now. So I'm going to cue the poll. And then we can carry on, but thank you for bearing with me and for seizing the reins Kevin, I [00:18:00] appreciate it.

So the poll should be on people's screens now, I believe.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah. What are the key means through which you hope to build brand trust?

Nick Chitty: Wait for some responses. While we're doing that, I think we. We ultimately want to, with all this stuff, as Greg was discussing, it's it's ultimately that place of making sure that first impression is right. And that comes from that, the very start of that process. So from your perspective, guys.

If we were looking as a, if you were a consumer, what are some of the key things from a company's digital strategy or footprint that you'd be looking for to make you feel comfortable in proceeding with them? As a builder or from a personal preference perspective, what things do you like to see on a website to, to help build credibility with a builder and a brand?

Greg Bray: Kevin, you wanna take that one? Or you want me to dive in

Kevin Weitzel: as a consumer or as a provider? 'cause I have two different things. As a provider, digital

Nick Chitty: assets, let's both, let's go for both.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah, as a provider of digital assets, I always want to make sure that I can see how the home [00:19:00] can be configured very important.

I want to make sure that I can choose my palette if that's an availability. There's some builders that are just build spec homes and if that's the case, then build your spec comes. But if you have those options, you need to be able to showcase those options as a consumer. I want to see real time accurate information.

I want to know what the pricing is. There's nothing more discouraging than walking into a car dealership, because I love Maserati. They got to be awesome. And then find out that I know we're near make enough money to be able to cover a Maserati, but I can go over to Ford, Honda, Chevy, and all these other different, Mitsubishi and find a car that I can afford all day long.

So I think that having, at least as bare bones, minimum price ranges or starting from pricing. And if you do have starting from pricing, I'm going to quote somebody else there, Nick, and this is Bob Whitten. Bob Whitten says, and he is a genius in my book. Says that you should have your starting from point price point.

Your model home should be no more than 20 percent and preferably within 10 percent of that starting from price point. Otherwise it winds up [00:20:00] happening if you have a 300, 000 starting price point. And by the way, this model home you're standing in is 750, 000. That's not a realistic view of what is going to be in that neighborhood.

Greg Bray: I would

add some elements that build trust are educating the buyer on the process. Again, a lot of people only do this once or twice in their lifetimes, buying a new home. They don't understand how it all works. The person who educates me. Often will be the one who gets my business. Not always but typically that builds trust.

I'm more likely to work with them. We already use the word transparency, this idea of accurate numbers and pricing. And again even just avoiding mistakes, right? Typos create distrust, right? Things like that other kinds of mistake, if they don't have the quality control to proofread, and spend just a few minutes then what else is being missed in the quality control?

It's funny how people judge the quality of your homes by the [00:21:00] quality of the design on your website. It's just, and it's subconscious, even it's that's an ugly website. I don't want to do business with them, even though the homes they build might be beautiful. And it's really, it doesn't make any logical sense, but we do it all the time.

Just catch yourself, right? Pay attention to what you, when you're shopping for anything, how you do that. It's Oh, that's ugly. Oh, that's hard to use. Oh, I can't find what I want. I'm gone. Trust is all about building connection that where they feel like they're working with a person as well.

Kevin talked about that human element and being able to do that. And I think that is really a core part of it as well. That, If they know they can work with a person then that's going to help them Feel comfortable with the company as well and get to know your people.

Nick Chitty: Sorry chaps This is not being as smooth as it as the run through went.

But appreciate it Appreciate you saving face. I think we're speaking about kind of human connection there, which is obviously a big part for us I think We know that people are not as fond as [00:22:00] I speak to everyone in face to face as they used to be as a as you touched on the start, Greg, I think, but ultimately is a personal journey for people.

And ultimately, we believe that personal element through any form of commission is key and responding in a timely manner. And I think we explored that in the previous session slightly with Jimmy talking about. different preferences for generational buyers. So how did Gen Z versus Gen X interact with builders and what are their expectations?

And largely, quite surprisingly, I think from their survey, it was a fair consistency in terms of their demands. It was, they want to speak to people, they want to speak to people quickly, they want those response rates. They want to be able to communicate on their own terms, and they ultimately want to be able to do things in their own way.

But I guess what one, one theme I was interesting, interested to, to explore would be whether you've got any practical advice for, say, a first time [00:23:00] buyer in terms of building trust versus someone who's bought several homes through a lifetime at a different stage, if there are any different strategies.

Again, that we can build that credibility as we discussed through our our marketing initiatives to help achieve that.

Greg Bray: Nick, from my perspective, I don't think the strategy is different, but maybe the content is different. So if the strategy is educating the buyer, what you need to educate a first time buyer about is going to be slightly different than maybe a move up buyer or someone who's, active adult, who's, this might be their third or fourth home that they've bought.

But the strategy is we need to educate our buyers. Then the layer down is what do they need to know? And how do we put that kind of content together to help them, first time buyers going to need to know more about financing and things of that nature than a cash buyer is going to need to know.

So I think from that standpoint, the ability to do the interactive tools that Kevin discussed, I don't think those are limited at all to different. I think everybody wants to be able to do that. [00:24:00] I don't know, Kevin, do you see any differences in demographics between who likes those tools?

Kevin Weitzel: The only thing I would really add to that is that I think that it's less about the differences between a first time buyer and a seasoned buyer, and it's more about that you have to almost dissect it into three different stages.

You have the attraction stage, Where you're just trying to win them over and wow them with, imagery and interactive tools and stuff. Then you have the during phase and that during phase is where most first time buyers get lost because they don't know what the process is. They don't know how what the timeline is they don't know once you've signed a contract, what your, what's going on. What's your ability is to say, you know what? I can't move forward with this. Those kinds of things need to be very handheld. If you will, they need to hold their hand much more in that first time buyer's space, but then afterwards, once you've signed that contract, I think a lot of builders put the old or, wash the, wash their hands.

They're done with it. And they need to follow up on that after effect too. Like when the house goes to framing, when the electrical is run, send them photographs of it, get a connected. Connected app like [00:25:00] a novi home or a foundation or something along those lines where they can keep track of that communication even after the sale has completed before delivery.

So I think that there's 3 different phases that builders really have to make sure that they are. Nurturing all three of those phases and not stopping at one or neglecting another.

Nick Chitty: Perfect. I'm going to round off this afternoon's session with a few other quick questions as we look to fall towards the holidays and the new year.

If you in a position of a marketer looking to make a big difference in Q1 and for 25. What would be the biggest kind of quick win that you would look to introduce? Help build this kind of brand trust for builders. If there's one piece of advice you could give again, really broad but let's see what we've got.

Kevin Weitzel: Here's what I've got. I've got an easy one. Assess your current situation of what different assets you have, not just on the marketing side, but how they need to connect to other things. The ability for Honda to [00:26:00] roll out some new technology on their website. All Honda builders, have to cover the cost of that.

We don't have that luxury in the home building industry. You know what Carl, the builder and what Dave, the builder are doing are two completely different things and they all have to fund them individually. So if you have to fund it individually, look at your various situation or your various scenarios.

Assets that you have and see how you can interconnect them. Make sure that your, when somebody saves a lot on the backend of your ERP, that pushes dynamically to your contracting system. And make sure that when somebody saves a floor plan, not only does it go to your CRM, but that it also can communicate with your ERP, so then you can see that there is a possible take down of that.

of that exact product line and that product offering that could be hitting production queue. So once you start tying in those different assets that you have, you become more efficient and you can shorten that timeline and make that transition much smoother for all the different aspects of your team.

Sales marketing production operations.

Greg Bray: Yeah, I think I've got [00:27:00] 35 quick wins. No, just kidding. We're just Yeah but I think there's a couple of Easy things that you can try to do that. That'll make a difference. Number one is do we believe? As a company that our website matters in our sales pipeline.

Is it a source of leads? And I think there's some data out there from some others that, that track this, that over half of your sales should be coming from web leads. And so if you're not hitting those kinds of benchmarks, there's opportunity to improve now, exactly which piece of the whole chain needs to be improved that requires some analysis, but acknowledging that, Hey, there's room for improvement here. We can do something better. And then I think the other quick win is never assume it's always working just because it was working yesterday, you need to test this stuff. And I can't tell you the number of times where. Where all of a sudden it's like, Hey, we haven't gotten any leads this week.

And it's cause the form [00:28:00] got broken somehow. And, it's oh my gosh, just lost things or, the forms being emailed to so and so who's on vacation. So nobody's getting those emails or it's being sent to someone who's no longer with the company. And nobody's getting those emails, test, test your stuff and make sure that it doesn't have to be very long.

But almost like a little mystery shop and see what people actually say when they respond to those leads. We've done some tests before where we got some weird stuff. I'm on the website asking you a question through the form on the website, and the response I got back was, look at our website, you can find the answer.

It was like, oh, no, I was already on the website, and I fill out the form on the website, and I still have this question. And it was like, just a total disconnect, right? There's some testing there, that does not take very long to do. Some little tweaks there can make a huge difference.

Nick Chitty: And I was gonna say that maybe what occurred to me was what Kevin was how he was breaking down that, that kind of journey, the pathways and having the feedback not only from people visiting the website and [00:29:00] leaving.

So there in the form of surveys, why didn't you convert? Why was, why weren't we a good fit? But also those that did close, what, what made them feel comfortable as part of that journey and what their preferences, what would they like to see, even if it wasn't optimized, what in the future or for others what could have been a better way to engage and what else might be important as part of that journey.

And I think that's how We grow and develop and build on that trust. But James, I think we've run over slightly. Thank you so much for joining us and for taking the reins in the absence of some challenges or other with some challenges. Where can people find you if they're interested after?

events

Kevin Weitzel: For me, linkedin at outhouse.net. And want fun, you can find me on Facebook too.

Greg Bray: What you find on Facebook with Kevin might be different than what you find on LinkedIn. I'm just saying that. Well me, bluetangerine For sure. And again, LinkedIn as well. There's not too many Greg Brays out [00:30:00] there. And greg@bluetangerine.com. Love to chat and see how we can help.

Nick Chitty: Perfect. Thank you everyone for joining us and we'll see you in the new year for our next session. Thank you, Nick. Thanks.