Builder - February 2009 - (Page 48) SALES STRATEGIES themselves living in the house. Children play a tremendously important role in the home buying decision, DeWalt says, and their rooms can be merchandised fairly simply. “You can do wonderful decals or use a chalkboard paint and write sayings on the walls or draw pictures.” Dirks recommends playing up places for pets, cozy reading corners, and “reminders of more confident years they’ve had that will make them feel those times will come again.” As Green points out, “If we can get them to stay in the house longer, we have a better chance of selling them.” Installing a Wii gaming system or a karaoke machine in a bonus room are easy—and inexpensive— ways to accomplish that. BE SELECTIVE fi rst—the entry, the great room, and the master suite—and everything else is barren,” Dirks says. “I’d rather do the whole model in a much simpler fashion. I’d eliminate the drapery from the windows before I’d encourage a partial model.” DeWalt’s preference is to scale down on the furnishings and dial up the color. “You have to grab buyers as soon as they come in the door,” she says. “Nothing can do that like color. We like to do a punctuation wall to make them smile as soon as they come in. Every room has to have that.” For builders who just don’t have the cash for a fully merchandised model, Pearlman is offering her customers a limited design service called The Essentials that focuses on a floor plan’s focal points and leaves some rooms, such as secondary bedrooms, bare except for flooring, paint, and window treatments. “We’re targeting the areas with emotional triggers,” Pearlman says.—P.C. I Boomers on Facebook Our expert designers had differing opinions on the subject of whether or not it’s okay to leave some rooms in a model unmerchandised. They’ve done it when they’ve been asked, but it’s certainly not ideal. “We have participated in partial models, where you do the main rooms you see f you think Facebook and MySpace are just for teens and college students, think again. A new “Entertainment Trends in America” study by market research firm The NPD Group in Port Washington, N.Y., found that 41 percent of baby boomers have visited social networking sites and 61 percent have been to sites with streaming or downloadable video. Overall, 57 percent of Web users across all age categories surveyed had used social networking sites within the past three months. Boomers who had visited the sites averaged eight visits in that time period. Some builders are taking advantage of the trend by creating their own Facebook profiles. Lennar, for example, has profiles for all of its divisions. MARKETING CASE STUDY Hangin’ with Hailey First-time buyers respond to an innovative Web campaign. H ubbell Homes in West Des Moines, Iowa, recently saw just how powerful Facebook, paired with a blog, can be. It used the enormously popular social media Web site to drive an innovative—and inexpensive—marketing campaign for GreenWay Crossing, a brownstone, mixed-use community geared to young professionals. A year ago, Hubbell Homes was having trouble creating interest in GreenWay. Marketing director Rachel Flint says that there’s significant competition in the townhome category in Des Moines and GreenWay Crossing “wasn’t even a blip” on the search term reports for Hubbell Homes’ Web site. Flint, who says she’d been “getting harassed” by some friends because she didn’t have a profile on Facebook, came up with the idea for a character to represent GreenWay Crossing’s target buyer. The result was Hailey Brownstone, whose persona was a young professional who had moved from Chicago to Des Moines and was in the process of buying her first home. “We got very deep with this— the type of food she likes, where she goes to socialize, what TV shows she watches, and put this all on her Facebook page and blog,” says Mollie Elkman, account executive with Hubbell Homes’ ad agency Philadelphia-based Group Two Advertising and Marketing, who served as the face and voice of Hailey for the campaign. Both the blog at www.HaileyBrown stone.com and the Facebook page made it clear that the character wasn’t a real person but a representation of the target buyer. The posts were written by 27-yearold Jarad Bernstein, a public relations specialist for Hubbell Realty. “We wanted to make it believable,” Bernstein says, “but we also wanted to make sure people knew it wasn’t a real person.” Still, the campaign (see page 50) S Eyes on Video earch engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of any builder’s online marketing strategy. So, new-home marketing directors need to pay attention anytime Google statistics indicate a new trend in what Web surfers are looking for online. Recent statistics from comScore, the Internet’s equivalent of TV’s Nielsen ratings, reported that video search requests on YouTube account for a fourth of all Google search queries in the U.S. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo!, comScore reported. Google continues to dominate the market in core search activity (not including video, map, or image searches); it holds a whopping 63.5 percent market share. The bottom line? Builders should consider incorporating videos into their Web sites and continue to pay attention to whatever Google Analytics is measuring for SEO. 48 ■ B U I LD E R f ebrua ry 2 0 0 9 W W W.BUILDERONLINE.COM http://www.HaileyBrownstone.com http://www.HaileyBrownstone.com http://WWW.BUILDERONLINE.COM
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