Just like a football team should never go into a game without a plan, a home builder business should never be without a marketing plan. The tougher the competition, the more that plan matters, and home builders are in a particularly competitive space. A marketing plan is essential to hold everything together and ensure that all your team members are moving in the same direction and have their eyes firmly on the ball.
What exactly is a marketing plan?
Any business will find that their marketing efforts bear the most fruit when they are coordinated and underpinned by an over-arching strategy. A marketing plan is a document that outlines how your home building business approaches its marketing and helps you to coordinate it, ensuring that every effort is in support of a collective drive to achieve specific objectives.
But a marketing plan is not the same as a marketing strategy. A marketing strategy is a long-term vision closely tied to your business goals and brand positioning based on target market research. A marketing plan, on the other hand, is a short to medium-term roadmap with the precise steps to take to execute that strategy. To put it simply, if the strategy is the “why” the plan is the “how”.
A marketing plan needs to be reviewed annually (at least) and adjusted based on what has been working and what hasn’t, as well as changes in the market, your service offering, brand positioning, marketing trends and a host of other factors. Perhaps you’ve begun to leverage social media more, or new content formats. Or perhaps your budget has increased or decreased. It’s vital that your plan remain agile to account for these types of shifts and ensure that your marketing efforts remain on track and deliver optimal results.
Why you really need a marketing plan
While it is possible to wing it and make it up as you go along, that means relying more on blind luck than anything else. Without a plan to implement your strategy, you’re likely to end up going in the wrong direction, wasting time and resources and achieving very little.
Studies have shown that a marketing plan is a strong predictor of success. Businesses that have one tend to out-perform those that don’t by leaps and bounds. Marketers with a documented marketing plan are more than 300% more likely to be successful in their efforts than those without. A marketing plan is the hallmark of an organized marketer, alongside goal setting. Goals are an essential part of any marketing plan, and surveys have revealed that marketers who set clearly defined and realistic goals tend to be four times more likely to succeed than their more aimless peers.
How to use our marketing plan template
Click to download your Home Builder Marketing Plan (PDF)
To help home builders get the most out of their marketing plan, we’ve put together a template that covers all your bases. The CODESM marketing plan template for home builders below includes a business summary and situation analysis covering SWOT (your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, as well as an overview of your target market, competitor landscape and pricing strategy.
After that, fill in your short and long-term marketing objectives and try to make them precise and measurable, framed within your KPIs such as leads, customers, visits or calls.
Our template then serves to guide your approach to the marketing funnel to outline what approach you plan to take for each stage of the customer journey, from awareness through to conversion and beyond. Then outline your content production formats and your distribution channels, as well as the budget you’re working with and the timeframe for the execution of your plan.
The accuracy of the information you base your plan on is key to its success. Be sure to use reliable and up-to-date market research, and mine your customer data for insights about your target market. It’s vital to know where your home builder clients can be found and what kind of content is most likely to resonate with them, as this will guide the structure of your marketing plan.
So here is our free marketing plan template – use it to pin down your strategy and take your marketing to a new level.
