Advertising helps home builders grow, but which advertising channels are best?
In a constantly changing market, it’s important to keep an eye on where your competitors are spending their money so you can plan and make strategic decisions going forward.
In the last twelve months we’ve noticed a big shift in advertising dollars.
Builders have been slowly culling their spend from traditional media and also from Branded style ads across Radio and TV and have been moving towards social media.
Primarily Facebook and Instagram paid advertising.
Not only are they shifting their spending money across to Facebook & Instagram… They are increasing their overall digital advertising spending, in some cases by over 100%.
This is a result of market dilution.
Google has been the dominant platform for years and through an SEO and Pay Per Click strategy using Google Ads, home builders have had monthly SEO campaigns ticking over for a decade, with very little change to monthly costs. Google Ads has also been fairly static in pricing over recent years and once builders hit a percentage of saturation (over 85%) for their primary keywords, they cap their ad spend.
Facebook however is different.
While it is still an auction with the paid ads, builders are still working out how to manage how much of their ad money goes towards branding, display home advertising for foot traffic and direct response style ads for immediate leads.
This overall advertising mix is important for builders to grow and I can see digital grabbing even more advertising dollars as builders start to explore more channels (such as YouTube and Spotify as an example).