284 Home Builder Marketing That Stands Out Sep 3 2025

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, 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 are excited to have joining us today, Kelly Primeau. Kelly is the founder at CEA Marketing. Welcome, Kelly. Thanks for being with us.

Kelly Primeau: Thanks for having me.

Greg Bray: Well, Kelly, for those who haven't had a chance to meet you yet, let's start off by giving them that quick background and overview about yourself.

Kelly Primeau: Okay. Sure. I am the founder, as you mentioned earlier, of CEA Marketing Group. We are a full [00:01:00] service digital marketing, and I always say ad agency because we are full-service. We have been in business, we're going on our 28th year. We'll celebrate in November, showing my age.

Kevin Weitzel: Nice.

Kelly Primeau: So crazy. Primarily, we are a real estate marketing firm. So, we work with builders, we work with developers, and we work with sometimes real estate companies, depending like if they're managing like a high-rise project, we'll work with them. That's been our niche for 28 years, so it's been exciting and a crazy roller coaster ride. What we specialize in and what we love to do is strategy for clients. I do a lot of consulting, coming in and taking a look at kind of an overview of what's going on in their marketing department. I'll start off by doing an audit and figuring out, like, what are the things that they're doing really well, and where do they need more help?

We do a full digital marketing audit where we look at everything from their [00:02:00] signage to their displays, their online, their website, their SEO, their social media, and what kind of events are you having. What's your realtor program look like? So, we look at everything. And then we also talk to the internal teams and find out, like, what are their strengths, what are they really good at, where could they need extra help in that place. And then from there, I'll put together like a full plan for the company, and then we execute.

Kevin Weitzel: Sweet. We're going to jump more into that. However, before we do that, we have to know some interesting fact about you that has nothing to do with work, the home building industry, or family.

Kelly Primeau: Something interesting about me. Well, I love to travel, and actually, I have something fun. I am going to be heading to Croatia in October. My husband and I are taking a sailing course to learn how to charter a sailboat.

Kevin Weitzel: That's cool. Alright, so really quickly, what's the worst travel experience you've had, just [00:03:00] country or city, and what's the best travel experience you've ever had?

Kelly Primeau: I would say when I was in Ireland with my daughters last summer, getting back from Ireland was a bit of a challenge because all the planes got delayed because of the Taylor Swift concert in Dublin. And we were actually in Northern Ireland, and they canceled all the flights, we couldn't get home, and we were supposed to be leaving to head back to the United States like a day later. That would've been a nightmare not making that plane. So, there was no buses, no knocking, everything was completely sold out except for a ferry. So, we ended up taking like an eight-hour ferry from Northern Ireland to Liverpool. And then from there, a train to the station. So, it was an interesting adventure. So, that was one of those things that was kind of annoying, but we found a way to get back and get on our plane. So, that was fine.

One of the best travel experiences of my life is I actually got married in Capri, Italy, a couple of years ago. That was [00:04:00] fabulous. We had a pretty big wedding, 50 people. I planned an entire itinerary, and actually, 35 of the people went on a trip with us 10 days before that, 30 people, and then another five joined. And then by the time we got to Capri, there were 55 people there for five days that I planned the whole thing out for. So, that was amazing. So yeah.

Kevin Weitzel: I did something similar when I got married the second time, I traveled to a courthouse near Twentynine Palms, California. It's almost the same as taking 50 people to Italy. You know, almost.

Kelly Primeau: Yeah, 50 people who had never been like overseas before. So, most of them, most of them had not been overseas, so that was their first big trip. You know, that's why they kind of wanted to come along with me. It's like, well, I'm doing this. They're like, well, can we come with you? And the next friend would ask, Well, can we go? I'm like, you know what? Why don't you all just come, and I'll just plan it for everybody. And they loved it because they had everything [00:05:00] laid out for them, and it made them feel more comfortable because they were in a group with everybody that they knew. And it was pretty cool.

Greg Bray: Because you know how to do plans, right? That's what you know how to do, so.

Kelly Primeau: Part of what I do is a lot of event marketing for builders and developers. We plan big, huge events and things like that, so I'm pretty good at that side.

Greg Bray: Well, Kelly, we know you've been working on a new book that's recently come out. Tell us a little bit about that and what got you interested in putting that together.

Kelly Primeau: Yes, so I have a book that came out. It's called Future Proof Residential Marketing. This came out a couple months ago, and I'm just finally starting to promote it. So, been on a couple different podcasts. It's been really exciting. The reason I wrote this book is because a lot has changed here in the last year. Despite doing a lot of consulting, working with a lot of home builders, what I've found is that there's a lot of marketing teams that, for a long time now, the market was really good, where we didn't have to really [00:06:00] do a lot. They were just selling homes like crazy. They could do a little bit and still sell a lot, if that makes sense.

So, now with the market being slower, I find that a lot of home builders are very challenged of how do I drive traffic to my model centers, how do I even get leads because everything is kind of slowing down. So, you have to get really creative and you have to step outside of the box. And also, digital marketing is great, but there's a lot of other things that you can do outside of digital that can help drive traffic. And even some traditional methods, I think, are making a comeback now.

So, I wanted to write a book to really help those that might want some additional ideas of what they can do to try to drive traffic in a slower market. Also, to be able to nurture the leads because a lot of builders they're not so good at that lead nurturing. They like to work the hot one that comes in. But as far as those that are just kind of sitting there, I [00:07:00] think they might have like one touch point and then they kind of give up. They don't get back in touch. But there's all these different things that you can be doing to stay in front of that audience and make sure once they are ready to buy, that you're that company that's been there for them during that time period that they were waiting. That's what the book is about.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, there's really only two things that builders really need to do, right? Isn't it just place an ad in a magazine, or in a newspaper, and then also have a sign spinner on the corner, or is it more complicated than that?

Kelly Primeau: It's more complicated than that.

Kevin Weitzel: Oh, okay. Okay. More complex. Not necessarily complicated, but yes. Okay.

Greg Bray: Kevin, for those of our listeners who are not familiar with newspapers, could you expand on what those are?

Kevin Weitzel: Yes, that's a very thin print paper that you can put silly putty on and extract the print reverse. Yeah. Anyway,

Kelly Primeau: You'd be surprised that paper still works.

Kevin Weitzel: They can. It's funny that you say that it can, because, you know, one of our most productive campaigns was actually a postcard series. So, we sent out a postcard series that [00:08:00] had just an image of the product that we were pushing or selling or trying to get in contact with the builder, and you'd be surprised how many times builders will say, Hey, I got this postcard. It's like, what do you know? It's working. So

Kelly Primeau: They work. Honestly, we just sent out a postcard campaign for one of my developer builder clients in Sarasota, and they've already sold two homes from it. They only sent out a thousand at a time. We got very strategic with it, where we mailed into the heavy hit hurricane area where a lot of people were struggling to rebuild because it all the expense and everything. So, we mailed into that area because where they were building was in a higher ground, higher area in Sarasota, and it worked great. They got a lot of calls from it and actually $2 million in sales, so. Still works. It really does.

Kevin Weitzel: It does.

Greg Bray: In your book title, Kelly, you used the term future proof. Is anything really future proof? Because like you said, things have changed so much just in the last, you [00:09:00] know, little bit, is it not going to keep changing? What does that really mean to future proof your marketing?

Kelly Primeau: So, there's a couple chapters in my book that focus on AI, for example. I have a whole chapter in here on AI, all these different things that you can do with AI to help save time, save money, and there's so many different things that you can do from using AI within your CRM systems, using AI to understand who your audiences are, using AI to do competitive research. Also, even with model walkthroughs, there's a lot of cool new technology out there that uses AI.

 It's almost impossible to stay up with it because it's moving so fast, but builders have a tendency to be the last ones to kind of move on technology, I find. They're very slow, but you have to get into this now, because if you don't, you're going to be left behind. That's how fast it's moving. So, future proofing is really getting in there and having an understanding of it and putting in systems [00:10:00] so you are future proofing your company. Because if you don't future proof, you're probably going to be out of business, in my opinion. Any business it's going to affect some way or another.

Greg Bray: So, you talked about that you like to do a very comprehensive audit of a builder's marketing when you're first working with them, what are some of the core things that you're looking for, or where do you start when you look at what a builder's been doing and you're trying to find opportunities to improve?

Kelly Primeau: What I like to do is deep research in the beginning, because one of the things I find that builders don't particularly do is they don't do a lot of research. You would be amazed. Even when they start building within a community, it's like, well, what kind of research can you give us as a marketing company? Well, you know, there was this land available, so we bought it. No research behind it. I was always trained to like do all this research and figure out, like, you know, what's the competition like. Here in Florida, it's really, if there's land available, they're going to go after it. So, it's a little bit different. So, research is super [00:11:00] important to be able to lay out that entire plan.

So, what we like to do is we go in and first of all, we'll interview the stakeholders of the company. And then from there, I really like to get with the sales team. So, I have a whole survey that I send out, and I ask for the sales team to fill out the survey. The sales team, they're boots on the ground, they're the ones that are actually speaking to the buyers that are coming in, so they know all the information. Who are they? Where are they coming from? What are their pain points? I try to ask about probably 50 different questions to really understand who the buyer is.

The other thing I like to do is I ask them to allow me to interview four or five people that have purchased a home from them. It's great to hear back from a home buyer because they will also give you even different information than what the salespeople give you. So, you can get a little bit deeper with them through surveys as well.

Then the next thing would be just doing [00:12:00] deep research, and there's all kinds of really cool research tools out there that can help you actually do this a lot faster than the way I used to do it. We like to go in and research, find out who are your top three competitors. Find out what are they doing as far as marketing. What are they doing really well? What does their SEO look like? What kind of digital ads are they running? What Meta ads are they doing? There's a lot of things that we can find out from what the competitors are doing. What are their strengths, what are their weaknesses?

And then from there, we can look at the current marketing of what the client that brings us on, what are they doing really well, and where are their gaps? But I'd like to see what the gaps are in the competition. Builders tend to like to copy each other a lot. Like when one offers a mortgage incentive, they all offer that incentive. Like, come on, let's get a little bit creative and be the one that's doing something a little bit different and not copy each other because that's where your opportunity's always going to be. So, I love doing that deep research and figuring out those things and trying to come [00:13:00] up with creative things that are going to get my clients to stand out.

Kevin Weitzel: Speaking of builders copying other builders, how often do you think that they actually study and do any kind of case research to find out whether there's a level of success to what they're emulating or copying, versus just, Hey, those guys are doing it, we need to do it? Do you think it's just that pull from the holster because somebody else pulled from a holster? Or do you think they're looking at it and going, you know, their gun's not even loaded, so why are we pulling out our gun?

Kelly Primeau: I mean, I don't know. If you look right now, it's the mortgage interest rate thing. Last round of research I did for one of my clients, I sent it over. I'm like, well, there's 10 builders in your area. They're all doing some type of mortgage; it makes sense, though, because obviously, people are waiting for interest rates to come down.

But to me, every buyer's a little bit different, so be creative with your incentives. You could have a cash buyer that they don't need to have a mortgage incentive. But people are always looking for a good deal right now because it is a buyer's market. So, let's be a little bit creative and maybe have [00:14:00] multiple offers depending on the buyer, what their pain point is, and what their certain situation is. But if you're just out there advertising one incentive, I think you're going to lose people that way. And plus, if everybody else is doing it, then you don't stand out as much. Be really creative with your offers. Maybe offer something additional, something unique that's really going to stand out.

Greg Bray: When you bring these marketing plans and ideas and things to builders, in your experience, where are places that they get stuck trying to implement, or maybe push back and say, No, Kelly, we don't want to do that. What are some of those places that you've run into in your career?

Kelly Primeau: Yeah, so my biggest challenge is the sales and marketing teams; getting them to work together can be very difficult. The recipe for success is being able to get these teams to work together. Marketing needs to be asking sales more questions, and sales needs to be giving marketing more data. We always like to recommend [00:15:00] having a really good, intuitive CRM system. The challenge is getting the salespeople to use the CRM system the way they should be using it in order to give us the data that we need in order to do really good marketing. So, that's always been the biggest challenge is salespeople, they just like to sell. So, they might use a CRM system, but they're kind of limited with it.

And I see this all the time, like especially when we do mystery digital shops online where you shop a builder and you fill out a form and you'll find like the response that comes back, like I mentioned earlier. You might get one email or two emails from a salesperson, but it kind of drops off from there. Where if they had a really good system in play and a follow-up system and really staying in front of that client, people are taking a lot longer to make buying decisions.

 I might want to buy a home, but it might take me a year before that happens. But I think the one company that's going to stay in front of me the longest is probably the one that I'm going to [00:16:00] end up doing business with, if they're giving me educational information and just keeping top of mind. That's where they stop because they want to have that quick sale. They don't get it, so they give up. That's where I find the biggest challenges for a lot of builders is they don't know how to follow through and stay in the game long enough to keep these people that are on the fence engaged.

Greg Bray: Kevin and I have talked in the past about salespeople who don't put the stuff in the CRM, and he has a very simple solution to solve that problem, don't you, Kevin?

Kevin Weitzel: I've led sales teams in multiple verticals. If you don't use a CRM, you don't have a job. Because there's only so many leads that come in naturally just because you happen to be on the right dirt in the right place, selling the right product at the right time. It takes a seasoned veteran, takes a new thinking pro that uses a CRM to their advantage, that allows them to absolutely multiply their reach and their effectiveness. So, if you don't use CRM, you don't have 00:17:00] a job. Builders that take on that mentality, we'll have a much higher success rate with their sales.

Kelly Primeau: I agree. You'd be surprised how many building companies I go into that they don't even have a CRM system.

Kevin Weitzel: Oh yeah, no. Trust me, I see it.

Kelly Primeau: We'll do training with them, and the sales team are like, what's a CRM system? Like, how can you not know what that is?

Kevin Weitzel: Okay. Speaking of that, and I want to go on kind of that tangent there. When you're talking about future proofing, companies, you know, emulating and/or just not adopting technology. I have noticed that certain areas of the country, certain zip codes, if you will, and I'm not going to pick on any particular area, but just say one of them rhymes with Ansis Ity, where the builders don't necessarily need to compete in modern technology. Because none of their competitors do. They don't have modern renderings.

They're still using stick drawings that they were using back in the seventies. They're not using interactive floor plans; they're still using static floor plans. They're still using printed marketing collateral that they don't necessarily even have digitally. What do you say to builders that aren't looking at [00:18:00] integrating AI into their workflow or not integrating a CRM? What is your stance on that, based off of the fact that there are some areas of the country that, because their competitors don't do it, they don't necessarily feel like they need to adopt it?

Kelly Primeau: Well, I can say that if you start to use these tools, you'll probably end up doubling your sales. So, do you stay where you want, or do you want to move forward and get more sales? And I have a case study on this. I have a builder that's in a rural area. They're in Springfield, Missouri, and they build in more of the outerskirts of Springfield. You're driving down country roads when you go visit the model centers and everything.

The market, the way it is right now, they are breaking records in sales because they do have a CRM system. They do have a lead nurturing system. They are being educational. They are doing all these things. The sales and the marketing team they collaborate together. They give it to each other information. It's this one big team that's working. They work well with their agency, which is me. You know, [00:19:00] all these things.

The communication and everything that this builder is doing is wow, but their renderings are great. The photography is phenomenal, what they do. They're doing so well, and I'm so proud of them, and they're in a small area. And I have to say that every month, Hey, we just went over our sales goal again. But it might have been selling, you know, eight homes or selling 12, 13, 14, 15 a month. And they're doing that because they have great systems in place and they're utilizing modern technology.

Kevin Weitzel: Technically, that is the right answer. I didn't know if that was going to come at me that accurately, but yes, that's basically what I'm saying is that you don't necessarily have to think that you need to do it because your competitors do it. Why not lead the charge and actually see that exponential growth? So, thank you. I love that answer.

Kelly Primeau: The other one, just that not having a solid budget either, and being afraid to spend money in a slower market where you should be spending money. Because [00:20:00] when everybody pulls back, the one that's doing more is also the one that's going to win. I see that happen a lot.

Kevin Weitzel: That's the old Pepsi Coke model. You know, Pepsi and Coke are the number one and number two choices, although I think Dr. Pepper is now just overtaking Pepsi. But you got your number one and number two, they spend billions of dollars, billions and billions of dollars over decades on advertising against each other when they don't really have any other competition. So, they have to spend, because if the other team is spending, they also have to spend, and if they don't, they start losing market share. So, yeah, you're on point.

Greg Bray: But wait a minute, Kelly. When the market's down, we don't have the money anymore, so we have to cut marketing. We have to, don't we?

Kelly Primeau: You cut marketing, and you're cutting sales.

Kevin Weitzel: Boom.

Kelly Primeau: You're losing opportunities on sales. Then you will have zero traffic. The thing is, is when you cut back during this time period, with digital, especially, if you slow down your campaigns or even stop doing them to turn everything back on once you do [00:21:00] have money, we can't turn on your Google ad campaigns and expect that you're going to start getting leads overnight. It's something about machine learning. The longer these ad campaigns go, the stronger they get. So, if you're turning them on and off and messing around with them, the progress is going to be much slower. So, it's going to take you a lot longer to get back in the game by doing that than just staying in there and staying steady during that time period.

Kevin Weitzel: So, basically, your Carnival Barkers are putting butts in the seats for these circus people to entertain. Ergo, your marketing people are putting butts in the seats for the salespeople to sell to. So, if your marketing people are taken away, then you have fewer people to sell to; therefore, you're going to reduce your sales.

Kelly Primeau: Yeah. And sometimes I end up leaving the marketing up to the salespeople, which isn't a good idea.

Kevin Weitzel: Bad mistake.

Kelly Primeau: Yeah.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah.

Kelly Primeau: And salespeople like also drive me crazy because it's like if you have a good company that's willing to invest, you should celebrate that and [00:22:00] you should want to be part of that and make sure that you let us know, like, Hey, I just got this really great lead from this. This is really working. Make sure you're telling management that things are working. Maybe, even if it's slower, still say it's working. Because if you sit there and start complaining about it, they're going to take it away, then you're not going to have anything.

So, I know salespeople tend to complain a lot, but if you can actually be part of the solution. And salespeople, too, can come up with creative ideas to drive traffic themselves. There's so many different things that they can do without spending a lot of money just to get people coming through the door. I don't see a lot of that happening. They're waiting around for, well, we don't have anything happening right now. You've got to do some things yourself to make that happen. Again, there's so many creative ideas that companies can be doing instead of just sitting there waiting. I see a lot of that.

Greg Bray: Well, Kelly, you touched on some different technologies, and you briefly mentioned earlier that you [00:23:00] had some stuff in the book about AI. Everybody's interested in AI right now. We're all trying to figure it out and understand it. What are one or two examples that you've seen work well of using some of these AI tools for builders with their sales and marketing?

Kelly Primeau: You really wanted to keep an eye on what your competition is doing. A lot of builders will ask their sales team or their sales management like to come back with reporting on what's happening in the industry. You can actually use AI for that to go in and do some deep research, where it can pull all kinds of different reports on your competition that really will give you a lot of insight on what's going on. So, I think for the research aspect of it, AI is really great for that.

Also, if you do have a good CRM system, meaning like some of my favorites are HubSpot, and another one is called GoHighLevel. I'm sure Salesforce has some capability as well. There's a lot of CRM systems out there, but a good one [00:24:00] that's just made for sales and marketing. It's not part of your whole builder system because those aren't very good. Ones that are just made for sales and marketing.

HubSpot has AI built into it, which is great. So, if you can train the salespeople how to do it, you have one lead that comes in, and you put information about that lead, AI will actually create emails for you automatically that you can have in workflows that will be made just off of that one lead. So, it's making it a lot easier to do that email communication and those types of things.

Also, just coming in by seeing, like this particular lead came in, like Kelly Primeau in and she is interested in a million-dollar home looking to buy here. AI can now look at me as that lead. It knows so much about me, so it can create a whole persona and a detailed marketing workflow just on me, myself. So, a lot of builders I [00:25:00] see everything's kind of the same marketing piece that goes out to everybody. With AI now, we can have everything be more individualized for each one of your buyers that come in. They feel like you're speaking directly to them, which is really nice, and that conversation can continue.

So, I think that helps the building and the sales team save time. And then the marketing team it just gives us so much information because we can really dig into the buyer demographic because the AI will help analyze all this, and it makes us stronger to help us be more predictive on what we want to do for marketing.

Greg Bray: Did you notice, Kevin, she never used the word write blogs in there?

Kevin Weitzel: She didn't. You're basically telling me that if you had something like a HubSpot and you're going to utilize that tool, it could come back to you and not just say, Kelly, we see that you're interested in one of our million-dollar homes. However, did you know that we do built-ins that are strategically placed so people will notice your SAM award when they walk in the front door? [00:26:00] Yeah.

Kelly Primeau: Yeah.

Kevin Weitzel: Would that blow your mind if it knew that you won a SAM? That'd be crazy.

Kelly Primeau: It knows all kinds of stuff. I mean, even for putting chatbots on your website. We're building conversational chatbots that sound just like a real person having a conversation. And these chatbots can send out floor plans of what they're interested in. Hey, based on this, I suggest this. Take a look at this. While they're chatting with the person, the whole time, they'll be probing them. Hey, let's set up a meeting with a sales counselor. So, once that person's ready, the chatbot right away can take that person and set an appointment, and it can do that at midnight when somebody's online searching.

The other thing it can do, because a lot of times there's a lot of missed phone calls. A lot of smaller builders they can't afford to have online sales counselors. But now you can have an AI assistant that sounds just like me, that will answer the phone, ask a couple probing questions, and then you know, Susie's busy showing houses right now, can I just get a little [00:27:00] bit of information about you, and then let's make an appointment. As soon as Susie's done, she'll call you back. So, when Susie's done showing her home, she'll come back to the computer, and the AI might have already set a couple appointments for her.

A lot of people, especially by the time they're ready to pick up and make that phone call, which for a lot of us takes a while, right? Because nobody likes to talk on the phone anymore. So, we're only going to do that when we're actually really serious. So, you don't want to miss that phone call when it comes in because I might get frustrated because nobody answered. Because we all want that instant satisfaction, and if they don't do that, then I'm going to go on to the next person. And the person that does pick up the phone has a more likelihood of getting my business than the one that might've been busy that just couldn't get to the call. So, AI can help with those types of things also. It could do so many things.

Greg Bray: It's a great example for sure. What is the one do not do for builders with their marketing? The things that you see it and you just want to hit your head on the [00:28:00] desk because you're just like, what were they thinking?

Kevin Weitzel: You're limiting her to just one? Because there's a whole mess load of them.

Greg Bray: You can do two if you have to. You can do two.

Kevin Weitzel: Kelly, what do you got? What do you got?

Kelly Primeau: I think there's certain things that sometimes, when they're trying to cut costs, they want to try to do things where they bring things in-house or give one person or a marketing team responsibilities that they shouldn't have. That's one mistake I see that happens a lot. Or maybe they might have one agency partner that's doing a lot for them. My agency is great, but we're not good at every single thing. I have an SEO partner that I recommend, and when we set up a CRM system, I bring in a CRM specialist that will come in and help that company get everything set up.

They put a lot on their internal marketing teams, which kind of drives me crazy when you hear that they're running ads and doing SEO when you know that's a specialty that should [00:29:00] be given to a company that specializes in that. But the relying on this one person to do everything, and then they're wondering why they're failing. And the person that is doing everything they don't have time. They're really not effective in all the different things that they're doing.

Greg Bray: I just had a conversation just in the last couple of weeks with a builder who has an in-house person, a junior person, responsible for updating the website, doing their SEO, and running their Google Ads campaign. And I'm just like, Oh man, and SEO means they wrote a blog. That's what SEO means to them. I'm just like, Man, you need a degree in Google these days to do a good job with paid campaigns. Well, you can set them up. It's not terribly difficult to set them up and just throw some money out there, but you're going to waste a lot of money if you do that.

Kelly Primeau: Waste so much money on it. Even with SEOs getting even more complicated now, because you have to do SEO for search when someone's actually typing and searching. And now there's something called GEO where you need to start optimizing for AI because a lot of people, like me, [00:30:00] for example, I use AI for most everything when I'm searching, I barely use Google any longer. So, optimizing for AI is a little bit different than optimizing direct for Google. And then you also have voice search as well, and that's a whole nother thing. So you really have to know what you're doing.

You also need to make sure whatever partner company that you're working with knows what they're doing, because there's a lot of people that say they are, but they're not really that good at it. So, it's complicated. It's so important to be able to find that. They should have a degree in it, like you mentioned, if you're going to give them that task. If not, it needs to be sent to somebody else or a company that can.

Kevin Weitzel: One thing that home builders have to deal with is that with AI and the way the internet works anymore, it is very easy for a company that is mediocre as all get out to represent themselves as being better than what they are. So, it is a challenge for builders to sift through this litany of, you know, Carl working in his underwear out of his home that says I can do SEO too. I got an associate's degree at this [00:31:00] school, and I play with Excel spreadsheets. I know all this stuff can't be hard. But let me ask you a question. Let's change it really quick just to a different gear.

Kelly Primeau: Okay.

Kevin Weitzel: The majority of what we're talking about is for established builders, builders that have been around the block, that have some revenue, that have some buckets, some various buckets of revenue that they can utilize for, you know, operation A, B, C, or D. For that starving, you know, just getting started builder that literally has stretching every gram of weight out of every penny that they have, is it a misstep to bring in their nephew, Timmy, to do some of these things, to get them started, and at what point do they turn it over? Is it as soon as humanly possible do you find a partner that can do it well, or find an employee that can do it well? Or do you continue just limping along with Timmy?

Kelly Primeau: The smart thing to do is if you're that new builder getting started, is surround yourself with the best people out there. First of all, find a really good consultant that can help you sort through all that. I also love to do this, knowing that their budgets aren't as big. [00:32:00] So, there's certain things that we can offload to an agency. Like, yes, we want to have a SEO company come in, and you need a new website. So, let's hire a website company to help you with your website.

Now, what can we bring in-house? Let's help you hire the right person because you do need somebody boots on the ground that's there working with you, but making sure that you have the right hire for that. So, what I would recommend to those builders is bring on somebody that can help you navigate all that and get your systems and processes. Set up first, right to begin with. Because if you bring in junior employee that doesn't have the training, you're never going to get off. You're never going to get started correctly. But if you bring in a consultant that can come in and actually train somebody to have that role, I think you're being set up for a success.

So, spend the money in the beginning to hire somebody that can help. Like you said, you don't need to necessarily hire an expensive agency, but you can have somebody that can help you, maybe find [00:33:00] good freelancers or different people to work with that's a little bit more affordable. And then at some point, once you're able to work with a company that can handle more than, obviously, you can offload to a digital marketing company or somebody like that. There's a lot of different ways to go about it, but don't try to do it yourself. Hire an expert that knows how to hire these individuals for you and start that way. That's what I'd recommend.

Kevin Weitzel: Music's in my ears.

Greg Bray: Well, Kelly, this has been a great conversation. I've learned a lot. Any last words of advice that you'd like to share before we finish up?

Kelly Primeau: Yeah. I know the market's really slow for all of us. What I recommend is trying to be creative, come up with great ideas that you can do to drive traffic. There are unique ways that you can bring people into your model center through having special events, join Facebook groups, those types of things that have a lot of activity. Invite those people to come to your model. There's also a lot of great realtors out there that have YouTube [00:34:00] channels and are actively selling, invite those people out as well.

You could actually have an activity happen in your model center every single day to drive traffic when it's slower, and you'll see that by doing simple little things like that, that are really affordable, really goes a long way. Those end up turning into sales. So, that would be one piece of advice right now. One of the biggest struggles I see is not a lot of traffic coming in. So, I just would love everybody to get a little bit more creative and challenge your sales team and internal marketing team to do a few of those things.

Kevin Weitzel: And random table on the side of the freeway, or Barnes and Noble, or builderbooks.com. Where can somebody find Future Proof Residential Marketing?

Kelly Primeau: On Amazon. Hopefully, it will soon be in Builder Books because I'm actually in the process of applying to get the book on there. They opened that up here in August. I'm working on actually putting my application in today as we speak. For right now, they can go on Amazon and buy it. [00:35:00] There is a digital version and then there's the actual book itself.

Greg Bray: And Kelly, if somebody wants to reach out and get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to connect?

Kelly Primeau: Yeah, so the best way to connect is if you follow me on Instagram @Kelly Primeau Consulting, I make reels with daily marketing tips, and also on my LinkedIn as well. So, if you follow me on those two channels, you'll actually get a lot of great insight to kind of what's going on and marketing tips and ideas that you can do to help drive traffic. So, I encourage that. And you can also email me, that's the best way to get in contact, kelly@ceamarketing.com.

Greg Bray: Well, Kelly, thanks again for sharing with us today and spending time with us, and thank you, everybody, for listening 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. [00:36:00]