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The Housing Trend—Where Does Your Market Stand?

22 May

Image courtesy thedailygreen.com

Every month, we get the new housing stats. Stats about everything: starts, permits, vacancies, ownership levels, mortgage rates, foreclosures, and of course, inventory levels.

It seems there’s an entire segment of the industry, and especially the government, responsible for reporting all these statistics.  And those are the factual statistics. Just as often we hear ‘experts’ talking about all the trends and forecasting for the future. I heard someone talking about the expected housing starts in Canada for 2015. Really? Who cares? Aren’t we all trying to ensure that 2012 is actually the recovery year?

There are some interesting facts that we should pay attention to. The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index (HOI) seems like a reasonable indicator to how your market is doing. According to the HOI, nationwide housing affordability is at a record high. But tight lending conditions continue to create a significant roadblock for many homebuyers.

  • 77.5 percent of all new and existing homes sold in this year’s first quarter were affordable to families earning the national median income of $65,000.  This beats the previous record set in the final quarter of 2011, when 75.9 percent of homes sold were affordable to median-income earners.

“Homes in this year’s first quarter were more affordable than they have been at any time in more than 20 years, yet many potential sales are not happening because of overly tight lending conditions that are keeping hardworking families from obtaining a suitable mortgage,” said Barry Rutenberg, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and a home builder from Gainesville, Fla. “Without this significant hurdle, the housing and economic recovery could be proceeding at a much stronger pace.”

The most affordable major housing market was Indianapolis-Carmel, Ind., where 95.8 percent of homes sold during the period were affordable to households earning the area’s median family income of $66,900.

Also ranking among the most affordable major housing markets were:

  • Dayton, Ohio
  • Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla.
  • Modesto, Calif.
  • Grand Rapids, Mich.
  • Buffalo-Niagara Falls, N.Y

Among smaller housing markets, Cumberland, Md.-W.Va. topped the affordability chart. There, 99 percent of homes sold during the first quarter were affordable to families earning the area’s median income of $53,000.

Other smaller housing markets at the top of the index include:

  • Fairbanks, Alaska
  • Wheeling, W.Va.
  • Kokomo, Ind.
  • Davenport-Moline-Rock Island, Iowa-Ill.

In New York-White Plains-Wayne, N.Y.-N.J., which retained the title of the least affordable major housing market for a 16th consecutive quarter, just 31.5 percent of homes sold in the first three months of this year were affordable to those earning the area’s median income of $68,200.

Other major metros at the bottom of the affordability chart included:

  • San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, Calif.
  • Honolulu
  • Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, Calif.
  • Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, Calif.

Ocean City, N.J., was the least affordable smaller housing market on the list, with 45.9 percent of homes sold in the first quarter affordable to families earning the median income of $71,100.

Other small metros at the bottom of the list included

  • Santa Cruz-Watsonville, Calif.
  • San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles, Calif.
  • Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta, Calif.
  • Laredo, Texas

So what does this mean to a building industry marketer? Focus on a few items that make sense.  This study looks at houses being built and their relative affordability in that specific market.  This tightly focused look at housing in a market is helpful.  Don’t get sidetracked on issues that you can’t impact or change.

Please visit www.nahb.org/hoi for tables, historic data and details.

Theodore Roosevelt & the Building Products Industry – Great Quotes Series

8 May

Image source:Wikipedia

What can one of the 4 Mount Rushmore presidents teach us about marketing?

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

- Theodore Roosevelt

We’re all guilty of it as building product industry marketers. I’ve heard it countless times myself. I’m talking about making excuses for why we can’t do something.

We have a small staff. We can’t get that information. We have a limited budget. Our budget got reduced by 20%. The head of sales won’t work with us. Those are the kinds of statements I thought of when I read this quote from President Theodore Roosevelt. And I don’t think he was saying to be complacent or accept the status quo; that was never an option for TR and it shouldn’t be one for you, the building product marketer. So what can we do, as marketers?

  • Don’t spend time on it if it’s not aligned with the business goals: quite often, an organization has a long-standing commitment to something that doesn’t make sense with the business today. It might be a tradeshow that used to be the industry event, a publication that you’re always advertised in or a customer event you’ve always supported. There should be no sacred cows in your marketing.
  • Make sure you’re collecting usable data: for too long, we had to frequently justify mass media as being solely a branding effort. After all, how could we tie it directly to results? Now, with the ability to create and track unique URLs, use tracking phone numbers and create QR codes, it’s possible to tie results back to every single piece of communication possible. Start doing that, and it becomes a lot easier to decide where your dollars should best be spent – no more sacred cows in the media plan either.
  • Automate It: technology has made it easier for us to automate so many things that used to require time from internal staff. Want to trigger reminder campaigns? Tie your sales data into your email marketing platform, set the business rules and let the system run. Tired of creating custom spreadsheets with pivot tables and other data visualizations? Look at marketing automation/analytics platforms, of which there are many.
  • Bring in strategic partners: we’re all being asked to do more with less, but we can’t all be experts at everything. Maybe you can’t afford a full-time website designer and developer, but hiring a website development firm to build a site with a content management system (CMS) that your staff can use to update the site might be just the ticket.

It’s easy to say something can’t be done, but it’s an incredible experience to overcome all those obstacles and achieve the goals in place for the business. I think that’s what TR had in mind, and the organization he was leading had more problems than we’ve ever had to consider, as marketers.

The Shift in Technology Spending for Building Product Marketers

4 May

Dollars are being spent by the CMO, instead of the CIO – why?

Every day we are faced with more technology in marketing. Websites, text messaging, mobile apps, phone tracking, analytics dashboards, database marketing and the list goes on.  It seems everything we do as building material marketers involves some technology.

So who spends all this money on technology? It used to be the CIO spent money on workstations and mainframes and big IT networks.  But the technology we use and how we use it has changed.

In a study earlier this year, Gartner predicts that, by 2017, the CMO will be spending more on IT than the CIO.  Why do they predict this?

  • Technology is at the heart of marketing – and adoption is well underway
  • Marketing is already a major buyer & influencer of technology
  • Marketing is becoming more strategic & expanding its responsibilities
  • Marketing controls the budget for a third to a half of marketing software

So how does this compare to your organization? Are you (the marketer) working to align with your IT department?

Information Week recently did an article with a CIO survey and Fifteen New Rules for IT to Live by—one of those is to make the CMO the CIO’s new best friend.

IT leaders have a ways to go to win over their marketing peers: 27% say their relationship with the marketing team is poor or neutral, compared with 22% who say that about their relationship with the finance team, and 15% who say that about operations/manufacturing.

Data-driven marketing and social networking analytics are places where marketing and IT groups should have a natural bond, as well as in mobile apps and websites.

Bottom line—regardless of where you’re at in consumption of technology, as a building material marketer your role in the recommendation and purchase of your company’s technology will certainly increase. How prepared are you for the changing role?

Gartner study

Are 20% of Building Product Customers Getting Left Behind?

1 May

Image Source: Monrovia Weekly

A recent Pew Study shows 1 in 5 adults don’t use the Internet.

20% of U.S. adults think the Internet isn’t relevant for them, the majority of whom are retirees.

For anyone with an aging parent, it probably isn’t all that surprising. Those raised to search through phone books to find businesses, who eagerly await printed catalogs to arrive in the mail, who keep their mobile phone turned off until they leave the house, who watch The Weather Channel to get their forecast—in short, the “Boomers” and older who represent nearly 40 million Americans—they have been much slower to adopt the Internet…or to “see the point” in it.

It would easy to dismiss this, noting that many of them are retired and don’t work in the building industry, except for one problem: this audience is a massive portion of the end-step of the building supply channel.

Boomers are the core of the aging-in-place population, a group with billions in purchasing power and growing need for products and services that will ease them through their senior years.

And what we’re hearing is: they don’t use the Internet.

What does this mean for us as building product marketers? Simply put, it means we need to make sure we talk to our audiences—all of them—where they really are and not where we think they should be, or where we’d like them to be, or where it would be convenient for them to be.

Fact is, in the current environment, it’s our inboxes and not our mailboxes that are jammed full of junk, much of which we barely skim over to determine if it’s worth reading at all. As a result, some of the “old school” tactics that have fallen out of favor in the digital age are perfectly positioned to reach the “old school” audience.

So as it turns out, those print ads, direct mail, printed catalogs, prominent Yellow Pages listings, door hangers, and all the other tactics that have been shunned as too old-fashioned to reach the tablet-enabled are exactly the way to reach the non-Internet crowd.

That’s not to say that email campaigns and banner ads and SEO aren’t important ways to deliver your message and reach your audiences. But more than ever, we need to remember that an audience exists who isn’t reached through the Internet that now dominates much of our lives.

When speaking to those who choose to live comfortably off-the-grid, the tried-and-true tactics are still the way to get noticed and make a connection.

As the Tech Revolution Continues in the Building Products Industry, Don’t Forget…

26 Apr

Linked from freedesktopwallpaper.org

Every day, we’re all inundated with stories about this device or this website being another “revolution” in our everyday lives, and while most of that is hyperbole, we’ve truly seen some revolutions in the past 20 (and even last 10) years in technology. You might be reading this on an iPad at home, or on your Android device at the airport. Or maybe you went “old school” and you’re reading on a desktop computer! Marketers like us tend to be on the forefront of technology and can sometimes forget that the people we’re selling to don’t fit that same model.

ProSales magazine, one of two main trade publications for the LBM dealer audience, conducted research titled “Building Material Dealer Sources of Information Survey” last fall. The first question in this survey was, “Which of the following types of resources do you use regularly as part of your work-related reading/information-gathering?”

The top response, picked by 82% of respondents, was “Trade magazines specific to building material dealers.” Yes, those magazines we all get at the office, the same ones derided as old/traditional media.

The second response, chosen by 61% of respondents, was “Building product manufacturer sales representatives.” Yes, in 2011, people still count on a one-to-one conversation to get the information they need to run their businesses more effectively.

This survey was conducted by email, so you can likely assume the respondents would tend to be more engaged with technology than the typical building material dealer…so imagine what the numbers would look like if you could survey those typical dealers.

Similarly, we conducted research for a client last fall, also sent by email to building material dealers across the country. We asked what methods they’d prefer to be communicated with by wholesale distributors, and gave them the following options: direct mail, email, fax, text messaging, social media or phone. Respondents ranked those choices, and Email was the clear #1 choice, but do you know what #2 was? Faxing.

We know the building products industry isn’t known for being quick to adapt, but that result still surprised us. Remember, this was an emailed survey, so it’s very likely faxing might be almost as popular a choice among the total dealer audience.

Am I saying abandon your efforts with mobile apps, social media, BIM modeling and other technologies? Absolutely not…but don’t forget that a lot of business still gets done in this industry with the same methods we used before any of us even knew what a “smartphone” was. A lot of “social networking” still occurs the way it has for years – in a lumberyard, face to face.

Facebook Timeline Hype – Does It Matter for Building Products Industry CMOs?

17 Apr

What You Need to Know about Facebook Timeline

As you’re no doubt aware, every change Facebook makes to its features or layout, whether big or small, results in lots of chatter and hand-wringing among the core users and the social media-focused blogs, such as Mashable. The most recent one is Timeline, and it was slowly rolled out throughout Q1 2012. So what do you need to know? Glad you asked.

  1. You’ve got more space to personalize the page visually. The most immediate change you’ll notice is the Cover Photo, a large horizontal format image you’ll see at the very top of the page, in addition to your existing Profile Photo. Lots of creative ways to utilize this space have been created – see a few of them here.
  2. You’ve got a new way to tell your company’s history. Say you’ve been around for over 150 years, like The Wolf Organization. Or you’ve got a great history of innovation, like Therma-Tru with fiberglass doors. You can utilize the Milestone feature to showcase those events in chronological order with both visual and written support. In addition to Wolf (a great example), Captain Morgan USA has perhaps the most fun usage of it I’ve seen, and it supports their broadcast and other marketing tactics perfectly.
  3. You’ve got a new way to control what messages are seen first. Using the Highlight feature, the most important or valuable posts made to your page by either you or people that like your page will stay at the top if you highlight them. This could be used for great testimonials or important product or service news, for example.
  4. You’ve got a better way to communicate with those that like your page. Company pages can now exchange private messages with people, which can be a great way to take something you don’t want public into a more private arena. This can also be used to give a more personal feel to someone that likes your page.
  5. Those tabs you spent money developing are harder to find. Tabs are used for custom functionality developed by the company for their page, such as a product catalog, sweepstakes registration or other tools. They used to be shown on the left side but are now featured towards the right side, just below the cover photo. Only 3 are visible at a time, though you can still click to expand more, so you’ll need to be careful about what goes there and what doesn’t.

Of course, these new changes have immediately been embraced by the biggest consumer brands, like Coca-Cola and Ford Motor Company, as well as B2B giants like GE and Aon Hewitt. However, that doesn’t alter our belief that not every brand needs to be on Facebook. Just because your customers are on Facebook to see pictures of their grandkids or keep up with their own children, doesn’t mean they want to hear from you in that space. New research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that 99.5% of people who like a page on Facebook don’t ever interact with that brand page, for a variety of reasons. That’s why it’s so important to first determine if there’s a business reason for your brand to be on there, and then determine what your expectations are…before you ever have your team spending time figuring out how to use these new features.

Further Reading

Mobile Apps versus Mobile Websites—Which is More Worthwhile in the Building Product Market?

5 Apr

Smartphone users want more out of their searches.

In a previous post I mentioned a few statistics of mobile shopping and the relentless reliance on our smartphones and devices.

As smartphone owners, we are increasingly using our devices as retail outlets. From researching products and reviews, to comparing prices, finding retail locations and redeeming coupons, we are constantly deferring to our phones for immediate inquiries.

How many times have your potential customers walked into a building products store and searched for an apron-donned assistant to answer a question about a specific product? I, for one, am guilty of that. Imagine having an app where your customers can simply scan a QR code into their smartphone and instantly appears your webpage with all the information about that particular product, where it comes from and how to order. A perfect opportunity to upsell and cross-sell, and all of sudden your customer is leaving with a cart full instead of a basket full of your products!

Your website provides vital information on products, warranties and special offers. Having that information accessible online and in-hand is crucial to the comparison shopper.

Mobile shopping has reached scale and is only going to grow as smartphone penetration continues to rise. Neilsen’s metering of 5,000 US volunteers participating in Nielsen’s mobile research shows that during the 2011 holiday season, the top retail apps and websites combined—Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Target and Walmart—reached nearly 60 percent of smartphone owners.

Smartphone owners of both genders prefer mobile websites over mobile apps when it comes to retail, with men slightly more likely to try retailers’ mobile apps than women. Research has shown that consumers who use retailer mobile apps tend to spend more time on them. Home Depot’s mobile website, for example, is efficiently organized to guide the user directly to the specific product they are needing. Target’s mobile site will even tell you the aisle in the store where the product appears! That’s the kind of tool consumers love.

As building product marketers, you (hopefully) already have an information-packed website; do you really need an app to repeat what is already provided on your website? The answer is no. Mobilizing your website to make it easy for consumers to navigate is what you really need to get ahead of the curve.

“Retailers need to think of their business as a multi-channel environment that can potentially include mobile, online and brick and mortar stores,” says John Burbank, President of Strategic Initiatives at Nielsen. “Winning with shoppers requires a consistent experience across channels that reinforces the value you represent as a retail brand, whether it be price, service, selection, style or other key attributes.”

Our industry consists of dealers, retailers, manufacturers and lumberyards; nowhere does it say we have to have a mobile app to thrive within. What is important, however, is that we stay abreast of the mobile trends and adapt as necessary. As I stated in my previous post, we have to be aware that the world we’ve lived in has changed and we need to ensure our companies and brands are ready.

Resources:
A Store In Your Pocket—NielsenWire

Building Product LinkedIn Groups – Find the Value Through Participation!

23 Mar

LinkedIn Groups Provide Value to the Building Product Marketer

Have you noticed that some of your LinkedIn contacts wear their group list like a decorated military officer?  I wonder, “how can anyone remain active in that many groups?”  The key word here is active.  To truly realize the value of LinkedIn groups the building product marketer must be active and interactive with peers within the group/industry.

A key for building product marketers utilizing LinkedIn groups, according to J.D. Gershbein of Success magazine, is to “Be Catalyzed, Not Paralyzed.”

 The vast majority of people don’t play in the groups. They join a few, maybe check in a few times to explore, but never really dip their toes in the water. Many feel inclined to add their two cents to a discussion, but they choke up, under the impression that their input will not be well received. Thus, the group logos, nice little branding elements that they are, are just for show on their LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn achievers do something group-related every day. It is part of their LinkedIn business plan.

Go ahead—dive in—the water’s great!

The following are LinkedIn groups that I like and that can provide building product marketers insightful information:

1.     Building Material Suppliers

Building Product professionals providing a networking resource to suppliers throughout the industry.  5,540 Members

2.     Building Materials – Sales and Marketing Professionals

Objective of this group is to bring together 8,004 Sales and Marketing professionals from the building materials industry to share best practices, discuss industry issues an offer and opportunity to strategize with like minded executives.

3.     Building Products Industry Group

Discuss Trends and Share Market Knowledge related to the Building Products Industry.  1,894 Members

4.     Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Network

The premier group for CMO level marketing executives who function as the head of marketing for their organizations and for corporate professionals who are interested in networking within the marketing industry.  28,028 Members

Each group highlighted can provide tremendous information and insight to the building product marketer.  However, the key is to remain active, utilize the network and separate yourself from the crowd with regular interaction.

Sources:

Additional Articles:

Deeper Email Analytics for Building Product Marketers

13 Mar

Better Email Intelligence…Beyond Open & Click-Through Rates

In an earlier post, I covered some of the basics of email marketing benchmarking, and now I’d like to share some other ways you can better measure & optimize your email marketing. With this information, you’ll be better equipped to evaluate both the messaging and creative strategy in your building products email marketing programs.

Analytics

Most email marketing platforms offer building product marketers the same basic analytics data−open rate, click-through rate (CTR), unsubscribe rate and deliverability rate –and have for years.

Beyond that, most platforms also include a Forward to a Friend function, which is frequently implemented but rarely used by recipients. Why? Because it’s far quicker and easier to just use the Forward function in your email program.

However, one company has found a way to provide much, much deeper email analytics data. Litmus offers two different toolsets for marketers.

Their original tool allows building product marketers to test how your email messages (and webpages) will render in all the most common email programs, from all the different versions of Outlook to the most common mobile devices to Gmail in Internet Explorer vs. Gmail in Firefox. Testing like that can help a lot, as each program can display your identical HTML a little differently.

Litmus’s newest tool is for Email Analytics. By implementing their analytics tool in your emails via a snippet of code, you’ll have access to information like:

  • How many times your email was forwarded, using the Forward function (not the Forward to a Friend functionality)
  • How many times your email was printed
  • Engagement Report, which breaks down open rate into Read, Skim Read and Glanced/Deleted metrics, based on how long the recipient viewed the message.
    • Marketers can also see this report broken down by the type of device the reader was on in great detail.
    • Email Client report, which gives you excellent technical information to help decide what changes/enhancements can be made to your email coding, based on what readers use to read the emails.

With data like this, you will, as a building product marketer, be much better equipped to test the look & feel and content of your email marketing, knowing you’ll be able to more clearly measure the results. You’ll be able to more accurately measure the engagement of your readers with your content, and you’ll be able to provide designers/programmers with more definitive information to drive the creative of your messages.

All this is available for extremely reasonable annual costs. I’d highly recommend Litmus to anyone searching for deeper email marketing analytics. Check them out at www.litmus.com.

Note: I was not asked to post this by Litmus or compensated in any way. I like their product and haven’t seen a competitor with the depth of data available that they provide, which is why I wanted to share it with you.

 

Additional Articles:

Impact of Mobile In-Store Shopping for the Building Products Industry

13 Mar

Building Product Manufacturers Are Challenged with Mobile Shopping

It seems the mobile revolution is less revolution and more reality. Everywhere you look someone is on a cell phone, iPad, or some other type of device that keeps them connected. We can now recognize our friends and family by the tops of their heads, as they are always looking down at the ‘second screen’.

We constantly are checking mail, updating our Facebook status, tweeting, blogging, or trying to become the mayor of our local dry cleaner on Foursquare. But what else can you do with that electronic leash we all carry?

One way consumers have become highly empowered is with all the price comparison or shopping sites and apps. I was at a conference in Phoenix and heard a couple of amazing stats:

  • 681 barcode apps are available just for iPhone
  • 33% of shoppers compare prices while in the store, using a scanner on a mobile device

681 apps for reading/scanning a barcode? If price matters to your customer – and who doesn’t it matter to – imagine how easy it is to comparison shop. Just because you might make vinyl siding or entry doors or roofing trusses doesn’t mean your customers aren’t going to one day, if not already, use this type of technology to price shop your product.

  • It’s estimated that by 2013, 50% of web traffic will come through mobile devices.  (source: IDC)
  • Amazon sells one product every second via a mobile device. $2 Billion, or 20% of their revenue, will come from sales on mobile devices.

So who really cares, right? As a building product marketer, you should. Our job is to be the industry Nostradamus. We have to be aware that the world we’ve lived in has changed and we need to ensure our companies and brands are ready.

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