Strategies to Land $5M+ Clients in Luxury Home Building

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. with your question and we'll spend 10 minutes on the question and then we'll get to the next one so that we can get to as many to give value to the whole group. Good deal. All right. So I'm excited. I'll try to be concise, but it's pretty meaty. So I work with a luxury home builder in the greater Boston area and his biggest challenge has been being beholden to architects and designers for all his leads. And so he's sick of schmoozing and having to go to like country clubs or taking take people out to dinners or go to events and get architects to want to work with him because he's a builder.

1:09And so they do a great job. They build like amazing green homes. They want to build like five million dollar plus homes. They do multimillion dollar renovations. They stay within 1 % of budget. So they do a lot of things, especially well, they want to own the lead as opposed to being beholden to the architects and so on and so forth. And we've tried a few different things like Google paid search, just because it's high intent. And people are typing in like luxury home builder, Boston, and we're getting leads. We're even getting leads for people that are like, I want to build a$1 million house.

1:45But this guy's like, I want$2 and$3 million plus homes, like none of these other people, they're not whales. We want like this guy that wants to build a$5 million house. Like that's who he really wants. Um, and it's been hard and it's like, there's this whole suite of things I could do. I could do direct mail. I can do programmatic. I could do a VSL. Um, maybe we could do LinkedIn. And it's like, I really don't know where to start to find this needle in a haystack. There's been some success and there's really good momentum. and we redid his website but like i want to be able to like find that whale and close it i don't know if anybody has any any thoughts real world thoughts over here of course so um and it might be outside of your area but what i would do is i would get a plot of land near the highway that everyone can see 100 000 people or go drive on the highway and usually the plots of land near the highway nobody wants unless it's like a retail area build a five million dollar home have it open 20 not 24 7 but five days a week and then they can show this so it's like there this house is going to be their billboard that everyone sees driving by and it's going to say stop by any time that's what i would do coming from like the real world guy that's that's a that's a big budget idea but it's it's an amazing idea i mean that's what yeah the dr hortons and everybody like that's what they should do for sure i mean i'll bring that up to the guy and he'll probably think it's a good idea but i don't think he'll do it i've got a couple ideas um yeah i mean i think you got to shoot for the moon and land amongst the stars a little bit you got to be real different than what everybody else is doing.

3:31And a lot of these home builders are trying new stuff, trying Facebook ads, hit them where people, like if you're searching on the marketplace, Facebook marketplace, it's gonna be a lower kind of income type looking people, budget, saving budgets, things. You gotta do the equivalent in where those people dream big. What kind of magazines are they looking at? Where are they? Pinterest boards, things like that, where they're kind of dreaming about what their house is going to look like, et cetera. The practical side is you want to maybe look at intent-based lists. We subscribe to a list that it's kind of like not predicting the future, but gives you current.

4:18They have over, I think, 20 billion records a day based on intent, based on what people are searching for on the internet. And then you can search based on, for example, purchasing a home, you know, or purchasing a vacation home, selling a home. Maybe someone who's selling a home that's worth a lot of money was going to buy one that's even more money, for example. So it's not always directly related. You have to kind of look where the data is. So like I can search for people that are, you know, selling their home or looking at home equity, you know, things like that are doing intense searches like that.

4:55I can share this offline with you, too. We can kind of meet and I'll show you what I you know how we do it. But you can also look people looking for mortgages that are. Yeah. What tool are you using for this? It's a brand new tool. So I'm under a nondisclosure right now. we're beta testing it it we've been using it a while as it's kind of a spreadsheet and then we pull we can pull the categories and ask for the data and now it's a do-it-yourself kind of interface and we're beta testing it but i'm happy to show it to you and introduce you to them and then when i can talk i'm happy to share it with everybody here um what we're doing there i can present some time on you know i can bring the guys that are doing it to present but it's pretty impressive stuff.

5:40It's almost like, like we just did a campaign for a, I have a dental glove supplier. That's a client. So they sell dentist gloves, boring, you know, kind of, you can buy those anywhere. But I can see people who are searching for nitrile gloves. And so I can, every week for the last five days, I pull a list of about 20 ,000 people who are actually searching for that we buy facebook ads that average they don't know but we're advertising to them and on google ads so it where they go they kind of retargeting or you know display ads and then we have their emails and stuff so we start hitting them with emails and um it's we're testing that out right now but it's way better than anything they've ever had lead gen wise and they're very old school call people on the phone and stuff so i don't want to the whole meeting but yeah i'm happy to i do want to check like how do i get in touch with you um what's is my email and then ezra get through any anytime we need to get a hold of each other guys let's go through ezra and ezra will connect us okay that sounds good i gotta take a minute to tell you about the agency owners association this is a peer group for agency owners think ypo or eo but for agency owners and i just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials so this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group?

7:04She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experience members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future.

7:37So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. If I still have some time, I'd like to ask about if anybody thinks cold email would be a good consideration for this, because there's only a few different cities that this guy wants to build in and he wants rich people, right? And so Adam, I have a couple questions. So this is not my area other than I used to be in construction many years ago and I used to work on big homes and stuff. But so first off, I may have missed this, but you said he's looking for homes like in the one to$5 million range or 5 million and above. So if 5 million and above is where he really wants to be, but he will build like a two or$3 million home and he'll do like a$1 million renovation at the low end.

8:28Yeah. Okay. So like in my experience, like there's like this, the ideas that Kevin's talking about, like, I think these are great ideas for like that $1 to$5 million range. Right. But when you get into the 5 million plus, that's like another class of customer. Right. And I would say then you should be looking, and Kevin mentioned this too, I think one of the first ideas he had is like magazines, right? Like what are the, what are the sort of luxury magazines that these folks read where you might be able to - The guy's done it. Like he did it and he's like, we never got anything from it, but he doesn't know.

9:01He spent like 30 grand on New England home. And he's like, and he gets an ad and he's like, what the hell is this crap? Like - Yeah. But you know, you're like 5 million plus, some of these homes, like you don't find these homes on Zillow, right? These aren't like, you know what I mean? It's another class of market, you know, where it's a lot of word of mouth. It's a lot of, you know, so-and-so use this builder. I want to use that builder because they use that builder. You know what I mean? It's that type of thing. Is this in North Shore, Boston? Is that where it's all? That's where the expensive homes are in Massachusetts.

9:31North Shore? Yeah. Boston. All right. So here's just another thing, and it kind of ties into what I've heard Neil say, actually, on the podcast, is, you know, he talks about going to conferences and speaking and getting the email list. Everybody's at the conference. But in their case, I would go to North Shore has events like higher end events, wine festivals and the higher end events, whiskey tastings, partner, sponsor that. Tell that provider that you want to be in the promotion appeals, but you also want to be able to email everybody or whatever it is, because that's the audience. So you can take the real world and then bring it to the digital.

10:12That's what I would do. Good play. Yeah, I need to find where they are, like wine tasting. And if I could get a list of people at country clubs. I can geofence people in country clubs and send them ads. So there is some funky stuff like that I can do. But those intense signals are really important too. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation that also means wage inflation right now.

10:50And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years, because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing, they've been a great asset for us. And I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketing school.io slash hire. Again, it's marketing school.io slash hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested.

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11:59This black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. Has anybody got any thoughts on cold email to rich people? My experience is it's the mid level is going to be your best bet with cold email. Their assistants check their emails. They don't read their emails. If they're smart, if they're really successful, they don't even look at emails. They have somebody doing all that for them.

12:41So what you want is to reach, if you're going to do that, target assistants that knows what their boss is looking for and go, hey, I found something that you might want to be interested. But, you know, I like I know some very high end builders in Vancouver, British Columbia, that we kind of helped them get new clients. And it was really more about bragging. You know, we showed off their work. We really kind of did a portfolio. We had a landing page was just these high end homes where people could come almost like a little Pinterest board. and then we had some software that we put on the site that would identify people and enrich the data so if we knew their mobile id we would know their name email phone number address things like that if they hit our site first party cookies if you will but enriched yep yep you know so if we could drive them to the site then we could kind of see we'd see their net worth all that kind of stuff and then we would start to reach out to them um that way but you just need to drive a lot of traffic they got to spend money on ads and usually it's not cheap um but yeah that's what we've done what software we're using for that there's one that i can't think of what it's called it's not apollo what um there well there's there's a few most of them suck to be honest a lot of them's changed but the one software i was telling you about that has that aspect of it that has that too yeah yeah so yeah like i said i'm happy i wish i could just throw it out there but i'm happy to show you one-on-one, you know, or anybody else who wants to look at it.

14:18I just didn't want to consume the meeting, kind of throwing out names because they're not really open, uh, taking on their clients yet, you know, so, but we're using it and testing it with clients or anything. It's working great. That's neat. Really neat. I mean, the other idea could also be very small scale though, but you could look into, let's say crunch base and databases like that. Anybody who made exits recently from their companies. So they've got extra money. Those guys tend to go and build and buy real estate. So canvassing and mailing, whatever you need to do to reach them, that would be an approach.

14:55You're trying to find people with money, so you got to go where they are. And that's a good moment. That's a nice idea, Scott. Thanks a lot, everybody.

15:11Thank you.