Twelve Tips From Strategic Thinking For Home Builders To Produce More Strategic Marketing Efforts

All businesses need to engage strategic thinking and planning in all aspects of their business, especially the marketing plan for the business. In working with custom home builders as part of my business coaching practice, I discovered only a few of them ever recognized the value of being strategic in their thinking and planning and had limited themselves to lower levels of success. Fortunately, after they opened their minds to being more strategic, their outlook changed and they started putting some tips on strategic marketing to good use. One of the most vivid and remarkable examples was one custom home builder that went from one of their worst years in business to a record setting best year in business after committing to a strategic marketing approach.

Based upon previous experience and some research, your strategic thinking business coach offers the following twelve (12) tips to home builders for more effective strategic marketing of their business.

1. Engage in strategic thinking and planning when developing your strategic marketing plan for your home building business. You may consider hiring a professional, such as a business coach, to facilitate and guide you in the preparation of your strategic marketing plan.

2. Conduct a SWOT analysis to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats associated with your home building business.

3. Identify your most desired clients and your ideal client profile to define who it is that you really want to market to for retaining existing clients and acquiring new clients.

4. Analyze your competition. Do some basic market research by visiting other home builder web sites, talking to competitor's employees and review their booths at trade shows, talk with our competitor's subcontractors and vendor representatives. And monitor their advertising to see what direction they are heading.

5. Develop clearly defined and measurable goals and monitor your progress.

6. Develop a strategic integrated marketing communications plan to make sure you have planned for effective messages to your target markets.

7. Develop a market position based upon identified opportunities. Clearly define the market position and focus on providing different benefits than your competition. Develop a positioning statement for your home building business. This can be used as a tag line that will help build brand loyalty and communicate benefits and features that your target market can relate to.

8. Incorporate and use the power of referrals as one of your key strategies in your strategic marketing plan.

9. Create and live by a strong code of ethics and company core values. Demonstrate in all that you do each day in your home building business that these core values and ethics are how you conduct your business.

10. Commit to a continuous improvement philosophy in your marketing efforts. And commit to finding the "lessons learned" in the mistakes and failures and then taking action in the future based upon the "lessons learned."

11. Commit to a "continuous marketing" mentality. Your marketing efforts need to be continuous and not a "one shot deal" or a "sometime" activity. It is al "all the time" activity.

12. Develop an effective customer contact management system with a goal of achieving Top Of Mind Awareness (TOMA) with your clients, prospects and stakeholders.

Your strategic thinking business coach encourages you to use strategic thinking and planning in the development of your strategic marketing plan for your home building business. If you would like to learn more about strategic marketing plans, how to develop one for your business and how a strategic thinking business coach can facilitate and guide you in that endeavor, please contact Glenn Ebersole through his website at www.businesscoach4u.com or by email at jgecoach@aol.com

Glenn Ebersole, Jr. is a multi-faceted professional, who is recognized as a visionary, guide and facilitator in the fields of business coaching, marketing, public relations, management, strategic planning and engineering. Glenn is the Founder and Chief Executive of two Lancaster, PA based consulting practices: The Renaissance Group, a creative marketing, public relations, strategic planning and business development consulting firm and J. G. Ebersole Associates, an independent professional engineering, marketing, and management consulting firm. He is a Certified Facilitator and serves as a business coach and a strategic planning facilitator and consultant to a diverse list of clients. Glenn is also the author of a monthly newsletter, "Glenn's Guiding Lines - Thoughts From Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach" and has published more than 250 articles on business.