Driving OKR Alignment to Create Employee Engagement

A bi-weekly round-up newsletter of the best new construction and real estate marketing, sales, and news in the industry.

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In This Issue:

💡 The Big Idea: Learn how OKRs can influence your marketing strategies.
🐝 Industry Buzz: The latest marketing and real estate news updates.
🧠 Get Your Learn On: Get the latest SEO strategies for 2025 from Neil Patel.
🏆 Quick Win: Start the new year by creating a seasonal content calendar.
🧰 Tech Check: Use Postplanner to schedule your content for 2025.
🤖 A.I. Prompt Play: Create an engaging educational blog post series.
📚 Recommended Resource: 3 Fundamentals That Make Your Home Builder Marketing More Buyer-Friendly.
🎙️ From The Podcast: Lead Magnets: My Favourite Tactic For Generating Home Buyer Leads + Examples You Can Swipe & Deploy.
🏅 Marvellous Marketing: A standout social post from Berks Homes.
... and more!

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
"Love the easy-to-digest format. Gives me a quick pulse check on the industry and some new things to try."

The Big Idea 💡

Driving OKR Alignment to Create Employee Engagement

Want to elevate your marketing team from a supporting role to a strategic powerhouse? This groundbreaking article from Outhouse shows how Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can help marketing professionals demonstrate tangible value across their entire organization.

☑️ Explore how marketing can influence and drive company-wide strategies.
☑️ Master the art of creating goals that resonate across departments.
☑️ Learn how to communicate marketing's critical role in business growth.
☑️ And more...

Industry Buzz 🐝

💪 Private Builders Adapt to Market Challenges and Prepare for Resilient Growth in 2025
This Builder Online article highlighted a private builder outlook, along with a positive outlook heading into 2025. They navigated challenges like elevated mortgage rates, affordability concerns, and competitive land markets. Despite these hurdles, many builders adapted with buyer incentives and a focus on move-in-ready homes.

Land availability and high prices remained a top concern, but builders are positioning for growth in 2025, with goals to improve build times and address buyer affordability needs.

📈 Year to Date Single-Family Permits Up Almost 10%
The latest data from NAHB shows single-family home construction permits rose significantly in the first 10 months of 2024, with 846,446 permits issued nationwide, marking a 9.4% increase from the same period in 2023.

All four U.S. regions saw growth and most states experienced increases. Only four states and the District of Columbia reported declines, with Hawaii seeing the largest drop (-5.2%).

📊 Zonda’s Latest Millenial Survey Set to Offer Valuable Insights for Builders
Zonda’s latest Millennial Survey, now in its eighth year, aims to understand the home-buying behaviours, challenges, and priorities of millennials, the largest living generation.

As millennials reach their prime home-buying years, Zonda is exploring how they navigate today’s housing market, marked by affordability concerns, limited inventory, and rising prices.

Get Your Learn On 🧠 

🖥 Next-Gen SEO: How to Dominate Search in 2025
Want to know how top home-building marketers are going to win in 2025? Neil Patel is breaking down the emerging SEO strategies that will make your brand stand out in an increasingly crowded digital space. From zero-click search optimization to crafting shareable content, this webinar is your roadmap to capturing more leads without burning through your marketing budget.

Register here for the live workshop on January 7, 2024, at 8:00 AM PST and get the insider's edge.

Quick Win 🏆

Build a seasonal content calendar. Spend 30 minutes mapping out relevant seasonal topics (spring cleaning, summer outdoor living, fall maintenance, winter energy efficiency). You'll have a year's worth of timely, relevant content ideas ready to go.

Tech Check 🧰

Use Post Planner to transform your seasonal content strategy with AI-powered content curation and scheduling across eight social networks. Its intelligent algorithm surfaces viral content in your industry, allowing you to effortlessly populate your seasonal calendar with engaging posts. Drag-and-drop scheduling and content recycling means you'll spend just minutes creating a ton of content that keeps your audience engaged.

AI Prompt Play 🤖

Welcome to AI Prompt Play, where we provide carefully crafted prompts you can copy, customize, and use immediately to create professional marketing content in minutes.

Tips for using these prompts:

• Replace text in [brackets] with your specific information

• Adjust tone and style descriptors to match your brand voice

• Use the generated content as a starting point and customize to your needs

EDUCATIONAL BLOG POST SERIES

Goal: Create engaging, SEO-optimized blog posts that guide potential buyers through their home-buying journey

Prompt: Act as a real estate content strategist and SEO expert. I am a [CITY] home builder looking to create a 12-month blog content calendar focused on the home-buying journey. Create an outline for 12 educational blog posts that include:

1. SEO-optimized title options for each post

2. Key points to cover

3. Suggested subheadings

4. Types of data/statistics to include

5. Content upgrade ideas for lead generation

6. Internal linking suggestions.

The tone should be helpful and authoritative, positioning us as a trusted advisor in the home-buying process.

Recommend Resource 📚

Marvellous Marketing 🏅

Stand-Out Social Post From Berks Homes
Today’s stand-out social post is from the @berkshomes Insta account. The way they showcased their Lilac model at Harvest Meadows was too fun and so creative! This video is an awesome way to show off the home and make it stand out from the usual video tours people see.

From the Podcast 🎙

Discover proven marketing strategies and growth tactics on the Home Builder Marketing and Growth Show with Jeff Schneider. New episodes every week:

#011 | Lead Magnets: My Favourite Tactic For Generating Home Buyer Leads + Examples You Can Swipe & Deploy | Marketing Minute
Create a steady stream of qualified leads by offering valuable content upgrades that home buyers actually want. This episode reveals proven lead magnet strategies specifically for home builders, including real examples and implementation guidance.

#010 | Leah Fellows | Online Sales Concierge Best Practices From One Of The Top Trainers In The Industry 
In this value-packed episode, industry pioneer Leah Fellows shares battle-tested insights from 18 years of training top-performing OSCs. As the founder of Blue Gypsy Inc and one of the most respected voices in OSC development, Leah reveals what actually works to improve conversion rates and drive more sales.

#009 | Contact Type: A Custom HubSpot Property To Sort Contacts So Sales People Only Focus On Prospects | HubSpot for Home Builders
This episode provides actionable steps to enhance your HubSpot implementation. In it, Jeff shares a simple yet powerful trick to get your HubSpot database organized for your sales team.

Tune into the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or any of your favourite apps.

What We’re Reading 📖

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller

Learn all about the marketing framework that transforms how businesses communicate. Donald Miller's bestselling book introduces the StoryBrand 7 (SB7) method, revealing how to create compelling marketing messages by making the customer the hero of their own story.

Miller provides a revolutionary strategy for businesses to cut through the noise by focusing on customer challenges and positioning their brand as a trusted guide. For home builders, this means crafting narratives that speak directly to homeowners' dreams and obstacles.

Just For Laughs 😂

Points of Interest 🧐

🗓 On this day
On this day in 1920, famous sci-fi author Isaac Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russia.

🧈 Butter Safe Than Sorry
Due to the cost of living crisis, the government of Poland has announced plans to release 1,000 tonnes of butter from its strategic butter reserves.

💀Street View To A Kill
A murder in a northern Spanish village has been solved after the killer was spotted loading a body into a trunk on Google Street View.

Whenever you’re ready, there are three ways we can help:

1. Complimentary 1-Hour Strategy Session: Let's get to know each other. We'll hop on a Zoom call to understand your goals and challenges and then provide actionable marketing recommendations tailored to your business. Walk away with strategies you can implement immediately. Schedule your no-cost strategy session.

2. HubSpot Audit & Optimization: Unlock the full potential of your HubSpot investment. Our thorough 60+ point check-up will identify what's working well and what needs attention in your setup. You'll receive a comprehensive report and a 90-minute review session to maximize your HubSpot performance. Request your HubSpot audit.

3. Complimentary Website & Marketing Check-up: Give your online presence a boost. We'll review your website and marketing channels, then conduct a 60-minute workshop to share our findings. You'll walk away with actionable tips to improve your digital marketing and attract more qualified leads. Sign up for your no-cost marketing check-up.

About Velocity23

Velocity23 is a growth agency and has been specializing in digital marketing for home builders for 13+ years. As one of the first HubSpot partner agencies to specialize in the home-building industry, we’ve helped builders across the country solve their challenges with content marketing, lead generation, lead nurturing, and marketing automation. Our experience has led to the development of the Growth Engine Framework™️, a marketing system that’s helped our clients achieve:

🖥 7.4M+ website sessions
🙋 110,200+ leads generated
🏠 9,680+ homes sold
💰 $3.3+ Billion in reported client revenue

If you’re experiencing marketing challenges or you want to sell more homes and grow your company, book a call today and let’s see how we can help.

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