Building Trust & Authority Without Emailing — Russ Stephens // The Association of Professional Builders

Quotes

• “As you know, it’s getting harder and harder to get people to part with their email addresses so mastering this aspect of marketing, getting in front of people and building that trust and authority without having to rely on email is becoming more and more important and the obvious channel for that is social media.” - Russ“The one thing that we’ve used very successfully ourselves as well as our builders is what we call the content marketing strategy. That involves writing blog articles, good quality information, and producing videos.” - Russ“It’s interesting to me that you’re saying, “Hey, look. People don’t want to give their email address out,” Something I totally agree with. People are a little bit protective of their information but you still have to build a relationship with them so you’re focusing on social media. My question is, people who want to build homes do not necessarily look first at Facebook.” - Ben “I love the question as it illustrates why social media is so important because traditionally this is what builders have always done. You’ve got to be engaged with that person before they realize that they are going to build a new home. This is what social media, interruption marketing is so good at.” - Russ“In my consulting practice, when I’m consulting C-level executive marketers, the first thing you have to understand is who your customer is. So you answer why social media is important because you know your customer and they end up buying from the person that introduces them to the concept of building a new home before they know they want to do it. You’re building that relationship before they raise their hand saying I’m a buyer.” - Ben “You’re using social media and what you call interruption marketing to build not only awareness for your business but awareness for the category that you work in.” - Ben “In order to get the awareness, the thing you need to focus on are their problems, the challenges because they might have a high level discussion whether they should build. You want to enter that conversation going in their head. So what are their fears? the FAQs, that consumers ask you in that very first conversation. When you do a content marketing strategy this is always the first step.” - Russ“Let’s not forget that Facebook is amazing with algorithms and targeting where they can do a lot of hard work in identifying people who need to build.” - Russ“In terms of this whole process on social media, we’ve got the very high level where we are entering the conversations, it’s going on inside their head and we’re getting their attention by sharing articles which will drive them to our website, we’re sharing videos which are becoming more and more important.” - Russ“I hear a lot of people talking that a long-form video is not working on Facebook and you should only put it on YouTube but for us that’s really not the case at all.” - Russ“It seems to me that you’re in the highest of high-ticket purchases and the amount of awareness building and credibility building that you have to do is higher than most businesses.” - Ben “You do have to get some contact information so when you say building trust and authority without email it doesn’t mean that you don’t need that contact information to reach the person. It just means that you gotta lot of work to do upfront before that contact information comes your way.” - Ben “People will respond to different channels so we encourage builders to go on multiple channels.” - Russ