The Power of Consistent Builder Marketing - Ken Semler

Greg Bray: And we are excited to have joining us today, Ken Semler. Ken is the President at Impresa Modular. Welcome, Ken. Thanks for joining us.

Kenneth Semler: Thanks for having me.

Greg Bray: Well, Ken, let's start off by just getting to know a little bit about your background. Give us that quick overview and introduction.

Kenneth Semler: Okay. I'm Ken Semler. I have a company, Impresa Modular. We have a website. We do primarily modular construction, but the unique thing is we're a [00:01:00] nationwide builder. I'm licensed, registered, certified in 44 states now, so we work across the country doing off-site construction, and we actually even do hybrid construction, and we'll use panels and components in addition to modular to really try to deliver a completely off-site package to the job site.

Kevin Weitzel: All right, well, our team at OutHouse, huge fans. We are huge fans of modular construction. However, before we jump into any of that, we need to know one interesting factoid about you personally that has nothing to do with work, family, or the home building industry.

Kenneth Semler: Most people don't believe I'm actually a CPA. I have a Bachelor's and Master's in accounting, and I was a vice president at Citibank and somehow ended up being the nationwide modular builder for the industry.

Kevin Weitzel: That's not a bad thing. That means you know numbers quite well and can look at profitability and the whole gamut.

Kenneth Semler: Yeah. Yeah. I'm a closet CPA. You outed me.

Kevin Weitzel: Yes.

Greg Bray: Alright. Well, Ken, give us a little [00:02:00] bit more, how does one go from being a CPA to getting into building?

Kenneth Semler: Well, I was actually, like I said, a VP at Citibank. My side gig was I would buy houses, rehab, remodel, and flip or rehab, remodel, and rent. And in 2003, my boss came to me, and I was in the DC area, and said, We want you to move to New York City. So I went home that night. I asked my wife. Dear, they want us to move to New York City. She says, I don't want to move to New York City. I said, Good. Me neither. So, they gave me a nice severance package, and my side gig became my main gig. And a year later, I was like the third largest modular builder with one of the factories in PA. So, happened to be at the right time. 2003 was the beginning of the building boom. It couldn't have been a better time to start.

Greg Bray: Well, Ken, tell us just a little bit more about Impresa Modular. Who is your ideal customer? I mean, you already kind of hinted that you're nationwide, but just give us just a little more detail about the company.

Kenneth Semler: Well, like I said, we're nationwide and we have a website that pretty much, the internet is our best friend nowadays. [00:03:00] Anybody who's doing a Google search for modular construction, pretty much we show up as one, two, or three because they're typically saying, you know, modular construction, Ottumwa, Iowa. We have a website that makes us more local than the local guy typically. But most of the people are doing research, which means we have, really, I would say, an educated buyer.

Most people think, Hey, you're selling over the internet, you're selling cheap. No, we're actually selling to educated people who are doing the research. So, most of the homes we sell are like second homes, vacation homes, move-up homes to somebody that wants something, you know, unique, and they find out we can do true custom. And most modular builders, I hate to say, don't know the product as well as we do, so they don't realize the things we can make it do. So, we do really unique custom homes. You know, you can see on our website and my postings on LinkedIn. We do really unique, cool stuff in the industry.

Greg Bray: And are your buyers then bringing land, or do you guys have land as well?

Kenneth Semler: So, typically, they're bringing land. Most of our customers actually have the land already. About 60% have the land already, [00:04:00] and then about 40% we end up working with them because then it becomes a chicken or the egg thing, especially in budgeting. Do they have to spend $200,000 on a piece of land, and they only have 200,000 for the house, or do they have to spend, you know, a hundred thousand for the land so they can have 300,000 for their house? So, we play through that quite a bit.

Kevin Weitzel: And are you selling specifically to the homeowner, to the actual end user? Or are you working with like subcontractors or other home builders?

Kenneth Semler: That definitely leads into the next thing. We typically are selling to the customer. And a lot of times, they have a builder, a local GC working with them, and we end up training that GC on how to use modular construction. And so that's what ultimately led to starting our franchising is as an industry, we do a horrible job at training new to modular builders. There's this no modular 101 class you can take. And so, we were doing that a lot, and it's like, well, hold it. We have this brand that we've created. We're nationwide. We looked at business licensing or franchising, and in 2019 decided to take the franchising [00:05:00] route.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, Ken, you said some magic words, at least for me. Kevin's going to know, right? But you're talking about your website is driving so much of your exposure and your buyers and everything else. So, you're starting this in 2003, this company, when did you say, Hey, it's the website that is a key to our growth. When did that happen in that journey?

Kenneth Semler: Well, so again, lots of key milestones. Well, you know, 2003 was the building boom, 2008 was the building bust. Basically, because of where I live, west of Washington, DC, I'm within 20 minutes of four states, so I was licensed, you know, had to have all the paperwork. We worked in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia. So, I was used to working in multiple states with the licensing. And then, in 2009, I built one house because of the building bust. But luckily, we'd also done educational with the work with a local school system, and we did, I think, 40,000 square feet of space in eight weeks that summer. So, I mean, that was our primary business.

 Later that year, I was like, you know what? I came home one day [00:06:00] and I said, Dear, I'm going to start selling houses over the internet. Now, keep in mind, this is 2009. This isn't today. And she looked me square in the eye and said, You're freaking crazy. Nobody will buy a house over the internet. So, at that point, it was game on. I had to, you know, prove the wife wrong.

So, 2009, that winter, I worked on the website, did all the content. You know, everything you read is pretty much stuff that I write. Authoritative writing is important. It just can't be written by somebody who doesn't understand the industry. And then in 2010, we put it together, we launched it in February. We really didn't ever pay for pay-per-click. We really jumped in, just put a lot of effort in organic, and that drives thousands of people a day.

Kevin Weitzel: So, we're going to dive a little bit more on the website, but I do have one question for you because I'm constantly alarmed at the number of people, even within the home building industry, that still think that modular building is, you know, on wheels. It's a trailer, it's got aluminum siding, it's 10 foot, 12 feet wide. Can you kind of dispel some of that and, you know, kind of give us more of a definition of what modular construction is? [00:07:00]

Kenneth Semler: I would love to. I spend most of my life educating and training on just this. My favorite thing is I say as an industry, we did a horrible thing. We named everything that starts with an M word: mobile, modular, manufactured. The technical answer is there is no such thing as a mobile home anymore. 1976, HUD created what's called the HUD Manufactured Housing Code. It's a federal code, it's an affordability code.

It's meant that if you can build a home as cheaply as you can and an engineer will stamp it, then that's how you build it. We need affordable housing. But you just have to understand, you know, you can't build a house at 50 cents on the dollar, and it be the exact same quality as the house built to the IRC, which is the International Residential Code, and that's what we build.

A modular home is a misnomer. There's no such thing as a modular home. It's a home built using modular construct. So, it's built to the IRC. Just like any site-built house, we just take the plan, divide it into modules, build it in a factory, truck it to a site, take it off the carrier, and assemble it in Lego-like fashion. So, that's really the key [00:08:00] differences. It's built to IRC, just like any site-built house. The manufactured home is built to the HUD code.

Kevin Weitzel: You have the capabilities of being more square with your walls, more plumb with your walls, having better vapor barriers. Is this all true?

Kenneth Semler: You think about it, we're building indoors, and I always get a kick out of people that say, well, you just can't build with the quality of site-built. It's like, do you really think that guy out in the mud, the dirt, the rain, and the wind can take that two-by-four across the toe of his boot and cut the end of it off exactly the same length for everyone that's in that wall and assemble it on site?

I have square jigs, I have saws that are meant to make sure that every two-by-four or two-by-six is the exact same length, because if you think they come from Lowe's that way, you would be wrong. They're all varying a half inch or more, and you've got to cut them to the same length. How many people do you know that cut them to the same length site building? They don't.

To expand on one other thing you said, Kevin, think about we're building inside. So, when you build outside, the first thing you want to do is get the sheathing on and the roof up because you [00:09:00] want to try to dry it in. Well, when you're building indoors, we don't care about the rain because it's always sunny and 70 degrees in the factory.

If we put the drywall up first, now that means we can seal every crack and crevice. We can seal every penetration. You don't put your hand by that outlet on a cold winter day and fill the air coming through your outlet on an exterior wall. And we also don't get your little pitter-patter of little feet like, you know, insects and rodents and all the other stuff that come in in the winter in a lot of houses, because our walls are sealed. Much more energy efficient.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, I know we're concentrating on the digital marketing side. I mean, obviously, that's what Greg envisioned when he came up with this whole podcast. We're in our fifth year, right, Greg? Fifth year?

Greg Bray: We are, we are.

Kenneth Semler: Wow.

Kevin Weitzel: We're gonna be hitting our 300th episode sometime in the very near future.

Kenneth Semler: This long to invite me, Kevin, come on.

Kevin Weitzel: I know, I know it. Shame on Kevin. But let me ask you this, because this has always been a pet peeve of mine. Is it just the good old boys network, we've done it this way for this many decades, is it that group of people that are keeping builders from incorporating modular into [00:10:00] their processes?

Kenneth Semler: I think it's a combination of several things. I mean, human nature is, we don't like to change. And again, I'll take some responsibility from the industry. I've led both national organizations for our industry, and we just do a horrible job at training new to modular builders. And if there's no training and you kind of have to wing it on your own, you know, Murphy's Law is going to set in on your very first home.

You may make $30,000 on a house, let's say, and you may struggle and hardly do it, but you know how to do it the traditional way. You build your first modular home, you don't understand the scoping. You spend 5,000 more on this, you get hit nicked by $800 more on this that you didn't even know about. Well, pretty soon, it's death by a thousand cuts, and on your very first home, you've lost money. You didn't make money. And you get mad and blame the system. And it's not the system, it's just you didn't know how to use it.

You know, you've learned a lot, but now you give up and you go right back to what you do because you may have to work hard and not make as much, but at least you know how to do it. That's why, you know, it's again spend my life educating. And again, it goes back to creating franchising is [00:11:00] if we can create that mentoring Big Brother where we can teach people, train people, show people, and have a support network for builders, I think that's the only way we grow our industry.

Greg Bray: So, Ken, 2010, 2011, you're saying, Hey, I can sell homes online. My website can do some of this heavy marketing and sales lift for me. You are doing something that most builders hadn't even thought of at that time. Where do you start with that? What is the process look like for you then, and how has it evolved now from that online outreach?

Kenneth Semler: Well, when we first started, it was just based on content. I mean, it was like, how can I write good content, you know, authoritative, you know, real content? We get better at it, and it's a good point, Greg. It's funny. Who's the primary buyer of a house? It's not a man, it's a woman. When I first started out, guess what? I designed a website like a man. But that's the cool thing about Google Analytics: it tells you what you're doing wrong if you actually look at it.

We developed the website that went through a [00:12:00] process, and it was all you know about modular. Look at the gallery, how to buy a modular, how to get a lender, and contact us. That's not how a woman buys a house. You know what she does? She goes right to the plans first and then figures out what to do next. So, it took us a couple years working through and figuring out. So, then we redesigned the website.

Now, if you look at every page, the very first thing we do is try to get you exactly where you want to be first, and then guide you after that. The top of every landing page that would be perceived as a landing page, we give you an option to go right to the plans first, and then we tell you what to do after that. So, you know, you gotta match how your buyer maneuvers. And we all know, Mom wants to look at a plan; she wants to look at a lot of plans. She wants to cut and paste and look at this one and do that.

My view is time equals trust. We have probably three times the average time on a website that most builders do because we encourage you to just stay on and look at the next plan and look at this, and, oh, what about this? That's one of the big things we learned early on, is how do we build it for the way our [00:13:00] user's using it, not the way we, as the builders, think they should use it.

Greg Bray: Oh, you got to say that one more time. How do we build it for the way our users use it and not for the way that we want to use it?

Kenneth Semler: I learned that lesson early 10 years ago, 12 years ago.

Greg Bray: Kevin, I feel like we should stop now.

Kevin Weitzel: That brings up something about even just findability, you know, because the production home builders kind of have a slight advantage in the fact that they can wash, rinse, and repeat the same processes that all their competitors do. So, when they're going out and doing keywords for SEO, they're all doing the same stuff, you know, livability, affordability, yada, yada, yada. Do you find that there's any kind of change when you do build your website, franchisees are building their websites, that you have to change your strategy when you're looking at SEO and PPC, that type of thing?

Kenneth Semler: Well, yeah, I mean, and maybe because we build it more as an information website. How long have we been at like now? About six, eight years. Eight years? You know, Google's going to like a mobile first mindset, and what people don't think about is to me, eight years ago, six years ago, Imean, we were doing it already. We [00:14:00] broke a lot of the rules.

So, I don't want to step on anybody's toes if I'm offending anybody, but everybody says, Okay, you can only build a webpage that's three to 500 words, and my answer is no. All of our webpages usually are 800 or more, because guess what? Google, we don't do keyword searches anymore. We do semantic searches. People don't think about that. So, our website's an answer engine.

How you query this is very different than how you query on a keyboard. When you're researching this on your keyboard, you're typing in modular homes in Ottumwa, Iowa. When you are Googling this on your phone and putting it in, you're saying, I'm trying to find a new home builder who's building homes that may in or around Ottumwa, Iowa. Well, now I got to have the information on my website that gets you that answer on that second search, not necessarily just the first.

And so, we have all that information because Google is crawling the information on our site. We have to sometimes throttle Google, because Google will be on our website six to 9,000 times a day with bots, because we make it an Easter egg hunt. We change content so much. That's the other [00:15:00] thing, we have about 1.4 million pages on our website. Google has crawled 250,000 of those pages, and then we just revolve about 700 of those pages every day so that they don't know which 700 we changed. So, now they're out there looking for it. We don't tell them where to look.

Greg Bray: Okay, Ken, a couple of people just burst a blood vessel when you said over a million pages on the website. Help us understand what kind of content are you creating that has got a million pages of content out there.

Kenneth Semler: So, we actually put a unique page out for every realtor in the country, and we put out a unique page for every zip code in the country. And then we change the zip code pages on a regular basis with unique content. Hand to God, this is not AI because this happened way before AI ever happened. And I've written it. I don't just stay up 24/7 doing this, but we've got a process that it's unique, valuable content that Google's always looking for, and that's how we [00:16:00] rank.

Again, I'm going to say I break rules. People think content and volume of pages doesn't matter. They think page length doesn't matter. You know, keep it short. There's a lot of things we do. Blogging. You probably struggle with your people to write blogs. They don't realize blogging, if you do it right, is probably the single most important thing you can do on a website.

Greg Bray: Okay? Then take us into what is, quote, do it right look like?

Kenneth Semler: Okay. So, make it good content, make it long content. Don't write three to 500 words. Write 11 to 1400 words. Write articles, not what is conceived as typically blogs. You get volume going. You rate four links to the a past blog that you've written, so there's at least four keyword sites to something previously that you've written, then you have two links to something on your website that's contained in that blog or that article post.

Then, when you post it, you go out and post a related to link to something that was done in the past. And then you go and change something in the past that's related that goes back to post to the [00:17:00] one you just posted. And so, now we've created so much linking and back linking within our blog post. So, I'll give you one secret, and then what do realtors do that don't want to have their own content? They cut and paste it, and they don't strip the backlinks out.

Greg Bray: I think what you just described there, Ken, is an amazing formula that a lot of people are doing pieces of it, but not all of it, when they try. And the linking part, I think, is an area where a lot of people don't pay attention. Your idea of, I'm purposefully linking to these prior articles, and then I'm going back to other old content and updating it to connect it back to the new content.

Because so often we put it out there, and we never touch it again. We just post something. And of course, then there's the builders that have blogs that haven't had anything new added for several years, and you can tell that, and that's a whole different problem. But I think what you're talking about there is powerful because it is about the loop of content, not just for Google, but also for the user who's educating themselves to be pulled [00:18:00] in and learn more, and learn more, and learn more. And by the time they've gotten through three or four of these pages, oh my goodness, they're like, they are teaching me, they understand me, I want to work with them, and all of a sudden that trust is huge.

Kenneth Semler: My favorite quote is, Time equals trust on the website. So the more time I can get somebody to spend on it, the higher the trust. We follow up with our email campaigns, and they're never salesy, they're never high-pressure. We try to set up every one of our sales consultants as a trusted advisor, not a salesperson. And so, that's what our website tries to reinforce is we're educating and teaching, not selling. Selling will come automatically if you're teaching and building trust.

Kevin Weitzel: If you educate enough people sell themselves.

Kenneth Semler: Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Greg Bray: All right, so Ken, from an SEO standpoint, now you're in 40 plus states all over the country, which means you're competing with like everybody in the in-home building industry. So, everybody would be nice to Ken. He is not trying to steal everybody's business, but from a raw SEO [00:19:00] process standpoint, are you monitoring keywords across all of these different locations, or are you picking your top 10? How do you kind of keep that so you don't have an army of a hundred people having to run around, you know, doing all this SEO work for you?

Kenneth Semler: So, we are doing so much of it that, like I say, it's not AI, but we've just developed processes to make it so a lot of it just happens automatically, so that we're not having to put a person in front of a screen to monitor a lot of it. We kind of monitor it at a higher level, and we're looking for bigger patterns. One of the things I will say is, when you have a higher volume website, we are attacked almost every day by somebody.

And we spend so much time, you know, I'm just looking at our stats right now. I mean, you know, four days ago, we had Singapore go after us. It quadrupled or tripled our website traffic. I don't know that they were trying to do a denial of service, but you know, we're getting so many people crawl our website or trying to scrape our website. Two weeks ago, we had China hits, you [00:20:00] know, so you can see increases in traffic, but good things can happen for bad reasons. So, you have to always look. Just because traffic goes down doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. Just because traffic goes up doesn't mean it's necessarily good. It's researching that. We're at that higher level, basically at this point, watching it.

Greg Bray: So, you already made reference to some of the AI things out there. What is changing for you now over the last year or two with the new AI tools and the way that buyers are starting to do their research, maybe within some of these tools as opposed to the traditional Google search?

Kenneth Semler: Well, and that's a good thing because we've been watching and trying to learn ourselves right now. We don't have physical locations at every city in the country. And so, as AI gets smarter, you know, is it going to say, Hey, you're not physically there. Now we've been watching ChatGPT searches, and we do still show up if you just use ChatGPT to say, Hey, show me all the homes in Ottumwa, Iowa, for the home builders. We're still ranking up there pretty well. You raise a good thing, Greg, is how do we change [00:21:00] our content? How do we adapt it?

Now, luckily again, we've created that authoritative, educational website, and that's what AI seems to be doing. So, it seems like so far we're aligned with what AI's trying to do, or ChatGPT with how we've written it. We've been fortunate, but we are monitoring it. We're using AI more, like right now, AI answers our phone system. We have AI Bob, who we've educated with everything I've got. So, AI Mia answers the phone and AI Mia then takes the call if the salesperson is busy and.

Kevin Weitzel: Wait a minute. You have an AI Bob? I wonder if it's the same Bob that my girlfriend, because my girlfriend has her boyfriend Bob, which is when she talks to her point, Hey Bob, can you tell me about this? And then Bob gives her all the answers, apparently better answers than I give her. You know,

Kenneth Semler: Well, we then also have a chatbot, my new granddaughter to be born is next month is Sophie. So, we named the chatbot Sophie, you know, on her honor. You know, we've created a lot of that AI stuff now. We actually went to you know, not to try to do a shout out for them, but GoHighLevel [00:22:00] as a CRM, and it's just been amazing, the opportunities that that affords us with so much that we can do. So, we have the agency version of that ourselves because it works with our franchisees and us. But then what we can do with content, because we are using for some of the email campaigns. We are using AI to write some of the updated email campaigns now because we can draw off of so much of our content that we're actually, I think, creating good AI content within our own, basically our own GPT.

Greg Bray: So, as you are working on these AI tools to customize that content, are you then integrating that directly into the CRM for like drip campaigns? Or where are you taking that content next to use it?

Kenneth Semler: So, we've got two efforts underway. One is, yes, we're going to email the campaigns. We're using it to extend and create better, I'm going to say, email campaigns. The second area that we're experimenting with is now with the power of AI, because [00:23:00] we post on like eight social media platforms, can we create an AI agent that basically takes our content, writes the post, does the post, watches the post and how it performs, and then optimizes the post and every three months curates the post and repost three months later and do it across all the platforms, and we just have to monitor it. So, that's what we're trying to build out right now, so that we can have maximum exposure and now do that for our franchisees on top of that. That's our big social media effort right now.

Greg Bray: Ken, this has been a fascinating conversation. I think when you said, I'm a closet CPA, you forgot to mention that you're a closet SEO and you're a closet marketing director. There's a lot going on here besides just building some homes. Just one personal curiosity question. Does the delivery cost of building in the factory and then getting these off to the home sites, does that become a roadblock, or is that still something that's [00:24:00] just kind of factored in, that really isn't an issue for your buyers? Or how do you educate on that?

Kenneth Semler: Yeah, so, you know, that's a good question, Greg. So, in Pennsylvania, where, you know, you're sitting there with a $20 an hour carpenter and you're selling a home in Boston or New York where that carpenter's a hundred dollars an hour, that labor arbitrage is huge. Yes, we can easily overcome the delivery cost, the set cost that we have. If I'm building it in Eastern Pennsylvania and shipping it to Western Pennsylvania, well, that labor arbitrage is not as much.

When building rurally costs way more than people think because now that plumber, that electrician has to drive an hour and a half each way for three days or a week or whatever when he is working on the house. So, there are increased costs to building rurally. So, people don't think about that. That helps offset some of our delivery and set because it's just coming in one big box.

I don't want people to think that modular is going to save you 50 cents on the dollar because that's manufactured housing, and that's what it's for. We're building to the IRC. So typically, we're either going to save you five or 10%. We might even [00:25:00] be more in New York. We might be break even in some places, but I think you're always going to get a much better built home. I think you're going to get a much healthier home, much more energy-efficient home. So, obviously, I'm biased, but I think we're worth the difference even if it costs the same amount of money.

Greg Bray: So, Ken, any last thoughts or words of advice for marketers out there, especially those that could leverage some of your ideas that maybe aren't in modular. I mean, we've got a lot of listeners that aren't in modular, but they're just trying to figure out how to get their message out there. What last thoughts would you like to leave with them?

Kenneth Semler: Well, so many people I watch, and you said it, Greg, is they write five blogs. Then it's like, it's really hard and they don't think it's worth it, and they don't see the result, and they give up. Don't. That's probably the single best thing you can do. And then, consistency. I see people start processes to improve websites. I see them start to do things, and then they just give up. They get distracted. It's consistency, not intensity. Just do it every day, even if it's a little bit, just do it every day. Don't just give up.

Kevin Weitzel: [00:26:00] That's actually really good advice. So, if somebody wants to get a hold of somebody in Ottumwa, Iowa, like Radar O'Reilly.

Kenneth Semler: That's why, exactly why I use that as the example, because that's where Radar O'Reilly was from.

Kevin Weitzel: Nehi Grape Soda, Baby. Or if they're going to go to, you know, look for somebody in Tupelo, Mississippi, they might be looked for Elvis or somebody that's related to Elvis, who knows? But if somebody wants to get ahold of you, Ken, what's the best way for them to do so?

Kenneth Semler: So, best way is my email is just ken@impresa, I-M-P-R-E-S-A, modular.com. That's probably the single best way if they actually want to get me or message me on LinkedIn because I camp on LinkedIn or it's always up, or I'm checking or, you know, doing things. And so, LinkedIn or my email is probably the two best ways to do it.

Greg Bray: Well, Ken, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us today, and thank you, everybody, for listening to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you. [00:27:00]