Content is Still King in Home Builder Marketing - Dan Bridenstine

Greg Bray: And we're excited today to have joining us, Dan Bridenstine. Dan is the Director of Digital Marketing at Group Two. Welcome, Dan. Thanks for joining us.

Dan Bridenstine: Great to be here and see both you today.

Greg Bray: Well, Dan, for those who haven't met you yet, let's find out just a little bit about your background and give us that quick overview about yourself.

Dan Bridenstine: Yes, so I've been doing sales, [00:01:00] marketing, lead gen, since 2010, I think overall. So, I started in-house with a software company through college. I worked there all through college and did cold call sales, and that's a very interesting thing to start your career off in with marketing and sales. I can tell you I was called a number of things, a blood thirsty coyote, from some guy in Montana. It's just a different thing. Cold call sales are their own unique beast to tackle, but it really gives you some perspective once you get further in your career and don't have to do that anymore, as far as communicating and reaching out to people.

So, from there, I transitioned to an in-house marketing analyst position for the software company I worked at in my area. I'm in the Canton, Ohio, area. So, that was a fun transition there. And after that, I dove into the agency life. So, I worked with a couple agencies. One was full service, one was SEO specific. The agency, prior to being at Group Two, I actually was their first digital hire. So, I built the digital department from the ground up there and all the processes and things, and was privileged to bring that experience here to Group Two and kick things off here with the team, which has been really exciting. So, that's a snapshot of the career there in general, but it's been fun. [00:02:00]

Kevin Weitzel: Well, that's going to be fun to talk about, number one. Number two, before we get started on that, I need to know some interesting factoid about you that has nothing to do with work, the home building industry, or family.

Dan Bridenstine: Interesting factoid about me. I would say I am a very outdoors person. I'm an Eagle Scout, so I did achieve my Eagle Scout award. I love fishing. I love doing those sorts of activities. But growing up, I would get up before school every morning and go fishing for an hour, come home from school, eat dinner, and go fishing for another hour. So, I was probably fishing three to four hours a day for at least 10 years of my life growing up, and just never lost that passion. So, I guess that's a little interesting tidbit.

Kevin Weitzel: Give a man a fish, he can eat a fish. Give a man a fishing pole, he can fish every morning before school. Is that the saying?

Greg Bray: You butchered that, Kevin.

Kevin Weitzel: Did I butcher that a little bit? I don't know what happened.

Dan Bridenstine: Something about I'm fed now and.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah, he's fed, he's happy.

Dan Bridenstine: I'm self-sufficient.

Kevin Weitzel: He gets to go to school, get an education, you know.

Dan Bridenstine: My parents are proud because of fishing.

Greg Bray: Well, Dan, for those who [00:03:00] haven't come across Group Two. They've been in the building industry for a long, long time, well known. But just give us that quick overview of the agency, the kind of services that you're providing, and the folks you like to work with.

Dan Bridenstine: Yeah, so I mean, Group Two as a corporation, really, we've been around for a little over 55 years now, just in total, which is great. As far as being in the home building industry, that's our sole focus. So, we do marketing and development and strategic planning, creative for home builders. The range goes from large nationwide builders to smaller custom builders in different areas.

And we do full-service digital solutions for SEM, AIO, SEO, content marketing, social posting. All the types of campaigns you might want to promote home buying and home building, we're out there right now. It's really exciting. We have a great creative team as well, watching a lot of really amazing campaigns to end the year and kick off the new year for us here as a company. So, really excited to see 2026 and see how it grows for us and see what new fun things we can get up to.

Greg Bray: So, as somebody who has come in recently into home [00:04:00] building, what's something that you noticed digitally when you started looking at builders that maybe you hadn't really thought of from your other experiences, that you thought, oh, this is an opportunity, or here's some things that I never thought builders might, be doing or not doing?

Dan Bridenstine: I did actually come in with a very small experience in home building. Not very small necessarily, but I did have a custom home builder that was a client previous. So, there's a little bit of that bridge, which was great, and some adjacent services for outdoor services and remodeling, concrete work, things like that. But diving in more specifically here, I think there's a few things I've found that are very interesting.

And one is that the competition perspective and spectrum of competition here is very different than what I've experienced in other industries. I've done education, I've done manufacturing, I've done e-commerce, and there you pretty much know exactly like my product is better for this reason and these 10 reasons, and I'm going to sell it, and I'm going to make sure that's there and push people to it.

But here it's very, and especially I would say this last year in particular, was very much about creating trust upfront with a lot of buyers, [00:05:00] generating trust, generating real relationships, which you don't do in a lot of industries. It's that I need a solution; You have a solution, I'm going to buy that solution from you. That's not quite the same when someone's buying a home. It's, yeah, I need a home, but I'm not just going to buy any home. It's what relationships are you generating there with online sales reps and things like that. From that perspective, it's been really fun to dig in and learn more about that.

I'd say the second thing is, I think that there's still a lot of traditional marketing tactics that are required for home building that aren't as required in a lot of other industries. We do still have to have sales offices and sales materials. We have to have banners and signage. Those things are still important. If someone can't see your community when they're nearby or don't know about it nearby, then you're just not on their radar at all.

I built a home almost a year ago now, 11 months ago, with a local builder here. There was some communities that we knew about this one, and there were some that we didn't know about until we were in the process. Now, I love my house. I love where we're at, and that's not to say that we would choose again, but we didn't know about them. And being in the industry and seeing that was very intriguing to me.

I think you'd also be shocked, maybe, maybe not, to know how [00:06:00] many home builders don't actually talk about the fact that they build homes. That's the core tenet, I think, of what we do here. And it's something that I have really had us as a team dig in this past year, for a lot of our builders say, no, you really need to showcase the process and who you are as a home builder in your areas, in your specific communities, and cities, and regions. If you want to go to, you know, DMA regions for targeting on that type of stuff, sure.

But a lot of websites for home builders don't talk about the fact that you're a home builder. The word home builder's not there. Bridging that gap, I think has been very interesting of people in your area may know about that, but with the changes with AI and search results shifting so aggressively in this past year and more to come, you have to show up for those bots and those crawler agents that are going to hit your website to really showcase that you do in fact build homes, even though you've been doing it for 60 years. So, that's been a fun challenge to come across, too.

Greg Bray: So, to peel that back a little bit more. The builders that are not talking about that, what are they talking about instead? When you have that kind of a message, so that they have that comparison?

Dan Bridenstine: It's [00:07:00] usually very focused on maybe company history. Here's where our company comes from, where we started, our origins, who founded it, and goes from there. And I went to the Jeff Shore, the sales and marketing summit in Denver this year. And one of the things that was a constant topic, actually, and I had the opportunity to speak there too, was how are you showing that you're different? We've all been building homes, quality homes, for the last 50 years, so what makes one home builder different than another one? You might start with, well, a lot of them don't say that they're home builders. So, start there and then go throughout the rest of that process of what are people actually asking right now in the market? What are they looking for?

The pain points aren't the same as they've been. The pain points this past year, there's a lot of pain points for home buying around rates and the Federal Reserve, and the 10-year bank note, and all these different things that people watch. I can tell you I did. I watched that like a hawk and was able to take some free financing for myself here, this past year as a consumer. But, I mean, I've already built a home, but there's all these things you have to take into consideration when you're going down that route of how are we different? Why should someone actually build with us?

It's not the fact that we're in the [00:08:00] community that they want to build in. There's probably another builder. It's not the fact that we're in a specific school system. There's probably another builder or another home buying opportunity from maybe real estate, whatever it may be, to take advantage of that. So, I think really driving the difference in what you offer as a home builder through having a new product with the benefits of that, getting what you want, and establishing a home for your family are more important than ever.

Greg Bray: So, as you're looking at a new builder that you haven't worked with before, okay, you've looked at this messaging, how do we kind of say more about what we actually do more straightforward? What are some of the other things that you kind of focus on or review as you're getting started with the builder to kinda say, oh, how are we doing X, Y, and Z? What would be those first things you look at?

Dan Bridenstine: I think one of the first things I look at, and this is probably just something from my experience not being in home building, is are you answering questions that people don't realize they should have? So, this takes me back a little bit to manufacturing, my experience in the manufacturing industry. There's a lot of times manufacturing can be a very [00:09:00] complicated and convoluted process to get, you know, from a schematic for a product to then the end piece going out. It's not that different from a home building perspective. There is a blueprint, there's a floor plan, there's engineering requirements, there's architectural requirements to get through that process, and just making sure that that's leveraged, I suppose, in the right ways is important.

Greg Bray: So, is that something that a builder can do completely online today, or do they have to do it in some of these more traditional offline marketing opportunities?

Dan Bridenstine: It's a mix of the two, I would say. So, you know, making sure you have the right answers to questions. You don't necessarily have to go. Here's a question, here's an answer. That call and response doesn't have to exist necessarily, but you have to be ready for that. So, are you taking someone from their experience with your website, and I'm sure you can appreciate this, that your website is your 24/7 salesperson. If your website's not in great shape, if you're not investing it like you would in a team member, then it's falling behind.

You wouldn't not train your sales team. You would not prohibit them from having new resources and updated ways to [00:10:00] work with home buyers. Especially, again, when you have a complicated or convoluted market where it just seems things are up one month, and they're different the next month, and interest is up. You have to be ready for any given scenario. And so, having those resources on your website to effectively discuss that process or those key points that your potential buyers may have is important.

But also transitioning that into your sales conversations and transitioning that into printed materials that you may have available. Somebody comes in tour as a model home, you're going to send them home with resources. Well, are those resources matching the experience of what they had on the website when they first got there? Because if they don't, there is a trust factor there. Ideally, at some level, you would want their in-person experience to be far greater than their online experience because that's where you're really going to capture them as a potential buyer and develop a real relationship there. But it has to start.

And I'd say still today, I've written some numbers on it that last year or the beginning of 2025 too, and kept tabs on them, but it's something like 66% of all home buying searches start online in one way or another, if not more at this point. I mean, we see all the mobile stats going up and up about users and queries. And then you've [00:11:00] got the AI experience and AI search results and OpenAI and ChatGPT, and they're all answering these questions that people have of is it a good time to buy a house right now? I mean, we're starting there at some level, too, when you're looking at themes and key areas.

Kevin Weitzel: Alright. But I'm a small home builder in, let's just say, Canton, Ohio. Let's just pick a city out of the random. I've got a pretty small budget, and I hired a whippersnapper, a local guy that knows everything there is to know about the area, you know, what kind of homes we build, et cetera. You know, and this guy's promised me that he's just going to sell and sell and sell and sell homes. Why would I want to spend the money as that home builder to find an agency to work with, versus just trusting that Carl, my rockstar sales guy, is going to just make all my dreams come true?

Dan Bridenstine: Well, and my response would be what happens when no one's calling Carl? What happens when Carl's network and his Rolodex rolls up and is dried out? Because that happens. There's a lot of instances, too, where you see home builders transition from being a really well-known [00:12:00] local, maybe like a semi-local celebrity as a real estate agent or someone who's selling houses in the market and they transition to be a home builder and they lose that personality touch, they lose that connection that they had with the community.

So, sure, please keep Carl going. We love Carl, and we'd love to utilize Carl. Maybe make Carl visible, make some video content around that. But you have to leverage that relationship. I don't know that Carl in Canton, Ohio, has that experience. Sure, Carl could do some videos, Carl could do some social posts, but does Carl have the breadth and knowledge of years in the industry from a partner that's there, that's in multiple markets, maybe in even a similar market to Canton, Ohio, and know what's going on there?

Does Carl know how to reach new people that Carl has never met before? You know, the chances of that are more; they just saw your Google business listing as they were going around, saw your banners, your flags, or your community coming soon signage, and called in. But really, I would say Carl's reach is about as far as his wingspan.

Kevin Weitzel: I forgot to mention one thing, though, about this scenario. I also have a niece. Her name's Missy, and she's attending school in [00:13:00] Toledo, Bowling Green, Ohio. I don't know wherever she is. She's on the social media all the time. She knows TikTok, Facebook, and all these kinds of things. She knows that it's even called Meta now and not Facebook. So, she's way, way ahead of the times. Why wouldn't I just use her? Because I could probably get it pretty cheap versus an agency.

Dan Bridenstine: I will say there's always benefits to having someone that's boots on the ground and getting concept from them. We actually have a lot of partners where we do have a direct relationship with someone who is on the ground and can get the content that we need to make a successful program behind social posting. That's the key of it. You don't want things to be stagnant. You don't want it to be the same, but you also have to know who your audience is.

I would venture to say that, just based off an experience level, I'm sure your niece is very wonderful, but does not necessarily know the tactics behind the strategic plan, behind, okay, this community needs to be marketed in this way to these people. Is it 55 plus? Is it just new homes? Is it single family homes? Are we looking at townhomes? Do we know that maybe in a market where costs are an upfront priority for people, expressing that you could own a home for [00:14:00], maybe less than you'd pay to rent something that's the same size or smaller, because that is happening. Does your niece know all those factors? Does your niece know that maybe you don't need to post 18 times a day? Does your niece know that maybe you need to pull em dashes out when you're using AI to create content? There's just a lot of factors there that are unknowns.

And sure, you can teach and learn those things, but where would she learn those things? In school, maybe. Or could you partner with that agency and have your niece then helping to capture that content and being this fun personality that could be part of it too, and leverage that. So, there's always excitement when you're young and you're in your first role, so leverage that excitement, see what you can do. But do it with a plan that's strategic and elevates your brand, not to just continue on what you're doing in the past. Because you can keep doing that, but you're not going to grow.

Greg Bray: Can I just say that I have heard and used the word em dash more in the last 12 months than I used it in the last 25 years.

Dan Bridenstine: Oh, yes. I feel bad when I see someone who uses it very intentionally in their writing, and I go, was that you or was that a tool? Please use the tool. It's a tool. It's a resource, but [00:15:00] don't make it your job. AI is an incredible thing. I am a little bit of an AI nerd. I run mine through tests and have done a lot of random things that are, some of it's home building related, obviously, and some of it's just for personal fun. I have a meal planner that I do, but I still even clean that up. I don't want to see em dashes in my meal plan.

Greg Bray: Well, Dan, let's dig in a little bit more into the AI side of things.

Dan Bridenstine: Yeah.

Greg Bray: Obviously, SEO is changing a lot. What are some of the things that you're recommending to builders to help grow that AI visibility side as part of those SEO programs?

Dan Bridenstine: The biggest thing that I've been talking about now, probably for the last 12 to 14 months, is that it doesn't have to be this significant separate effort that you're putting into your marketing tactics. A lot of these resources, oh, here's a new email, and AI's changing everything for the 18th time this month, and all this. How do we shifting our plan? And I think one, it creates a lot of panic where it doesn't need to create panic. I think there's a lot of oversaturation of that information, and it's all growing. We don't know the end result of what all this will be in the long run.

I've [00:16:00] used AI tools here, and I've actually shut some of them down and said it was a good test. I'm glad to know what that tool does. We are not going to use it anymore as an agency. You know, from a data analysis, from a reporting perspective, we pull some of those things in. It's great. But I trust my experts more than I trust that tool. They're just not there yet. We weren't replacing anything. We weren't swapping anything out. We were using it as an addition and hoping like maybe it finds one extra insight in the five minutes that it's looking at something that we could've maybe needed to spend 15 minutes going through something to find. And it's just not there yet.

The biggest thing is just, you know, when I'm looking at SEO or AIO or AEO or whichever version of it you want to call it, it's all the same. The only thing I would say is different is GEO, because with GEO, in my brain, you're generating imagery and content in a different way. But AIO and AEO are essentially the same thing as far as what we are concerned with, and that's that visibility on a website.

So, don't change your plan to just do AI. If you're only focused on AI, you're still losing out on a significant portion of your market from what that visibility perspective is. Are you rolling AI parameters and AI themes that you would want to capture [00:17:00] into your other marketing plans effectively? John Mueller just put some information out about that. And I mean, that's his whole thing. I've lovingly refer to him for the last decade plus as Mr. Google. So, when I'm just referring to John Mueller, that's how I call him. So, if you hear me say Mr. Google, it's him. Neil Patel's agency just put some things out in the same vein.

And if you know what you're doing with AI and SEO, you're rolling them together, you're combining those efforts. You're not treating them as separate to push content out, just to have it out there. It's not going to be effective in that way. You have to really continue that whole thing of, I'm trying to think back to like maybe 2012, 2013, we heard that content isn't king anymore. No more king of content. It's not there. And then we heard it again five years later, content's not the king anymore.

Content is still going to be the king of whatever you're doing. It just looks different. That's the thing. Are you pivoting to shift to how content needs to be formatted, to how answers have to happen? Are you pivoting to focus on the fact that people want real answers to their very real questions? They don't want to have to type in three keywords into a Google search 18 different ways to try and find that perfect answer to the thing that they're looking for. Is your information readily available? And you can do that [00:18:00] very easily without having to shift your entire focus on your marketing tactics.

Greg Bray: Is there specific types of content that you guys are shifting a little bit more towards or away from as part of the changing landscape? Are there certain things that seem to resonate better or things that don't matter as much as they used to?

Dan Bridenstine: I would say there's things that don't matter as much as they used to, as far as the content itself. I would say the formatting doesn't matter as much as it used to in certain ways. I mean, you still have to leverage H tags. If you want a question to be seen or even a bulleted list, Google still loves its formatting, it loves its schema markup, it loves all of those things. So, still use that when you're developing your content, but providing the context. What's the quality of it? I know we've talked about content quality for the last probably five to eight years, as things have been shifting around, and Google's going to its goal of answering.

I mean, none of this is a surprise. Google has said on records for years that it wants to answer your question before you've click any link. That was far before AI started taking over the results. So, this has [00:19:00] been the plan for a long time for most major search engines; we're just now seeing it. So, we've had a 10 year, what a decade long run up to this point, and now we're seeing it happen, and it's like, we don't need to panic. Hopefully, if you know what you're doing and in the content industry, you're just shifting to do it the way that it needs to be done now. We change this every two years, maybe even faster now. It's just more of answering relevant questions, developing trust with those.

I think, as I was a recent home buyer of a fully built home, put myself in those shoes and go, what questions did I have? Are we answering those? And maybe that's a unique perspective I have, having just gone through that process and then also working in this industry. But are we answering those questions that people have? And it's not always about money. Yes. That's a big question. Yes, it's a huge question this past year, year and a half, two years, because rates have been so high, but there's so much else.

People have to have places to live. You're still going to sell homes to somebody. Are you selling? Are you getting more of that type of buyer, and do you even know that buyer? Qualifying them with that content on your website is what will help with that. Again, I go back to that call and response comment I made a little bit ago. It's important. You should have [00:20:00] questions and answers. You should have FAQs on your website in certain places. Not everywhere, and you don't want to duplicate them or at least make them canonical if you do. That's the important part. Being that quality source of content is going to push you above most of your competitors, especially if they're not doing it.

Like I said, everybody's built quality homes in their area for the last 50 years or for the last six generations of their family, but are you showing how you do that differently? Are you showing how that process works? The more information you can give, the better it's going to be for you in any result, in any interaction you're going to have down the road, too.

Greg Bray: So, for the builder who's listening, is okay, we haven't really been paying attention to that. We need to take a step back and look. What would be the first thing they should look at or the thing they could do tomorrow, the tip you would have for them to do tomorrow, to start moving more forward in this AI-driven search world?

Dan Bridenstine: The thing I would suggest to start with is listen to the people you're working with now and find out the things that are important to them. Not just thematically, but did they have specific questions through their [00:21:00] buying process that are important that could be something that you address from a content perspective? Maybe a blog post, maybe an update to your process page, whatever it is.

Again, I've worked on lots of different industries, and there's almost always a disconnect between the business at large and the consumer or the buyer or whoever's getting that service. The disconnect is that they usually call it something different. There's usually a misnomer between what a buyer will call that process, or some things they'll ask, or some things they'll say, or how they refer to building a home versus how a home builder will refer to their own process. Whether you're a smaller local builder or you're a national builder with lots of huge communities and divisions, you have to still have someone that understands what's going on with the people in the area to know what's important to them.

A great example, like if you're building townhomes, people that are in your list or audience that may want to buy a townhome, they're not necessarily searching for townhomes, townhomes for sale, new townhomes, whatever that may be. They're looking for a home. And it's not that a townhome is any different of an option for somebody. It's that just may be what's available. There may be more townhomes in their area. [00:22:00] They might be in more of a college town. It just depends on what it is. But it's still their home.

And so, they may not be searching. I would love a townhome. They're just looking for homes, and whatever fits in their budgets is what they're going to go with. So it's, are you doing that in the right way? Are you showing information? Are you showing how you can work with them effectively to find a home, regardless of what type of home it is?

Greg Bray: Well, Dan, it's been a great conversation. We appreciate all the insights that you've shared with us. Do you have any kind of last thoughts or words of advice to leave with our listeners today before we wrap up?

Dan Bridenstine: Oh, last thoughts or words of advice? Goodness. I would say, at a bigger picture, just make sure you know where your buyers are coming from. That's my biggest piece of advice right now. With the changes to all the data collection and first versus third-party pieces, you know, get your email lists up and utilize them. Know where they're coming from. Make sure you know if a call was quality or not, or if a form fill was quality or not, or somebody that you want to talk to.

A marketing agency's job is to get you marketing-qualified leads. That's the job. It's, is it the right people in the right place looking for what you have to offer? From there it goes to a sales [00:23:00] team. But from a marketing perspective, the job of an agency or anyone on a marketing team is to get you the highest number of people that fit those three items as a marketing qualified lead. So, do you know where they're coming from? Do you know if they're quality, and can you trace that back effectively? And then, maybe invest more in that.

It'll be different from community to community. It'll be different from city to city, DMA, state to state, whatever the case may be, it will be different, but can you find those common threads that you can then start to pull on and leverage, especially heading into 2026, knowing there's a lot of like market volatility this past year of sometimes people just came in on their own. Sometimes they found you via search or ads or geofencing, whatever the case may be. They can find you in a lot of different ways, but you know which one's the most effective and how to leverage that further and investigate that.

Greg Bray: Well, thanks so much again for sharing with us today, and thank you everybody for listening to the Builder Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you. [00:24:00]