This week on The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast, Greg and Kevin discuss data feed management that helps home builders organize community, plan, and inventory data, and create properly formatted automated listing feeds to syndicate to home listing sites.
The value of proper data management can often be overlooked by home builders, but it’s vital to ensure that information gets updated accurately and consistently. Greg says,
“This is certainly just one piece of a puzzle, but it’s an important piece, and it’s a piece that I have noticed doesn’t get talked about by marketing departments often enough because it’s not something they’re as familiar with. They’re more familiar with some of the visual components. They’re more familiar with some of the other opportunities. You can kind of get yourself, to use a building term, painted into a corner if you’re not careful and talk about this upfront. So, that’s why we kind of want to raise a little bit of more awareness on this particular concept and see how we can help people avoid some of the issues that can crop up.”
While there are tools that can help with data feed management after the fact, data feed management should be considered before a website is created. Greg explains,
“Well, I think at the beginning it all starts with are we going to have a website that allows us to do this or not? Where a lot of people suddenly discover that they haven’t done this properly is when they’ve got this beautiful website. They’ve been kind of doing things manually, and now they want to push that data to somebody else and they’re like, oh, how do we get this out into this XML file format? And it’s like, you can’t because it’s not organized properly, and they hit this roadblock, and all of a sudden they’re stuck. And so, they start having to manage all this stuff manually, separately, within these different listing platforms in order to take advantage of the services that they offer.”
Data feed management tools are extremely efficient and effective. Greg says,
“At the end of the day, Kevin, computers are really good at moving data around if they’re set up properly. That’s what they’re good at. It is very tedious and time-consuming for people to do it. And people forget or they’re busy or they miss one, in spite of their best efforts. And if you set these up properly, you check the primary place and make sure that happens and let everything flow through all the other connected processes, and it keeps everything in sync in a beautiful way.”
Listen to this week’s episode to learn how home builders can take control of your data feed management and list homes everywhere.
