Tips for Marketing Your Remodeling Business on a Local Home Tour

While claiming a spot on a community’s home tour or Parade of Homes can position remodelers in a beneficial place, reaping the most rewards from the event requires a solid marketing plan.

For Mark and Mina Fies of Synergy Design & Construction, also the Model ReModel homeowners and remodelers, a solid marketing strategy began well before the event and well after.

Being a part of the Reston Home Tour in years prior provided the Synergy team with greater recognition within the community, the building of relationships and trust, prospect identification, and future sales.

With help from Nicola Shelley, Synergy’s director of marketing and sales, the team created clever ways of promoting their stop on the Reston Home Tour this year.

“The Reston Home Tour is an annual highlight on the local calendar,” says Shelley. “It’s a great day out and we are fortunate to partner with the Reston Historic Trust and Museum who promotes it. However, we have also proudly promoted the tour independently to encourage people to attend and raise more money for RHT, a non-profit organization.”

 

Promoting Before the Tour

Synergy went to local media outlets and their own social media channels to promote the tour overall, but also their stop. The team sponsored an article post on RestonNow.com outlining the must-see features of their remodeled home, as one example and wrote additional posts for local media leading up to the event.

Social media posts and blogs on the company’s website featured sneak peeks on the progress of the remodel, hoping to entice some community members to see the big reveal on the tour. It was also important to the team that attendees knew about the people behind Synergy, so they created several videos to get to know the Fies and understand the Reston Home Tour more.

But there are fun ways to encourage engagement and interest in both a company and the event. Synergy opted for a ticket giveaway competition, calling on community members to “like” and comment on their social media to be entered in a drawing for two free tour tickets.

It resulted in excitement from Reston neighbors, well wishes, and lots of engagement on their post, helping to organically boost it on Facebook.

 

 

Promoting During and After the Tour

Each attendee who visited the Fies’ home was given the chance to sign up for Synergy updates and follow-ups after the event. This helps to identify potential prospects.

For the Synergy team, though marketing is a top consideration for this event, they enjoy having their project speak for itself. For them, marketing materials help attendees receive information on the company if they are interested, it’s not their main focus.

This is why the Synergy team offers small gifts in addition to marketing materials as attendees leave, and their gift choice was very on-brand: “Renovate Happy” stress balls. 

 

 

Because this project happened to have several product sponsors as part of its role as the Model ReModel project, Synergy provided additional goodie bags from their sponsors. Goodies included notebooks, product brochures, and hand sanitizers.

The Fies wanted to help illustrate the extent of the remodels and found displaying “before” images throughout the home would be best to do so. Due to the nature of being a remodel, the Fies were able to show the full process and in turn, their abilities, through these displayed images.

All of these materials help to market during the tour, but the gifts and takeaways go beyond the tour.