Jack Parrish was behind the project, which automated the creation of their marketing brochures. As the Davidson Homes Marketing Technologist, Jack handles website development, digital advertising, email marketing, and any technology-related marketing for the home builder.
Davidson Homes builds throughout the southeast. The company started in Huntsville, Alabama, and now they also build in Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. They’ve recently tripled in the number of homes they sell a year, but automation has helped their small team keep up with the rapid growth.
With frequent changes to pricing, floor plans, and features, Davidson Homes’ one graphic designer and one assistant spent too much time updating community brochures. Jack knew that streamlining the process would allow those team members to spend more time on creative work. He also knew that it could help them solve the problem of having out-of-date marketing materials in the field for sales agents to use.
Before taking on the project, Jack had previous experience with coding and web development in a programming language called Python. With these kinds of tools and the information from their website, he knew they could automate the creation of marketing pdfs for customers and Realtors. Jack ultimately used Javascript for the project. He said the biggest challenge was making sure the data was formatted to look customized and like a graphic designer had created it. Because every community was different, some with or without pricing, plat maps, or available homes, the solution needed to dynamically format the pdf to look great and be as effective as possible.
Overall, Jack and the team were happy with the solution he created. The sales team appreciated having direct access to the most up-to-date marketing materials. Despite some hesitancy from the graphic design team, they soon realized that the solution freed up their time for more creative projects.
The coding took Jack two to three weeks, but the project has changed and morphed as they problem-solve and improve on it. This project has also opened them up to using other automated solutions. Jack has automated their Google Ads strategy, making it easy to update pricing and the number of available homes. This also made it possible for them to create ad extensions that they otherwise wouldn’t have time to update. They’ve also automated their reporting, taking information from internal systems, their CRM system, and Google Analytics and feeding it into a Data Studio Report that provides a health status for every community.
Jack says that almost anything repetitive can be automated and that it’s all about compiling the puzzle pieces. But before automating, you should weigh whether the increased productivity will outweigh any downside in quality, which depends on the specific project.
Davidson Homes was able to take full advantage of Jack’s skills and knowledge to help them use marketing automation to best utilize their most valuable assets - their people!
