Pultegroup Partners With Sitecoreai To Bolster Its Marketing Strategy

PulteGroup this week agreed to join the ranks of homebuilding enterprises that have adopted SitecoreAI, integrating the omnichannel digital content marketing platform into its marketing, sales and CRM tech stack to improve homebuying digital user experience. 

SitecoreAI – used by global consumer marketers across a diverse array of business sectors – enables homebuilders to centralize and personalize their marketing content, and streamline how they market, manage listings and improve buyers’ experience through the homebuying journey.

“SitecoreAI will support a consistent digital experience for our customers, which is important in the decision-making process,” said Mike Guhl, Chief Information Officer at PulteGroup, in a provided statement. “This consistency will help ensure an integrated process across all digital channels, no matter where a buyer begins their journey.”

The platform is part of a broader technology-fueled shift that’s evolving how homebuilders leverage artificial intelligence to better engage prospective buyers, connecting those buyers with less friction to new homes that are more precisely designed and priced to fit their pocketbooks and home and community needs.

The embrace of consumer intelligence investments and commitments has been a bulwark of Pulte’s customer-segmented home design, features and functionality for decades, pioneering consumer trend research’s ever-stronger role in driving both product and community development.

The adoption of SirecoreAI also reflects homebuilding’s accelerating pitch toward unified marketing platforms that emphasize a consistent digital customer journey. Builders have reached a crossroads in their embrace of digital, data-driven and thoroughly-integrated solutions that power workflows from investment and pre-development through the entire end-to-end building lifecycle.

With an endgame of precise, personalized and results-driving improvement of homebuyers’ customer experience, homebuilders’ tech-stack goals also encompass single-source of truth operational, financial, logistical and customer outcome fields of measurement and team-member accountability.

Boiled down, that amounts to smarter, faster, more efficient systems, and a sales and marketing strategy that both pulls demand through the production system and generates better customer experience at the same time.

The Sitecore international platform targets companies in various industries, but already partners with homebuilders such as Brookfield Residential, LGI Homes and UK-based Berkeley Homes. 

“The opportunity to work with a partner like Pulte, who is addressing multiple segments, multiple brands in many different demographic environments, is really the opportunity to showcase the power of a solution like Sitecore,” Eric Stine, CEO of Sitecore, told The Builder’s Daily this week. 

What this means for homebuilders

Today’s media landscape is highly fragmented across different channels, such as social media, websites, mobile apps and email. SitecoreAI unifies this hodgepodge of channels into a single platform.

It also consolidates five different solutions for content management, personalization, product search, digital asset management and content marketing into one place, when most competitors in the space focus on just one or two of those areas. With these tools all wrapped up in one platform, builders can plan, personalize and execute campaigns across social, email, web, mobile and print. 

“From a homebuilder perspective, it allows you to deal with the immense amounts of content that home builders deal with on a daily basis – video walk-throughs, listings, pricing updates – dynamically. If I’m marketing a home or community on a social media channel, it gives me control to create content marketing for various listings or communities. It also allows me to use my website to feature specific inventory that might have been built on spec, or target the built-to-order customer a little bit differently once they’ve landed,” Stine explained.                                                                          

The platform also focuses on helping marketers deliver a precisely-designed message to the right person, in the right place and at the right time. Further, it helps builders determine where consumers are actually finding information – the strike-point of engagement – and uses AI agents to qualify leads, nurture them and act as a guide through a digital journey. 

“What we see with homebuilders that now have adopted SitecoreAI is the ability to not just create the listing of the future, but what is the homebuying experience of the future, everything from finding and discovering a community or a specific home to going through the paperwork process to partnerships with interior design firms or moving companies, everything that you need to really just turn the page and move in.”

The ROI on personalizing a message

According to Stine, one of the most important features of SitecoreAI, from a consumer perspective, is the ability to tailor the digital homebuying experience. 

For example, when a buyer engages in a digital homebuying experience and asks about a specific neighborhood, community or school district, an AI agent will curate follow-up questions to better define what matters most to them. 

If a school district ranks as their top priority, the agent may ask if they’d like to explore nearby areas. If they really like a specific floor plan, the AI agent may ask them to consider alternative layouts or bedroom counts. The tool then allows buyers to visualize different layouts or furniture placement. 

By the time a lead gets to a human sales agent, prospective buyers often know exactly what they want, or at least have a good idea of what they are looking for, before entering a community. 

More and more homebuilders are now adopting similar technology. Taylor Morrison, for example, initiated a similar platform in recent years that allows consumers to interact with an AI chatbot and customize a new home online. 

Stephanie McCarty, CMO at Taylor Morrison, during a session at Focus on Excellence in October, said that many of their sales representatives were worried that the AI system would replace them. 

However, Taylor Morrison found that sales representatives who embraced the new system were more successful, selling more than their peers who didn’t use it. Buyers who went through the initial AI vetting process were already informed, and it took much of the initial work out of the sales process. 

In a time when demand for new homes is relatively low, builders are increasingly looking for a differentiating factor, both in how they build and how they market their products.