20+ Holiday Marketing Ideas for Homebuilders (That Actually Work)-159

Tired of “Home for the Holidays” on repeat? In this episode we share 20+ proven, low-lift holiday ideas you can roll out fast—from tasteful model-home décor and seasonal website swaps to HOA-friendly gatherings, realtor tailgates, and UGC contests that fuel word-of-mouth and Q4 sales.

Download the Holiday Marketing Guide to follow along! 

You’ll learn how to:

• Refresh branding (seasonal logos, signatures) without a full rebrand
• Make models feel magical on a budget (wrapped boxes, greenery, scent & sound)
• Add simple virtual décor to renderings/videos for social, email, and plan pages
• Host community + HOA events (Story Time with Santa, cookie swaps, decorating classes)
• Win with realtors (tailgate broker opens, Santa photo ops, “12 Days” prize runs)
• Give calorie-free gifts that stick around (mini pumpkins, plants with branded picks)
• Spark UGC with “Pictures for Pie,” porch-decor contests, & Elf-on-the-Shelf photo ops
• Publish local holiday guides (pumpkin patches, Santa pics, tree farms, best light displays)

Who it’s for: New-home marketers, OSCs, sales leaders, and on-site teams who want festive campaigns that convert—without burning the December candle at both ends.

Chapters:

 00:00 Welcome & why holiday differentiation matters

 03:00 Model-home décor (indoor/outdoor) on a budget

 06:00 Virtual décor for renderings & short videos

 08:00 Community/HOA experiences that drive referrals

 10:00 Realtor plays: tailgates, Santa photos, 12-day giveaways

 13:00 Sticky gifts (not sweets!)

 15:00 UGC contests that explode reach

 18:00 Local guides for SEO + goodwill

 20:00 Wrap-up & next steps

🔗 More episodes: https://anewgo.com/podcast

 🎧 Listen on your favorite podcast app (search “Anewgo of New Home Sales”)

Transcript

0:34

Hello, and welcome to the Anewgo of New Home Sales podcast. I'm your host, Anya Chrisanthon, and today I'm joined by our very own VP of Sales, Beth Byrd for one of the most fun and practical episodes of the year, holiday marketing ideas for home builders. Beth is sharing over 20 creative ways to bring a little holiday magic into your model homes, marketing and community events, all designed to boost engagement and sales during busiest season of the year. She'll also be referencing a step-by-step guide throughout the episode, so if you're listening, check the show notes to download your copy and follow along. We will cover everything from festive model, home touches and realtor tailgates to user-generated content, local guides, and even a few clever gift ideas that don't involve cookies. Yum. Whether you're a marketer, OSC or sales leader, you'll walk away with ideas. You can launch right away. So grab your peppermint latte and let's get to it. It's. this is a topic I'm so excited to talk about. The holidays are my favorite time of year, and I had a lot of fun putting this together because I went back through my archives and pulled out a lot of things that I've done over the years. This is just ideas from my. Experience to spark some, new things that you can do for the holidays, because I don't know about you, but. I would get tired of the same old home for the holidays campaign. We've seen it so many times. It's been done so many times. So here are some fun things to get you started, and we're gonna start with visual and branding updates. One of the things to consider is, as a whole, what is my branding looking like in the holiday season? I think that's something we tend to ignore. We leave it the same all year round and there's a lot of opportunities to freshen it up. So let's start out with logos. This was a fun project I did. These are Beacon homes logos that were created for us by group two. We were working with them at the time, but I had them create logos specifically for social media. These were our profile, little icon on Facebook and Instagram. And we put them in our email signatures too. And this is just such a simple, fun way. To dress up your branding for the holiday season. So get creative. I think we did Valentine's and spring. We did several more, but I, I pulled out some examples here of the fall and Christmas logos. Alright, next, a picture from my archives model decor. I see some builders doing this, but I think that we can go a little bit further. Pumpkins and moms. For example, our very simple way to dress up your model and really draw attention to it, the, the color, the pops of color were great. I love this picture from the snow. Even in November when we had snow, that orange was just a fun hit of color that drew attention from the street. I think one of the important things about a model home in a neighborhood is being a good neighbor. And so the residents in the neighborhood love and appreciate when the model home is dressed up for the holidays and, really adding to the festive feel in the community. So that would be outside. Let's talk about inside. Here's a few really affordable ways that I would decorate the model home. My number one. Tip is to wrap empty boxes. I would save my Amazon boxes. I would buy wrapping paper that fit my brand. So this is important. Do not go out and buy cheesy wrapping paper that doesn't fit with the decor in your model home. You see here, these are subdued golden white stripes and polka dots. Uh, so maybe let your design team have a little, help you a little bit with this, but pick some really tasteful. Wrapping paper, wrap up boxes, and just pile up presents around the model home. It's the most affordable, fun, festive way to dress up your model and then tuck a few pics of greenery in around it. So I would typically spend about$50 per model home at Hobby Lobby, getting the wrapping paper. The greenery, some ribbon, and then like this gift here, you see in the bowl, just a couple little extra picks like this with some, those were some fun bells. And the picture on the lower right. Those ornaments were actually all from the dollar store and I was just filling the glass containers that normally had lemons and limes and things like that. Uh, on the model home counter, sometimes it was a big bowl. So anywhere you maybe have a, a large vessel displaying something, swap'em out with inexpensive ornaments and it adds such a fun, festive touch. Okay, so that's model home decor. How about your virtual decor? I pulled these together from Chat GPT. I took a rendering that we had done for a client and I asked it to create a fall season and a Christmas season image. And how fun would it be on your plan page if you swapped out some thumbnails from the usual pictures that people see all year and they saw something that was seasonally appropriate? I think this would really. Catch most people's attention. I know it would catch mine. This took me seconds to do. You could also do videos and I'll play this here for you. This is a fun, welcome, more neighborhood. We have some scary, good deals. No tricks, just treats. Very simple. This is created using veo. It's a free tool for video editing, so you take the still rendering that you have and, give it a prompt to create something fun for the holidays. These would be great for social media, for your website, to plug in to a customer email. I was thinking, let me jump back to the previous slide. Maybe you've got a prospect that has gone silent on you for a while. What if you created a holiday version of the house that they were thinking about buying and sent it to them as a, a way to get them excited to get them back in? I think that would certainly be an attention grabber when they're being reminded of what the holidays could look like in a brand new home from you. Okay, let's jump back to the model home. Another fun idea, and this is maybe an extreme example, but is Christmas lights on your model home? One of the things, that we struggle with when we get into the winter months is how dark it is and how early it gets dark at the model home. Well, Christmas lights really will make your home show up and, I did this one year in the neighborhood. And it really, the home just glowed. It was very visible. It was easy for people to see, again, the neighbors. Felt like we were really contributing to the look and the feel of the community. So this would be a fun way to add some holiday sparkle in your model home. And one little thing, don't forget about the scent and the sounds. Do you have the scent of fall in your model homes? If maybe you have a signature scent that you have the rest of the year to make sure they smell good, maybe change that out to be something that's seasonal. And what about music? Can you have great music playing that helps to enhance that seasonal feel? Okay. Those are some quick ideas for visual and branding. Now let's talk about experiences and social gatherings. The holidays are a great opportunity to bring people together and the model home can be one of the best ways to do that. And I had a community where we had a very vibrant community, but we didn't have our own clubhouse in the neighborhood to have neighborhood events. And so I got really involved with the HOA board and I said. Feel free to use our model home in place of a clubhouse to host events, and we very successfully hosted several, some of which I'm gonna show you here in a minute. So that's one option. If you are in a neighborhood that has an established group of residents, let your model home be a place for them to gather and host events and you know that's going to spark conversations about your homes and drive referrals for you. And then additionally, you can create experiences yourself for your prospects or for your homeowners in your model home. So here's a few ideas how to do that. This is one of my favorites. This is an actual picture from a model home that I had here in Oklahoma. We had story time with Santa in the neighborhood. We hired Santa, we brought him in. We invited all the kids in the neighborhood to come. We had. Cookies and cocoa, and this was a great event. Everybody really, really loved it. We also did, same neighborhood, a cookie swap. This was one of the neighborhood events where all the ladies in the neighborhood brought a bottle of wine, brought some cookies, and just had a lot of fun getting together. I also have done a kids decorating party. I didn't have an actual picture of it. You can imagine getting those plain sugar cookies, getting all the frosting and the sprinkles, and letting them decorate their own cookies in your model home. That would be a really fun event to host. Next one. This was one of the oldies, this was probably a dozen years or so ago, but on the left is my friend Alicia. She was a designer at Ethan Allen, and I had her host a holiday decorating class in our model home where she taught people how to put together some fun holiday centerpieces and other decor tips. For around their home. And the everyone who came loved this event, we had such great response. It was very hands-on. She had them try stuff, and it was very intimate. You can see we're hanging out in the living room. She's on the floor around the coffee table. So this is very relaxed gathering and that's where these natural connections and conversations. Happen. So that was a fun one. Okay. Speeding right through to the next one. Let's not forget our realtors and our networking partners, this is a time of year that they are busy as well, trying to get those final sales in. For the end of the year trying to get those numbers up. And so there's opportunities to take the normal efforts that we're making towards networking and make those really fun for the season. So let's start by talking about some brokers opens. We did a football tailgate party. We did it themed around OSU rivalry, which was really fun. And in this situation, we had a custom set of cornhole boards created that were our giveaway. And we made it fun. We had people out playing cornhole. We actually brought a grill over and we're grilling outside. Just very relaxed. Tailgate is a really fun theme. Here. And then jumping to Christmas pictures with Santa was another popular one. And earlier I had story time with Santa. I've done lots of pictures with Santa for the kids and the models too. That's another great one. But realtors love photo opportunities and so giving them an opportunity to have a picture with Santa that you know they're gonna share on their social media because they're looking for content. To be filling out their social media this time as well. So if you can provide Santa, provide the goodies, they will come visit your model home and they will share, which is key. They'll share that photo and tag you in it. So the third idea here, this was a very complex but hugely successful brokers open. We did, we called it the 12 days at Christmas, and we were in a large community with several builders. We got all of the builders involved. So I wanna say there were four or five of us. We all had multiple homes open. We got a massive amount of prizes. In fact, the woman that hosted this and organized it, she went out on Black Friday and got crazy deals. And so for 12 days we gave away gifts. So everybody had to come. They had to visit all of the builder's homes. So we had a a, a way to track who visited all the homes. And then from the people that visited all the homes, we gave away some big stuff for 12 days straight. And what I loved about this was sometimes with those brokers opens, you've got the one giveaway and then it's over where the 12 days really helped to drag it out. It gave us constant, content to be posting and the realtors were watching us for 12 days straight and it's really hard to keep their attention for that long normally. So this was a great way and of course, you know, in between announcing those winners on social media daily we're posting promotions and homes that we really wanted them to be paying attention to as well. So that was a really, fantastic and successful Brokers Open event for us. Let's then jump to gifts. So calorie free gifts that last, of course, there are lots of sweets that are being given around the holidays. I love sweets too, but I, I found over time that if I chose something that would last it. Would create a much longer lasting impression. And I'll tell you, the pumpkins on the left. I wish I had a picture, but I couldn't find one. I did this every year for years. I would buy about a hundred of these little white pumpkins and I would tie a bow around the stem and I would punch a hole in my business card, and I would tie it to that. Bow and I would go to realtor's offices and I would put a pumpkin on every desk. And I will tell you, I saw those pumpkins on their desks for a long time. I would come back at Christmas and the pumpkin would still be there. Because they love that little bit of festive decor on their desk that made it feel like they'd decorated for the holidays, but they didn't have to do anything. And I, I think that that's pretty unusual to gain the opportunity to be in front of a realtor on their desk. Every day for a couple of months, but it worked. And people would ask me about the pumpkins. They would be waiting to have their pumpkin every year decorating their desk. So that's a, a really fun way. And, and these are little, so this is the mini size. These are not big. This is just a little mini white pumpkin. It's very easy to do. But it was one of the simple things that really made an impact for me. And then of course. At Christmas. The pointsetas, lots of people do this, so there's other ways that you can do it. You can do other floral arrangements, other plants, the little, um, rosemary Christmas trees, for example. Those are great, but I will say, little tip, the floral picks. Like you get, from a florist where you have the card there that says who it's from, you can buy those at a craft store and I would put those in the plant with my business card in it, and then I would see the plant staying, on that front desk or maybe in the break area in those offices all season long. So it's just staying in front of them where you are front and center and top of mind for them throughout the season. All right. Next category. Let's talk about contests and giveaways. This is another fun one to really generate a lot of good social interactivity. So the first one that I did, I called Pictures for Pie, and this was a social media contest where we would ask our homeowners to post pictures of their home that we had built. On social media to tag us and to say what their favorite thing was in their home. And anyone that did that, we would send a gift card to a local specialty pie shop for one pie. And it was an amazing pie shop, so everybody was excited to have a gift card. Frankly, it didn't cost us a lot to buy each of those gift cards, and yet the reach for each of those people sharing to their network, tagging us, saying what they loved about their home was worth every penny. And we were supporting a really great local pie shop. So we did this one many times over the years. It was very successful around the holidays, people loved being able to. Grab a pie from one of the shops and bring it to a holiday. Get together or just enjoy it by themselves at home. Next one that we did that was really successful was Porch Decorating Contest. And here's a couple of the submissions that we received for our fall. We did a fall porch decorating contest. The one on the left was our winner. Loved the legs there outside of the flower pot. That was really fun. The ghost at the front door. On the right. Love seeing homeowners with their pets, but we just asked our homeowners, send us pictures of your front porch decorated for the holiday season. Tag us, we picked a winner, gave them a gift card. This was another really good one. And then again, at the holidays we would do it inside and out. So I just have pictures of the exterior here, but we would ask people to share. Pictures of their outside and inside decorated, and it was so fun to see the variety of photos we got and this particular one really looks professionally decorated. This was our clear winner. They owned, a gift. Store. And so they had access to some pretty amazing products, but we had homeowners who were sharing just really heartwarming, homey photos of their Christmas tree or their stockings hung on their mantle place. And that's the kind of content that is so authentic. You can't fake that in marketing. Perfect. Model home pictures might look. Amazing, but they're not as real as a homeowner sharing their own pictures like this. So that was a really, really fun one. All right. Next one, back to those brokers. Opens. I did this for our brokers open initially, but then we expanded it. It was Get your LFI on. And I found this really fun cutout, for photos here. And we asked the realtors at the brokers open to take their lfi, and to post it on social media and to tag us. And then we selected a winner, but we went on to do this in the model home. And there's lots of different versions of this. You could do sort of your own. Version of Elf on the Shelf and getting kids and families to find the elf in your model and to take a picture and post it. So there's lots of opportunities then to create a photo op. Think of different ways that you can do it, whether you have something like this or it's just a matter of hiding that elf in your model and having them take a picture of themself of the elf and and tag you. But there are lots of opportunities for them to share This was a really fun one. Okay. Whew. That's a lot. I've got a bonus for you. One more. And that is to focus on what is local at the holidays. There's so many local opportunities to talk about, and so why not create holiday event and local business guides? And this is another one that is great for SEO in addition to helping. Your customers, this is going to, if you do this really well, you may be able to pop up in some search results. So I would say you could look at doing this a in a variety of ways. You could create an overarching guide. For the entire season, or you could do a weekly feature. And I think that's the one that I did, more often. So like in October, I would feature, local pumpkin patches. Or other fall activities through October and November that families could go to places that were seasonally appropriate. And then in December we would feature, best places to get your picture taken with Santa or Christmas tree lots where you could go to a Christmas tree farm and get a real Christmas tree where the best places to see Christmas lights. A, a guide of where all the best local lights were. And, I really would say focus on the small businesses. They love getting that attention. It's gonna help you when you're recommending other local businesses, and the homeowners loved it. So this is really easy social content to help fill out that social calendar during the holidays. Okay. That was it. That was my 20 plus ideas. I hope that that will spark some creativity for you, and I'm excited to see what other ideas our builders come up with. Well with that, thank you guys for tuning in, and we'll see you all next time. All.