HOW M/I HOMES
USES DIGIZUITE TO DELIVER AMAZING HOME EXPERIENCES
Summary
M/I Homes has been building single family houses for people across America for more than 40 years. With operations in 16 markets around the country – from their headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, to Charlotte, North Carolina, and even all the way down to San Antonio, Texas – M/I Homes constructs thousands of new builds every year.
Who is M/I Homes?
A homebuilder of more than 40 years that constructs single-family homes in 16 markets across the United States.
Enterprise Breakdown:
1,200+ employees, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.
Revenue:
$1.96 billion.
Challenge:
Differentiating the M/I Homes offering from their multiple dimensions of competition. Also, had to establish a better image strategy – namely, for their website.
Solution:
Implemented the Digizuite DAM in 2020 and integrated with the Sitecore CMS.
Results:
Operational efficiency, with a 95% reduction in the time it takes teams to upload and distribute photos across digital channels.
Consistent delivery of timely, relevant, personalized customer experiences.
Established buyer portals for regular communication with all customers.
The Challenge
In 2020, M/I Homes began to execute a significant digital transformation strategy. The digital team knew they had to make some big changes so that they could properly market and differentiate their offering – brand new homes – against two types of competition: other new homes as well as existing homes on the market.
“One out of every ten homes sold in the US are new construction,” Dan Piotrowski, M/I Homes Marketing Project Manager, said. “That means most of our competition is resale homes, ready for a potential buyer to move into right away, potentially with hundreds of staged photos of that home on sites like Zillow. That’s the bar we are trying to hit from a content perspective – making our product feel tangible even if it hasn’t been built yet.”
And, in order for customers to be able to paint a mental picture of a potential home, they need to be able to access a number of high quality images and other visuals. M/I Homes needed to be able to stand up to these expectations – both for potential customers and existing ones.
Another challenge for M/I Homes was establishing processes for communicating with – in other words, delivering compelling content to – existing customers throughout the months-long building process.
The Solution
To simplify marketing and digital content processes, M/I Homes needed a tool to get all their digital assets in one place.
“One of the big things we were trying to do was reduce the size of our website database,” Piotrowski said. “The other thing we wanted to do was combine our website assets with our design asset library – to have one place to source everything so we don’t have ten different versions and ten different crops of the same asset.”
The solution would be a digital asset management (DAM) platform – one that would allow them to establish automated workflows surrounding digital assets and other content.
The DAM they were looking for also had to integrate seamlessly with their Sitecore content management system (CMS).
After a comprehensive search of tools that met these expectations, the M/I Homes team implemented the Digizuite DAM.
“Digizuite stood head and shoulders above everyone else in terms of their capabilities. The way it integrated with Sitecore really put it over the top in terms of selection.”
The Results
For Digital Marketing
With the Digizuite DAM as the single database of all images, it is easier than ever for M/I Homes to get the correct, most up-to-date photos on its website. And, accuracy, quality, and relevancy is extremely important here because the website is the main lead generator for M/I Homes.
Both for the website and their other forms of digital real estate (no pun intended), the M/I Homes content creators work with an uncountable number of photos for the production and publication of compelling content. Not only does the Digizuite DAM make these processes easier – it makes them much quicker.
In terms of uploading and processing photos, what previously took up to a week now only takes the content team a matter of hours.
“Content groups upload between 1,200 to 2,000 photos every week, so the DAM saves them hours and hours every week,” Piotrowski said. “This gets photos online so much sooner and frees up time for content authors to do so much more.”
For Sales
Having the Digizuite DAM at the center of their digital content ecosystem, the M/I Homes team has also been able to build and leverage buyer portals for streamlined communication with customers. Digizuite sources all the digital assets for these portals and automates the workflows that guarantee timely delivery of relevant assets to customers.
These portals bring a lot of business value to M/I Homes.
“It’s all about making customers feel as comfortable and confident as possible about what is probably the largest purchase of their lives,” Haines said. “The process of building a home can be nine months, which can cause a lot of anxiety for buyers. The idea of these portals is that providing this kind of customer experience will reduce buyer’s remorse and customer cancellations.”
In general, the more high-quality content that M/I Homes can create and get to market, the more homes they are likely to sell. And the Digizuite DAM is key in their ability to produce and publish this material.
By sourcing images from the DAM, M/I Homes far speedier when publishing images to their public website and their new buyer portal application. This, of course, leads to the production of more (and better) digital content for their users.
“Content groups upload between 1,200 to 2,000 photos every week, so the DAM saves them hours and hours every week.
This gets photos online so much sooner and frees up time for content authors to do so
much more.”
Dan Piotrowski
Marketing Project Manager
M/I Homes
The key takeaway
With the Digizuite DAM,
M/I Homes now has the time and the engine they need to effectively communicate with prospects and existing customers.