A Day in the Life of CB Homes’ Marketing Manager

Maggie Austen has been Marketing Manager at CB Homes for nearly four years. Her role involves developing and implementing marketing plans and overseeing the creation of marketing material and online content to help drive sales of CB Homes’ self-build homes and small, exclusive developments.

What do you like most about your job as Marketing Manager?

I think what I like most about working for CB Homes is the variety. CB Homes has a wide range of products –from a cosy cottage to an amazing Grand Design, plus everything in between, so there is always something fresh happening, from a new self-build client coming on board, to a development starting up or a homeowner moving into their completed house. It’s really interesting seeing how many people are involved at every stage of a project, from the person who finds a great plot of land or advises on making a successful planning application to all the different trades who complete the building itself.

What does a typical day look like for you?

I spend a part of every day checking the CB Homes social media channels, so looking at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. It’s important for our marketing that I post messages on all the channels regularly to keep people up to date with all our activity.

Blogging

Next, I may spend some time researching for one of our blogs. We write two of these per month on a variety of topics, from the challenges of planning applications to the latest sustainability issues so I often reach out to an expert in a particular field to find the most up to date information to include.

Guides to building your own house

We have created a library of free downloadable self-build guides and resources, which live on the CB Homes website, and we add to this frequently. Writing these entails some research again, followed by liaison with our graphic designers and webmaster in order to get the content and design ready and uploaded to the website. As part of this, I really enjoyed arranging to video the entire self-build ‘journey’ of one of our clients, who has built a spectacular house in Kingsley. It meant I got to accompany a videographer to visit the site at several different points during the build. Seeing the property grow from basically a hole in the ground to the stunning finished product was really amazing. As well as documenting a really remarkable project, the video is a very helpful way to explain the self-build process to a potential customer so it’s a useful sales tool as well.

Case studies of self-build projects

Where possible, when a self-build project is complete, we like to interview the homeowner about their experiences so we can write up a case study for our website. It’s a good way of finding out what worked well and what could be improved; and I think potential customers enjoy hearing about different self-build experiences too, so case studies are extremely valuable.

Award-winning homes

Awards have kept me busy this year with CB Homes winning or being shortlisted for several property awards. Writing an award entry usually involves interviewing some of the people involved on a particular project and then collating supporting material, such as diagrams and photographs so I can then make the award submission. Once the entry has been submitted, we have to wait and see if we have made the shortlist and then it’s fingers crossed that we will emerge as winners! It’s great to get that validation for the whole team’s hard work.

Why do you think people like CB Homes’ houses?

I think people just need to see a CB Homes house to fall in love with it! It’s no surprise that the company wins so many awards for its designs as the houses are just beautiful, inside and out. More than that though, I think it’s the personal attention to each customer from a small, completely committed team that puts the company head and shoulders above other developers.  When houses aren’t being mass produced, you just get a much more personalised service as the CB Homes team takes the time to make sure every customer is happy.

Interested in building your own home? Talk to us about our complete self-build package.