Facing a competitive market, M/I Homes sought to differentiate themselves on multiple fronts while improving their image strategy, particularly for their website.

In 2020, they implemented KeyShot’s digital asset management (DAM) solution, KeyShot Dock, after identifying its seamless integration with the Sitecore content management system (CMS) as a key advantage.

The results included consistent delivery of personalized customer experiences that set them apart from competitors and a 95% reduction in the time required to upload and distribute photos across digital channels, significantly improving operational efficiency.

M/I Homes has been building single family houses for people across America for more than 40 years. Today they construct thousands of new homes every year across 16 markets, with +1,200 employees and $1.96 billion in revenue.

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, for customers to be able to paint a mental picture of a potential home, they need to be able to access several 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.

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 KeyShot Dock.  

Digital Marketing

With KeyShot Dock as the single source of truth, it is easier than ever for M/I Homes to get the correct, most up-to-date photos on their website and accuracy, quality, and relevancy is extremely important here because the website is the main lead generator for M/I Homes.  

M/I Homes content creators work with an uncountable number of photos for the production and publication of compelling content on their website and other digital channels. Not only does KeyShot Dock make the processes easier – it makes them much faster. In terms of uploading and processing photos, this task time was reduced by 95% – 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.” 

Sales

Having KeyShot Dock at the center of their digital content ecosystem, the M/I Homes team has been able to build and leverage buyer portals for streamlined communication with customers. KeyShot Dock sources all the digital assets for these portals and automates the workflows that guarantee timely delivery of relevant assets to customers. 

“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.”