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Meet Michelle Taves
Michelle Taves serves as Group GM of Porch Marketing, leading the integrated marketing strategy of PGM. Michelle played a key role in establishing PGM as a leading product innovator in mover marketing and today is a member of the senior leadership team.
With over 30 years of product, marketing, and leadership experience, Michelle has developed an in-depth knowledge of product strategy and development, operational efficiency management, omnichannel campaign execution, first-party marketing solutions, and audience development best practices including sourcing, privacy, availability, and reliability.
*The following content has been adapted from a podcast recording.
What is Mover Marketing? | Leadership Insights with Michelle Taves
Michelle: Mover marketing is a discipline and a category in the marketing realm that’s been going on for the last 20 or 25 years. Surely, any of you who have moved, remember the direct mail pieces showing up at your doorstep with coupons for local merchants and service providers. The goal of these direct mail campaigns is to help you get familiar with businesses in your new neighborhood and find the right brand connections.
Mover marketing has sort of been in the same place for the last couple of decades. The data sources have been the same, primarily focused on people who have already moved rather than people who are moving. The channels and routes to market have also typically been the same, with most brands spending their efforts solely on spent on direct mail programs.
However, it’s important to understand that today mover marketing offers so much more. Within Porch Group Media and Porch, we describe mover marketing as the art, science, and process of connecting brands with moving consumers throughout the entire move journey. This involves identifying these consumers and understanding where they are in the moving process. This level of insight enables brands to strategically place the right offer, on the right channel, at the right time.
The moving process is comprised of different phases. There’s a research phase, a home listing phase, and the home search phase. Additionally, throughout these phases is a flurry of economic activity centered around getting ready to move. This is when consumers are doing research, switching brands, and finding new service providers. As a result, this opens up several opportunities for brands to reach movers when they’re actively re-evaluating their finances, relationships with brands, and so forth.
So, what does this all mean for brands?
In our research on mover trends that we conducted with The Harris Poll, we found that nine in ten movers are willing to try new brands. Additionally, three in five movers are making major purchases prior to moving. This proves that brands should not only be focused on acquiring new clientele but also be working to retain their existing customers as well—and doing so early in the moving journey.
But many marketers who know of mover marketing generally have an outdated understanding of it and that is the focus on marketing to post-movers (people who have already moved) through a limited set of channels.
Fortunately, new technologies, such as those brought to the marketplace, allow marketers to connect with movers in a much more fundamental way. Because there are different phases of a move, consumers need to be reached throughout that journey—from pre-move to post-move —from direct mail to omnichannel, digital, e-mail, direct mail, advertising, and the like.
The old mover marketing didn’t offer many insights on movers. But, in recent years, mover marketing has evolved substantially. Now, with a high degree of precision, we’re able to identify who is moving, where they’re moving to, as well as where they are in the phase of the move, and what they’re all about from a demographic standpoint. And then, lastly, we have insights into what that consumer is shopping for. As you can see, this is a very different definition of mover marketing than the industry has typically had.
