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Outside the Marketing Bubble: What Writing a Novel Taught Me About Home Builder Marketing, Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I shared one of the unexpected benefits of writing my first novel: it pulled me into an entirely different creative ecosystem. As an audiobook junkie and aspiring fiction author, I’ve spent a lot more time following authors, Bookstagram and BookTok creators, narrators, reviewers, and small entrepreneurs who are exceptionally good at earning attention online. You can find that side of my world at @merrybooktrovert, where I’m usually talking about romantasy, audiobook narration, or whatever fictional character has temporarily taken over my life.

The marketer in me can’t help studying what these creators do well. The strongest book influencers rarely spend every post holding up a book and telling people to buy it. They create anticipation, capture reactions, zoom in on interesting details, tell stories, share their personalities, and make followers feel like insiders in a community built around something they love.

The products are completely different, but the attention psychology translates beautifully to homebuilding. One Utah custom builder provides a fascinating example of what can happen when you consistently make the work, the craft, and the people behind it interesting enough to follow.

When Social Media Becomes a Business Asset

Tyler Farrell is the founder and president of Killowen Construction, a luxury custom home builder in Utah. Killowen’s social media presence grew alongside the company, and by 2024, Buildertrend reported that the company had more than 319,000 Instagram followers. The more compelling number, however, may be the price of the homes some of those followers eventually hired Killowen to build.

In a Buildertrend interview, Farrell described asking clients who were signing contracts for 5–8 million homes how they had heard about Killowen. Their answer was sometimes surprisingly simple: they followed the company on Instagram. Farrell said clients told him Killowen talked about things they were interested in, they could tell the team cared, and the work itself demonstrated the quality of the product.

Think about the significance of that for a moment. These buyers didn’t simply discover a builder on Instagram. By consistently watching Killowen’s content, they developed enough familiarity and confidence in the company to entrust it with a multimillion-dollar home eventually.

Social media also helped create an opportunity that dramatically expanded Killowen’s visibility. Farrell said his Instagram connection with Shea McGee led to working with Studio McGee, then building Syd and Shea McGee’s own home, and ultimately appearing on Netflix’s Dream Home Makeover. By 2024, Buildertrend reported that Killowen had grown from Farrell’s original one-person operation to a business generating approximately 40–50 million annually.

In August 2026, the story reached an even larger audience when Farrell appeared on Fox & Friends First in a segment titled, “Luxury home builder turns social media following into multimillion-dollar business.” Fox described how showcasing Killowen’s custom homes and craftsmanship online helped transform the business and create a second career for Farrell as a construction influencer.

Farrell’s strategy is refreshingly uncomplicated. Talk about things people are interested in. Let them see that you care. Allow the quality of the work to speak for itself. Then consistently create good content around all three.

The opportunity for home builder marketers isn’t measured by whether you can replicate Killowen’s follower count, land a Netflix show, or appear on national television. It’s understanding the psychology behind why people kept watching in the first place.

You don’t need to become an influencer. You need to understand why influencers influence.

Show the Process, Not Just the Product

Home builder marketing understandably gravitates toward the finished product. We invest in professional photography, beautifully staged models, architectural renderings, drone footage, and polished video tours because the finished home is what we’re selling. Those assets are essential, particularly in a slower market where every image and video needs to work harder to earn attention.

Construction gives us another extraordinary source of content: the process of creating the finished home. Framing, cabinetry, millwork, tile installation, site preparation, energy-efficiency features, quality-control inspections, design decisions, problem-solving, and skilled trades all contain stories that disappear behind the walls or become invisible once the home is complete.

Finished photography shows buyers what you built. Process content helps them understand why it matters that you built it. Show buyers the detail behind the drywall that they will never see after closing, introduce the trade partner whose skill makes a complicated installation possible, or explain why a superintendent asked for something to be redone even though most buyers would never have noticed the difference.

Suddenly, you’ve stopped claiming craftsmanship and started providing evidence of it.

Specificity Makes the Story Interesting

This lesson immediately takes me back to the audiobook carousel from Part 1. The content worked because it was incredibly specific. It captured the peculiar little moments that make an audiobook listener think, “That’s me,” rather than simply talking broadly about how much people enjoy audiobooks.

The same principle applies to construction content. “Take a look at this beautiful kitchen” gives the viewer very little reason to keep watching, while “Here’s why we made this island 11 feet long” creates a question the viewer wants answered. A video about “quality construction” is easy to scroll past, but a superintendent pointing to one tiny framing detail and explaining why the crew builds it that way gives the audience something specific to learn.

Specificity creates curiosity because details contain stories. A cabinet becomes more interesting when someone explains why it was designed that way. A window becomes more meaningful when the builder explains why that particular product performs better in the local climate. A floor plan becomes a story when the designer explains the decision that solved a real-world living problem.

The house provides the subject matter. Your expertise provides the story.

Give Away Some of What You Know

Home builders possess an enormous amount of knowledge that buyers don’t have. Your construction teams understand materials, building science, land, weather, sequencing, structural decisions, installation techniques, design, codes, quality control, and hundreds of details most consumers will encounter only once or twice in their lives.

Social video gives you an opportunity to make buyers insiders. Explain why you chose one material over another, why the foundation is designed a particular way, what your superintendent notices during an inspection, or what will eventually be hidden behind the wall. When something needs to be corrected, explain what your team noticed and why getting it right matters.

Teaching demonstrates expertise without requiring you to announce that you’re an expert. It also builds the kind of credibility Farrell described when talking about prospects who followed Killowen before becoming clients. They had already watched the company discuss topics they cared about, observed the team behind the work, and developed a sense of how Killowen approached building before they signed a multimillion-dollar contract.

Marketing has already done part of the trust-building work before the first sales conversation ever begins.

Let People Get to Know the People

One of the most transferable lessons from influencers is the power of familiarity. The strongest creators develop recognizable voices and personalities, giving followers the feeling that they know the person behind the account even though they may never have met.

Home builders have people worth knowing, too. Your owner, superintendent, designer, sales professional, warranty manager, purchasing team, land expert, and trade partners all see the homebuilding process through different lenses. Giving them opportunities to share what they know creates a richer story than asking one marketing person to narrate everything the company does.

This doesn’t require turning your CEO into an Instagram personality or convincing your construction manager to perform the latest TikTok dance. Please don’t tell your superintendent I sent you to the jobsite with a ring light and choreography. 😂 Familiarity grows when knowledgeable people consistently show up, teach something useful, reveal what they care about, and let a little personality come through.

Over time, viewers begin recognizing the faces, voices, standards, and values behind the company. That familiarity becomes especially valuable during a long homebuying journey because trust can begin forming long before someone submits a form, schedules an appointment, or walks into a model home.

Earn Attention Before You Ask for the Sale

Scroll through enough home builder social feeds and a familiar rhythm emerges: available home, incentive, model tour, price improvement, community promotion, another available home. Each post may serve a legitimate purpose, but collectively the feed can begin to feel like one long sales pitch.

Influencers tend to understand the value exchange differently. They teach, entertain, reveal, react, tell stories, create curiosity, and build community, giving followers reasons to keep coming back even when they aren’t ready to buy anything. For home builders, that accumulated attention has tremendous value because someone who isn’t buying today can still learn from you, enjoy your content, share it, remember you, and gradually develop confidence in your company.

When the moment arrives to consider a new home seriously, you are no longer introducing yourself.

Attention gets the click. Relevance earns the conversation.

Farrell’s experience illustrates what can happen when that attention compounds. He has said Killowen received significant work directly through Instagram, including clients making multimillion-dollar decisions after following what the company had been sharing over time. Social media had become more than an awareness channel. It had become part of the company’s credibility.

Try This: The 60-Second Craft Story.

Part 1 of this series gave you a practical exercise for creating relatable social content. For Part 2, I want you to walk an active jobsite with your phone and look for one detail with a story behind it.

You don’t need a production crew or an elaborate script. You need something interesting, someone who understands why it matters, and roughly 60 seconds to tell the story.

1. Start with the interesting thing. Open on the detail, problem, decision, or action rather than a logo animation or lengthy introduction. “You’re probably wondering why we’re tearing out a perfectly good row of tile” gives me an immediate reason to keep watching.
2. Explain why it matters. Give the viewer knowledge they don’t already have. Perhaps the spacing is slightly off, a material performs differently in your climate, or a structural choice solves a problem buyers would never know existed.
3. Show the work. Let us watch someone install it, correct it, test it, build it, select it, or inspect it. The process becomes part of the story, particularly when skilled hands and thoughtful decisions are visible.
4. Connect the craft to the customer. Finish with why the detail matters to the person who will eventually live in the home. The story itself should communicate the value without needing to end every video with a “Call Today!” graphic.

Imagine that tile example ending with:

“Most homeowners would never know we redid this. That’s kind of the point.”

In less than a minute, you’ve communicated standards, attention to detail, accountability, expertise, and pride in the work without ever saying, “We are committed to quality craftsmanship.”

Your Next Month of Video May Already Be on the Jobsite

One thoughtful jobsite walk can uncover weeks of content when you begin looking for stories instead of advertisements. Film something being installed, a detail buyers won’t see after the home is complete, a material selected for a specific reason, a trade partner demonstrating a skill, or a superintendent noticing something most people would miss. Capture a design decision, a quality-control check, a problem the team solved that day, or a feature whose real value becomes obvious only after someone explains it.

Production builders have just as much opportunity to use this strategy as custom builders. Construction standards, energy-efficiency features, design selections, land development, quality-control processes, warranty practices, community amenities, model merchandising, and trade partnerships are all potential stories. Repetition can even become an advantage because it gives your team recurring opportunities to demonstrate the systems and standards behind the homes you build.

The challenge is learning to recognize what’s interesting to someone who doesn’t do this every day. Your construction team may consider a particular detail routine because they’ve seen it hundreds of times, while to a buyer it may be fascinating.

Ask your team one simple question when you walk the jobsite:

“What are you doing today that a homeowner would never know to ask about?”

Then turn on the camera.

Study Influence, Not Influencers

Writing a novel and building @merrybooktrovert has pushed me further into creator communities where I routinely find ideas that make me reconsider how we market homes. I follow the book creator who makes me stop scrolling, the small entrepreneur who has figured out Reels, and the brands whose content I recognize before I even notice the username. Each becomes an informal case study in attention.

You can build the same habit. Follow creators outside homebuilding and pay attention to your own behavior as a consumer. When you stop, watch, save, share, or follow, ask why the content worked on you and which underlying principle could translate to your brand.

The subject matter may be books, restaurants, fitness, fashion, coffee, interior design, dogs, or custom homes. Human attention still responds to many of the same things: curiosity, specificity, expertise, personality, emotion, belonging, and story.

Tyler Farrell’s story gives us a powerful homebuilding example because the connection between social media and business is measurable. He has publicly credited Instagram with generating work and opportunities, while Killowen’s broader growth demonstrates the scale the company ultimately achieved. His 2026 national television appearance simply put a much larger spotlight on a strategy that had been compounding for years.

Your opportunity can begin much smaller. Find one story worth telling and tell it well.

Your buyers don’t need another video telling them you build a quality home. Show them something that makes them believe it.

Continue the Conversation

Looking outside homebuilding has reminded me how much creativity grows when we deliberately exercise it. Writing fiction has taken that lesson even further because every chapter forces me to think about specificity, point of view, motivation, emotion, pacing, and the difference between telling readers something and helping them experience it.

Those skills have started showing up in my marketing work in ways I didn’t anticipate. They’ve also made me think differently about creativity in the age of artificial intelligence, when generating more words has never been easier and deciding which words actually matter has become increasingly important.

In Part 3, we’ll explore what writing fiction has taught me about writing better marketing and why strengthening your human creative muscles may be one of the smartest investments you can make in an AI-powered world.

Need help with your home builder marketing? We are here to help. Follow us at @meredithcomms and Meredith on LinkedIn.

Categorised in: Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Home Builder Marketing & Sales