OK – so you’ve read some of my blog articles and perhaps you’ve even read through one of our in-depth guides into real estate content marketing. You may even be thinking this is all well and good, but where’s the proof that it works, that it actually drives leads for a business.

Today I’m going to do a deep into one of the most recent campaigns, that we are actually still working on with a real estate office, and share with you the amazing early results!

A bit of background

This office was extremely well established in a popular inner west suburb of Sydney. It had been servicing the local community for 30 years and had a solid reputation, however sales appraisals, listings and property managements were slipping month on month. The old ways of marketing were beginning to fail, and this once successful office was beginning to struggle.

Under new family management, Localiz was invited in to help the office reinvigorate its property management division. As you would know having a strong management portfolio can make the difference between surviving in a market down turn or struggling. It provides consistent income each month and helps stabilise a business even when the wider property market is fluctuating.

With the real estate market heading backwards, the priority was to focus on property management and driving new property management leads into the business.

Developing the strategy

The first step was to do a full digital audit on the office websites, social media channels and nurturing programs. We needed to truly understand what the office was doing, what they were doing well, what they were doing badly and what the local competitors were doing.

Out of this deep dive we could clearly see the office was missing vital local ingredients. Its website didn’t feel local at all, there was no nurturing program and in fact the office didn’t even have a Facebook page! Plus to make it worse they had no Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel on their home page so they weren’t capturing any data or insights from their audience. It was pretty much a clean slate which was exciting for us as we knew we could make a difference.

Step 1 – setting the foundations

Step one was providing the office with a complete strategy document for them to start work on. A lot of this was easily remedied by the office and involved making changes to the website, adding the necessary tracking pixels, getting fresh local imagery, promoting customer testimonials, building out landing pages with useful information, along with other easy to implement, cost effective, but impactful changes.

Step 2 – the marketing campaign

Step two was to build a promotions campaign targeting local investors and property owners. After a great brainstorming meeting where we workshopped ideas on how to lure current investors over to the office and how to appeal to new investors, we developed a multi touch approach that involved:

• Creating a lead magnet – or in other words a hand-crafted local guide to investing in the suburb
• A strong offer that the office was happy to provide to new managements the lure if like
• Creating custom audiences in Facebook
• Developing over 25 different advertisements
• Building 2 x landing pages
• Developing an email program to nurture leads as they came through.

Under $300 advertising & 5 appraisal requests in the first 2 weeks

With a total advertising expenditure of under $300 the results have blown everyone away:

• 5 property management appraisal requests – some just walk in’s but considering the office had had no appraisals in some time this was significant
• 2.5% click through rate on the lead magnet promotion. This is 177% higher than Facebook’s average click through rate
• 20% of people who clicked on the lead magnet promotion downloaded the Guide and have entered the lead nurturing program
• 52% open rate on Lead nurturing emails. The average for the real estate industry is 19% so these results are fantastic

But what does this mean for the office?
Look at it this way, if only 1 of these property managements convert it will bring in approximately $1500 a year in management fees. Over 5 years that $7,500. That’s a whopping a 2,500% ROI for this campaign!!! Wowzers!!!

Next steps
This campaign is not finished yet- it still has a few more weeks to run and has lots more testing and refinement of creative, but if these results are anything to gauge the success of the local campaign, we are going to blow our targets out of the water!

What does it mean to you?
The good news is that these types of programs can be built for any real estate office and we’d love to help you. Email us today and let’s talk about how we can help you too with creating a strong local digital content strategy to drive leads through your door.

Disclaimer
These results were for one office and one campaign only. We will do what we can to create a successful campaign for our clients however there is no guarantee we will achieve these or similar results for all our clients.