It’s May 2020. It’s been a couple months since the pandemic disrupted the world. Many things have changed, but the demand for real estate has not vanished; if anything, it maybe has even increased due to all-time low interest rates.
As one of the largest real estate agencies in the state, the pressure is always on for this real estate client to push the limits on possibilities. Traditional advertising methods lead to traditional results, so it was time to test the waters on some digital tactics.
HyperValue, through another client’s referral, had the opportunity to test new digital marketing channels for this real estate agency, with the objective of producing leads at a Cost per Lead lower than that of existing methods.
At this point, a number of channels and methods could be recommended, but the first and best course of action was to target the existing search volume for the appropriate keywords. Leads purchased directly from sources like Zillow, come at a high cost. Many real estate agencies accept those costs and concentrate their efforts on acquiring local leads through these national aggregators, which charge a premium for their leads.
HyperValue sprung into action by helping this client test out paid search as an advertising method, at a low cost. Even on a small budget, the profit-oriented strategy achieved a $53 Cost per Lead within the first month. Low bids and low budget restricted the campaign from reaching its full potential, but when local residents search for a real estate agency, and the client’s ad earned a click that led to a Contact Form Submission, it’s safe to say that is a high-quality lead.
Of course, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, so we deployed sophisticated conversion tracking to closely monitor the resulting activity on the client’s website. Tracking the contact form, emails, calls, location lookups, and other engagements helped us decode the customer journey and understand how this client’s prospects moved through the site.
After two months of solid performance from paid search, at the direction of the agency’s president, we re-evaluated the customer journey and came at the lead generation equation from a different angle. Rather than spending $53 for higher-quality leads, what if we reversed the math and generated even lower-cost leads that were of lower-quality? Could we lower the Cost per Lead, and the Cost per Acquisition?
Facebook lead-generation ads gave us the tools to test this question. Using the lead-generation objective and associated ad format, we delivered leads below the $50 cost per lead threshold. Testing different audiences, images, ad copy, and calls-to-action, we optimized the campaign to extract the full value from the campaign.
By targeting users whose online behavior indicate an interest in real estate listings, in addition to remarketing and lookalike audiences, we were able to convert interest into action.
The key takeaway from this client’s experience? Test different methods, test different ads, measure the results, and make changes to get more value from your budget. Digital marketing channels give you the ability to target the people most likely to become your customers; we just managed the exchange to allow our client to pull those users in and turn them into leads and acquisitions.