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Carsen is a digital marketer by day and a digital DJ by night. He has a great love for travel and adventure, connecting with new people, and spinning out only the funkiest of beats. No matter if he's marketing or DJing, Carsen has a talent for making people smile.

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Catching the Wave – Why Landing Pages & Integrated Media Combine for HUGE Returns!

It’s no secret Alberta’s economy has been faced with challenges these past couple of years, and will continue to this coming year. We have a number of client partners in the home building industry who have experienced this economic downturn first hand, specifically in the form of less buyers, more inventory, and more competition. These conditions are what set firms apart. In order to be successful, firms need to be more precise in their marketing efforts and relevant to their consumers.

Today I’m going to tell you a story about a client partner of ours that tackled this challenging time head on with a promotional campaign, and walked away with an ROAS of 59+. Do I have your attention now? Let’s do this!

Landing Pages and Integrated Media

The Story & Strategy

Calbridge Homes is one of Calgary’s top home builders, and has been building homes in premiere communities since 1978. Just last year, in the midst of these challenging economic times here in Calgary, Calbridge was launching Phase 2 of its Vantage Fireside community in Cochrane. Appreciating all the economic and competitive factors at play, Calbridge needed to do something differently in order to find buyers for these units.

As the industry is so competitive, we knew that we would need to overcome two big obstacles for this campaign to be successful; awareness of the promotion itself, and efficient lead capture for the Calbridge sales people to close the loop. Together, we developed an integrated strategy that would leverage traditional media channels for awareness and online channels for lead generation.

The Channels

Awareness – A variety of channels were launched to increase awareness of the Fireside community and promotional campaign including: Broadcast Television, Radio Advertising, Direct Mail, and Print. The targeting and channel selection for the traditional push was centered around ‘First Time Home Buyers’, ‘Young Professionals’, and ‘Investors’, with proximity to the Cochrane community being the geo target.

Lead Generation – To capture the demand that the traditional channels were generating, we used a combination of Paid Search and Remarketing with similar targeting criteria to the traditional channels. What really set this strategy apart, was the creation of a simple, dedicated campaign landing page to drive promotional traffic to. This lead generation focused landing page removed all distractions from the page and funneled the visitors toward the ultimate campaign goal; lead form submissions. Here at Vovia, we LOVE landing pages because of their undeniable ability to increase conversion rates from paid campaigns, so this felt like a natural fit with the Fireside campaign.

The Execution

While I won’t get into everything that we tweaked and changed throughout the 8 week campaign, I’d like to show you a few of the key items that we updated for this promotion.

The first, quite simply, was updated ad copy to match the promotional offer that Calbridge had put forward. This not only created relevancy between the search terms and ad copy, it inspired click through through by highlighting the offer with Google’s new Expanded Text Ads.

Calbridge Ads

After the Search ads were updated, we went to work on the new campaign landing page. Simple, clean, modern, and free of distractions. We used the headlines and page hierarchy to improve our ad relevancy and quality score, then place the most important information from a user perspective (the offer and benefits) surrounding the lead form itself.

Calbridge Landing Page

The Results

Now for the part you’ve all been waiting for, the results! Despite increased competition in Search during the campaign period, the online campaigns drove 298 leads at a cost per lead of $13.84. Though I can’t share the exact revenue numbers with you, I can tell you that Calbridge converted a large share of these leads and that the overall return on Ad Spend (ROAS) was over 59! This means Calbridge received $59 for every marketing dollar spent on this promotion, making this a very successful campaign. But how does it compare to the regular campaigns?

The Comparison

Below is a table that compares regular townhome campaign performance with that of the Fireside campaign. In particular, I’d like to draw your attention to the conversion rate and the cost per conversion (or cost per lead). This perfectly illustrates the power of fully integrated, promotional campaigns and the potential that this approach to media truly has. But this isn’t the whole story. To truly understand why this was so successful, we need to look at the big picture.

The Insight

So why was this campaign so successful? Beyond the standard Vovia performance factor, we see a few key elements of this campaign that contributed to the success:

  • The Offer – Calbridge had a really incredible offer on townhomes starting from $184K, and a down payment of only $500-$1000. This offer and down payment incentive translated into much stronger CTR and general interest in the online space, which eventually brought in leads and sales.
  • Market Factors – The timing of this promotion was excellent. Industry trends tell us that home builder related search terms are much higher in the shoulder months to summer, so running this campaign in the August-September time frame allowed us to hit a market that was already looking with a promotion that would catch their attention. If this campaign had run in November-December, it would be a very different story that I’d be telling you today.
  • Full Media Integration – Traditional and Digital Media; they really are better together. Traditional channels built awareness and reach that the online channels simply could not. Then, the digital channels closed the loop by capturing the leads, which would then be converted into actual sales. Neither approach or channel could have done this in isolation, which is why it’s so important to coordinate your efforts, both online and off.
  • The Landing Page – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; Landing Pages work wonders! The more focused the environment, the more likely the user is to convert, period.
  • Specificity and Clarity – Specific advertising with clear value propositions and easy to understand benefits will always outperform generic or broad messaging and marketing. If you can plan events and promotions in your marketing calendars throughout the year, and time those events well to known market factors, you will almost always find efficiencies.

Calbridge Homes has a talented in house marketing team that works closely with Vovia to develop channel strategy and promotional campaigns just like this one. We are proud to call them a client partner and to contribute to their continued success.

How are your home builder campaigns going? Tell us about your experiences with promotional campaigns or landing pages in the comments below!