HUNT Real Estate : Driving home results through digital advertising
Challenge
HUNT Real Estate Driving home results through digital advertising: HUNT Real Estate is a family-owned company helping clients across New York State find that special place they can truly call “home.” They provide a full range of services that streamline the homebuying process, emphasizing the importance of customer service and building long-lasting relationships between agents and homebuyers. HUNT first came to 19 IDEAS in October 2017 so we could further build brand awareness and market their services to homebuyers in three key regions: Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse.
Solution
We knew that digital advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) would be the best tools for helping HUNT beat out the competition. With this in mind, our team set to work helping HUNT establish valuable digital real estate. Building the foundations: Our digital team began by conducting an initial SEO audit and keyword research, allowing us to set the foundation for regular SEO recommendations. We also launched paid search advertising campaigns through Google to target individuals in key locations searching for specific keywords. Our goal was to find users who were researching real estate companies to work with and hadn’t yet made a decision. With our new paid search strategy, we were able to double HUNT’s clicks for the same budget. Throughout 2018, as we continued to optimize, we saw improvements in our ad campaigns, including more clicks and conversions, as well as increased traffic driven to the HUNT Real Estate website. We also implemented several changes to the website to boost SEO rankings, such as: -Streamlining the navigation - Adding more calls to action to further encourage conversions - Setting up more directed conversion tracking to better understand our users’ behaviors and how to effectively push them toward conversion. A place to land: Because of the success we achieved in our digital work, HUNT Real Estate concurrently asked us to help with their website redesign and copywriting project in early 2019. In addition to rewriting pages to establish and maintain HUNT’s brand voice as well as improve user experience and SEO value, we built landing pages specifically for the paid search advertising we were conducting. Throughout the project, we crafted a site structure and wrote a brand story informed by SEO and UX best practices. The dedicated landing pages we developed helped to improve the user journey by directing users toward key actions we wanted them to take, such as viewing listings or contacting an agent. Due to the positive experience users derived from these pages, we were able beat out ad space competitors and decrease our overall cost per click. Continuing to build on momentum: Our work doesn’t end here. This year, we are continuing to work with HUNT to improve their SEO visibility, especially for individual listing pages, while building on our growth in the paid search realm through advertising their career opportunities and other initiatives. Our team looks forward to continuing to provide digital marketing support that helps HUNT achieve their future growth-oriented goals.
Results
Learning from the data: In 2019 HUNT spent 5% less in advertising budget while attaining more profitable outcomes, including: - 45% decrease in cost per click - 72% increase in overall clicks - 104% increase in conversion rates We achieved these results by using data and analytics from past campaigns and continually optimizing our work. We reallocated budgets toward more profitable Google ad campaigns, provided recommendations and insights based on ad variations that were performing best, paused underperforming ads, and created new variations that best utilized our findings. We also ensured HUNT’s Google account health by adding and optimizing extensions and removing underperforming keywords. Establishing solid, foundational paid search tactics also allowed us to leverage automated strategies in 2019. These tactics tend to yield higher conversion rates but rely on strong campaign history, such as we had already established by the end of 2018.
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