Background
Top 100 home builder, True Homes, came to us to help identify and optimize their digital marketing investments. With a significant amount of their home builder marketing budget allocated to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising through Adwords, we needed to establish KPI’s and benchmarks to better understand the performance of this medium in different markets throughout the east coast where they build.
The Challenge
With the majority of their media investment dedicated to digital, True was sending nearly all inbound traffic to product pages on their website, which was converting around 1% of unique visitors to leads (near-average for the industry). Since most PPC traffic consists of first-time visitors unfamiliar with the brand, they’re not ready to “Contact Us” to inquire about a specific home. These new prospects were still at the top of the funnel and searching for reasons why they could trust True Homes to be their builder.
Solution
Understanding the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of True Homes was critical to creating value for the visitors and building the trust needed to draw them deeper into the sales funnel. True is able to go head-to-head with resale homes on price and value. They built the True Homes Challenge around this proposition, where they challenge prospects to find a better home for the money. We built a landing page campaign around the challenge and directed all PPC traffic to the page, encouraging them to register to take the challenge.
Sales team members would then follow up to show how True compares with the competition.
PPC strategy continues to deliver high ROI: over 4,500 leads in 20 months, maintaining a 10.5% conversion rate.
Value-driven landing page strategy
By identifying the needs of the buyer and understanding what phase of the buying cycle they’re in, we were able to align the goal of the builder (generate leads) with the goal of the buyer (find a builder that offers the best value) on the very first visit. The True Homes Challenge campaign ran for 22 days, generating 2,046 visitors and 217 leads (10.6% conversion rate). This value-driven landing page strategy delivered such a high ROI that it has been extended to all markets in which True Homes builds, delivering over 4,500 leads in 20 months. They considered these great results from our marketing services.
Campaign Results (22 days):
- True Homes Challenge Campaign generated 217 leads in 22 days
- Overall campaign landing page visitor-to-lead conversion rate: 10.6%
- 863% improvement in conversion rate vs. standard web site (1.1%)
Post-campaign Results (20 months):
- PPC landing pages generated 4,500 leads in 20 months (7.5 leads per day)
- Overall landing page visitor-to-lead conversion rate for PPC traffic: 10.5%
- Average cost-per-lead for PPC investment decreased by 96%