Backhouse Housing, Awareness Media Campaign
Working with Backhouse Housing, a boutique private developer brand to market a small development of high-end homes at the coming soon stage of the development lifecycle.
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How we helped
The brief
In December 2020, our client Backhouse Housing briefed us to explore an advertising campaign to help raise awareness, and build a database of leads ahead of the launch slated for May 2021, of a new scheme of homes they were looking to launch in Great Somerford; a beautiful rural village in Wiltshire. We were briefed on the product being a development of just 24 four and five-bedroom detached houses.
The homes were typical of the Backhouse brand, with a heavy emphasis on contemporary and thoughtful design, coupled with high specification finishes. Prices ranged from £635,000 –£850,000, with a GDV of £7.3 million.
Backhouse had undertaken their own sales and marketing research which gave us a great starting position and helped us when completing our own research into the target customer profile.
The strategy
When working on this project, we followed our agency best practice to ensure we considered and understood the location, the product, the brand and most importantly, the target customer.
First, we completed a Local Area Report and marketing persona profile. We then considered the media channels that would resonate with this target customer the most, and mapped these to our media funnel model, and created a draft media plan that confirmed insertion dates, durations and costs. Finally, we created a Return on Investment forecast to quantify value.
In terms of measurability, we agreed on CPL benchmarks with the client, which were considered relative to comparable data we had available from previous Backhouse Housing developments and campaigns.
The tactics
Given we were tasked to produce a campaign for the coming soon stage of the development lifecycle, it was important to focus on building a database for the development and ensuring we didn’t use all the budget before the site had even launched. We, therefore, recommended that for the first 3 months we would implement a digital-first strategy that used measurable, lower funnel channels to help build the database.
Working to a relatively small budget, we agreed with the client that we would deploy the core digital channels of Paid Search, Paid Social and Rightmove Core Listing for the first 8 weeks.
The execution
The targeting of our Paid Social ads and keyword selection for our Paid Search campaigns was largely led by our research into the development and target audience. Examples of this are:
- Promoting the luxury / high specification message to Malmesbury, where affluence levels are high.
- Extending the radius of the Paid Social advertising to a 10-mile radius in order to ensure good enough levels of reach and frequency (the rural nature of the location meant a 5-mile radius would not deliver enough volume).
We worked with the client to set up the Rightmove Core Listing, uploading the content and managing the listing. Our experience of working with Rightmove informed us of the need to ensure we promoted the development with both internal and external images, along with copy that promoted the rural village location and high specification finish.
What the client had to say
“The rollout of the digital media activities meant we moved from a standing start for this scheme to good levels of quality enquiries coming through that meant we were able to keep the sales program on track. The Media team were, as always, attentive to the individual needs and requirements of this scheme and went above and beyond in terms of researching what our target customer looks like, and how best to reach and communicate with them. Despite the relatively smaller budget available, the Media team worked to deliver a media plan that ticked the boxes and meant we quickly saw quality leads coming through.”
29 Leads Generated
Within the first 2 weeks of deploying the media channels, we were successful in generating 29 leads with the average cost per lead exceeding all expectations.
90% CPL Decrease
The average cost per lead achieved from the Paid Search activities was 90% less than our benchmark average!
6 Rightmove Leads
From our Rightmove Listing, we generated 6 leads in the first 5 days of the activities going live.
8 Paid Social Leads
Paid Social ads generated 8 leads in the first 5 days of the activities going live and the pace and momentum were well received by the client.