Village Lifestyle Park in Traralgon, Victoria, was struggling to sell around 20 vacant lifestyle units in their over fifty-fives community.
Brian, the owner of village, had tried partnering with a local real estate agent to sell units and achieve his ultimate goal of being able to sell the land to property developers, but this wasn't working. It was hard to get people interested in the village through traditional marketing channels.
Brian had also engaged a number of web marketing consultants and agencies to try paid advertising, web design, and other strategies for the village, but none of these tactics had provided the results Brian was looking for.
After hearing about the results we were generating for his home builder colleague, Brian approached us to see if our digital marketing strategy could help him achieve some of the goals he had for his village.
We agreed to work with Village Lifestyle Park and immediately got to work implementing a digital & content marketing game plan. This approach included:
One big mistake we see a lot of villages make is not having enough content for potential customers who are in "research mode". Only about 3% of your potential target market is in "buy mode" at any given time, yet most businesses focus their marketing resources there. Our strategy revolves around targeting the 37% of customers who are actively researching or are about to begin research.
Image: Most villages are focusing on the 3% of the market who are buying now, while neglecting the 37% of potential customers who will be in buying mode in the near future.
Another mistake we see many villages make is only presenting potential customers with a "bottom of funnel" offer such as the option to get in touch or inspect a residence. Again, this ignores the opportunity to capture people earlier in the buying process and educate them about the benefits of your village.
For this village we created two main content offers that we'd use to generate interest earlier in the buyer journey:
Both these offers were available via specially constructed landing pages carefully designed to communicate the value of the content offer and meet the customer at the appropriate stage of the buyer journey. The job of these landing pages was to convince the person to provide just their name and email address in exchange for the content.
Once people had shown interest in our content offers and provided their email address to access them, it was time to build the relationship.
We planned and wrote a series of carefully timed automated emails that would reinforce the concepts mentioned in the content offers, and address common objections about our client's solution. For example, we addressed the concern that all lifestyle villages were expensive to live in, and that moving to a lifestyle village meant giving up one's freedom. We also wrote emails with the stories of current residents who had been in the same situation as the reader and was now living a happy, full life in the village.
We spaced the emails about 4 days apart, and if someone completed the sequence without taking any action they would go onto our "backburner" email list and still get emails periodically when we published a new blog post or if a new residence became available.
With several hundred people on the email list over time, when a new unit became available and we did a promotion, there was already an audience of eager-to-buy potential customers ready to respond.
The average person needs more than 14 "touches" with a potential vendor before having enough trust to make a purchase decision. This number increases for a large purchase like a future home. Email marketing is a very effective way to build that connection and trust when carefully and thoughtfully planned.
Now that we had all the elements in place for capturing early stage interest and nurturing these potential residents into village enquiries, it was time to send traffic to these content offers. Our hypothesis was that Facebook's wide reach and targeting options provided the most efficient way to do this.
Our approach to driving traffic from Facebook ads included targeting different demographic and geographic audience with different messages to see what resonated. For example, we positioned this particular village as an affordable option for people in the city who might want to consider an "escape to the country".
We were also careful to structure the campaigns to be mindful of the different stages of buyer awareness, and show the right offers at the right time. "Retargeting" (showing different content to people who had already interacted with our website or social profiles) played a large part in building trust and familiarity.
All this resulted in a relatively cheap cost to acquire a new email subscriber, a percentage of whom would go on to make an enquiry when they were ready, thanks to the follow up processes we had put in place.
We also helped Brian's team of village managers and agents implement a simple CRM system so they could keep track of sales leads properly once people were ready for a tour of the village. They had never dealt with this volume of enquiries before so it would have been easy for some to slip through the cracks or not be dealt with promptly. In this case we used HubSpot CRM to achieve this, and trained the village managers and local real estate agent on how to collaborate throughout the sales process using these user-friendly tools.
Within 12 months, this strategy was able to generate "sell out" results:
We help companies in construction and real estate that sell expensive products and services attract, convert, and retain more customers using smart content and inbound marketing strategies. We only work with a handful of clients around Australia so that we can give each client the attention needed for results like these. If this sounds like it could help you, apply for a free strategy session, and we'll see if we're a fit to help you.
Damien Elsing
Founder & Lead Strategist
Marinda Wilkinson
Content Strategy & Copywriting
Jamie Gemell
Google Ads & SEO
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We provide a range of inbound marketing services for both B2B and B2C companies, including:
If you'd like to see if we can help you achieve results like these, click on the button below, fill out the quick survey to determine if we can help, and if it's a good fit we'll prepare a plan of action and pricing for you.
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INCOME DISCLAIMER: The sales figures stated above are sales figures from (personal results, client results). Results are not typical. We are not implying that you will be able to duplicate these results and are using these references for example purposes only. Your results will vary and depend on many factors...including but not limited to your background, experience, and work ethic. All business entails risk as well as massive and consistent effort and action.
