Thirteen Homes is a social housing organisation based in Teesside, which primarily operates in the North East and North Yorkshire. When looking to reach a new audience of prospective Shared Ownership customers, Thirteen asked us to support them with a media campaign to educate and raise brand awareness.
Account Manager, Neil, sat down with us to explain what was involved in bringing the campaign together and what made it a success:
What were Thirteen looking to achieve with this campaign?
Thirteen Homes was relatively unknown in the Beverley-Hull area, so this was a two-pronged campaign. Firstly, we needed to raise awareness of the brand and what the offer was (Shared Ownership housing), to a local population that had little knowledge of who Thirteen Homes were. The subsequent aim, once that was established was to get people to enquire, and to drive sales.
How did you approach the brief?
Selling houses can be difficult, they’re not exactly an impulse buy. Added to that, we’re looking at a new entrant into quite a crowded market. We needed to maximise brand exposure in the area to educate people as to who Thirteen Homes were, before anything else. We looked at the demographics, the geography of the area and the market, and devised a plan to get the name out there.
What was involved in bringing the campaign together?
We worked with Thirteen Homes on messaging, and decided to separately inform people about who Thirteen Homes were and the process of Shared Ownership so that everything could be easily understood. We did this over a period of eight weeks leading up to, and over, Christmas on the Google network and Facebook, looking to maximise awareness and traffic.
Once this message had ran, we went with more sales and lead generation focused messaging. We distributed over 160,000 leaflets within a 20-mile radius of the developments, advertised on ad-nozzles at the most popular local filling stations, and finally booked static adverts on ITVx pause-play, (70,000 views) showing the offers to people within a 40 minute drive time whenever ITVx was paused on TV.
Finally, in February we carried out intensive Facebook lead-generation activity, driving people to download sales brochures, while capturing data about their housing preferences and contact details.
How successful was the campaign?
It exceeded our expectations in many regards. ITVx pause ads, and the response rate they got, made them a very cost-effective way of driving traffic. The latter Facebook lead generation phase led to over 120 enquiries to the sales team at Thirteen Homes. The mix of messaging and media seemed to be effective and clearly resonated with the intended audiences. Traffic to the Thirteen Homes website increased, and the bottom line (how may houses were sold attributable to the campaign) was ideal, making the campaign return on investment well worth all the effort. This wasn’t an inexpensive campaign to run, but the value of what was being sold is so high, that it’s not too difficult to see that cost as an investment rather than a simple outlay.
What did you enjoy about working on the campaign?
Working on a project that uses a range of different media and messaging and blending those so that they all work together to get results is always interesting to plan and roll-out. Obviously the enjoyment of a campaign like this can end up depending on the results. Thankfully, Thirteen Homes was really impressed with the results, and we’ve got some great data to carry forward into other projects with them, and other clients.
You can find out about more of the projects we’ve been working on, here.