Highland Homes Case Study
Budget Cuts & Uncertain Times
Situation
Like all home builders faced with less sales, lower traffic and reduced margins, privately owned Central Florida home builder Highland Homes had to cut budgets in 2008. The directive to cut the marketing budget came in September/October 2008.
Highland Homes first hired mRELEVANCE in January 2008 to assist with the ongoing challenges with keeping their Web site live. The mRELEVANCE team, led by Mitch Levinson, rewrote the entire site in a different programming language, optimized the site for the search engines and was in the middle of making site updates and changes at the time of the budget cuts.
Because of this strategic partnership, Kathie McDaniel, Broker, MCSP, MIRM, Director of Advertising and Marketing for Highland Homes turned to mRELEVANCE to help evaluate and strategize with next steps. She states, “Our marketing firm, mRELEVANCE reviews of our Web site analytics monthly and a produces a tracking report that shows us the areas where our marketing spend is working and those that are less effective. This business intelligence allowed us to make informed decisions of how to adjust the budget. As we made the necessary cuts, we focused on ways to preserve Highland Homes branding, Web site traffic and traffic to our models. Our biggest cut was with print advertising – going from full-page, four color weekly placements to quarter either half page, or black and white placements.” Highland Homes kept a strong online presence with listing ads and banners in many places, including the local papers. In fact, one of the builder’s top referral sources of traffic to its website continues to be the online ads with the daily paper.
Tactics
Seeing the opportunity to maintain brand, build online reputation and enhance Highland Homes search engine marketing, mRELEVANCE launched a social media campaign. The goal was to increase keywords and referring URLs for the Highland Homes’ Web site and the social media campaign was much more focused on social media optimization than social networking.
Campaign tactics included building a blog for the builder, use of external blogs, rebuilding their Facebook page and other social networking, online public relations and social bookmarking.
The blog launched as the news section of their main Web site. It contains community news, events, information on sales and individuals within the company. Social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and ActiveRain increased exposure within those communities. Online public relations sites served to fill the SERP results with positive news. Social Bookmarking and email marketing supported the entire campaign.
Results
The highlights of the social media campaign are as follows.
• A 20% increase in keywords
• A 25% increase in referring URLs
• A 26% increase in overall web traffic
• A 53% increase in internet leads
• An 13% increase in conversion – internet leads converted to contracts
Best of all Highland Homes wrote 56 contracts in December 2008 and 69 in January 2009. (Their best month in 2008 was February, when then wrote 63 contracts. A typical month averages 35 contracts.)
Kathie McDaniel, with Highland Homes says, “Typically our traffic drops during the winter months with holidays, shopping and time off. We are pleased to say our Web site traffic has been stable and our on-site traffic has actually increased. The only changes we made were implementing a social media marketing program, while at the same time cutting our print advertising budget by 50-percent.” She continues, “As we move forward, we will continue to monitor our analytics and tracking report utilizing them for a competitive advantage as we make strategic decisions for Highland Homes’ ongoing success.”
