Case study: Laying the foundations for a national building company - “Too Easy!”

Smokeylemon developed a full rebrand and marketing strategy for Latitude Homes, a national building company. After just three months since the new marketing campaign started, Latitude Homes recorded the highest month of sales in its 10-year history.

latitude homes blog header

Written by Smokeylemon Team

5 April 2018 | 8 Minute(s) to read



Marc Hunter, Managing Director of Latitude Homes, approached Smokeylemon in 2017 looking for a ‘one-stop-shop’ for all his marketing needs. A brand refresh, a new website and an advertising strategy in both traditional and digital media were developed by the Smokeylemon team. Keep reading to see some great results!

The client

Latitude Homes is an award-winning building and construction company, established in 2007. Currently, they have eight franchises across the North and South islands.

Wanting to grow business in the regions but lacking a strong marketing strategy, they approached Smokeylemon to develop a holistic marketing strategy that delivered integrated and unified communications across different channels and regions in New Zealand, driving customers to a new website and their local franchise.

Since day one we knew their principal belief: “Everybody should be able to afford their own home”. We sticked to this statement to strategise, design and implement their marketing actions.

Market research

Thorough market research enabled us to identify that the perception of their position in the market was not in line with their product offerings, price point or audience.

Identifying this issue was not only crucial to developing a strategy that shifted them into a position where their audience would find them, but allowed us to develop communications that aligned with that audiences’ needs and desires.

From that point on we were better able to understand their audience, investigate their competition and spot their unique value proposition.

What we did

The strategy identified several areas for transformation:

1. Graphic design and branding

The brand needed a facelift and a new driving proposition. We organised several workshops with the Latitude Homes team to get to know and understand the brand’s attributes and personality. This led to a core document that would guide every marketing action with consistency across platforms.

Logo

Our design team suggested a full brand refresh that included refining the existing logo. Latitude Homes’ revised logo maintains the brand values shown in the compass icon but uses a new colour palette and cleaner lines that makes it look modern and uncomplicated, reflecting the needs of their target audience.

Before

Latitude Homes old logo

After

Latitude Homes New Logo

Business cards

The business cards looked outdated and overly corporate, they didn’t match the values and spirit of the brand. The redesign presents a much friendlier and approachable feel to the business.

Front

Latitude Homes new business cards

Back

Latitude Homes new business cards back

Signage


Before

Latitude Homes old signage

After

Latitude Homes new signage design

Collateral

All supporting collateral and clothing were changed to align to the new brand.

Latitude Homes new vehicle signage

Latitude Homes new collateral marketing hat

Latitude Homes new collateral marketing

2. Website

A new website was needed to support the regions and to engage the customers in an interactive and user-friendly environment.

Visit Latitude Homes website

 

Before

Latitude Homes old website

After

Latitude Homes new website design

Technical goodies

The most important aspect of the new website is its user-friendliness, not only for the front end users but also for the franchisees who can now update content and prices from an easy to use interface.

Dynamically generated brochures

When a user views a house design and selects a region, they can download a custom brochure with the house plans, price, description and contact details for that region. This feature has different benefits: avoids confusion for the potential customer as they only see relevant info for their region, the information is always correct as it pulls the information that franchisees enter on the website and, most importantly, brochures are always up to date as they are generated based on the website data when the user clicks “download”.

The site has an advanced search field, social media integration, a dynamic map that shows Latitude show homes across New Zealand, a wishlist and a set of guides for first home builders.

Visit Latitude Homes website


3. Social media

The initial scenario was an inconsistent use of social media across multiple pages, with each region managing their own Facebook pages and lacking a clear content plan.

Our strategy included merging their Facebook pages under a national page which would gather all the likes and followers from each region. Then we developed a clear content plan for all regions to follow so that they each knew when to post. Content on the Facebook page became much more coordinated.

We also developed a Facebook Advertising Campaign with static and animated ads targeting first home buyers and, by creating a catalogue feed of the plans from their website, we ran a smart remarketing campaign that presents ads with the house design that users showed interest in when they visited the website. These ads are very relevant to the viewer and perform extremely well in terms of click-through rates.

Facebook Ads
 

 

4. Traditional media

Proving our flexibility to market across multiple media platforms we undertook lengthy negotiations on behalf of the client with radio, and press media. This required annual scheduling of radio and newspaper advertising across the whole country with individual schedules for each region - it was a massive task! Smokeylemon also provided creative direction for the radio jingle and wrote the radio ads.

Now Latitude homes have a coordinated marketing campaign with region-specific information running across the country, giving them extensive brand coverage.

Before

Latitude homes old press ads

After

Latitude Homes new press ads

5. Digital advertising

Online advertising campaigns through Google AdWords were developed.

We run campaigns on the Google Search and Display networks targeting first home builders and users that showed an interest in building a house. We designed animated ads to catch the attention of users while they browse other websites, and created text ads to show at the top of Google Search results when someone searches for related keywords.

Google Search Ads

Latitude Homes search ads adwords extensions

Latitude Homes search ads adwords

Google Display Ads

 

Latitude Homes display ads Mantaray square

Latitude Homes display ads Couple square

6. Results and reports

Our result-oriented campaigns needed custom-made reports to make data easy to read. We designed a reporting system where Latitude Homes’ members can easily understand the analytics on the month’s activity of the website and all their advertising performance.

As we understand the singularities of each region, license holders also get individual reports for each franchise so they can track the performance on their region of interest and compare between franchises.

Results

Quarter 1 (Jan-Mar 2018) compared to previous quarter:

  • More than 180% increase in traffic.
  • 20,111 returning sessions.
  • 207% more page views.
  • 9,626 brochures and spec sheets downloads.
  • Brand Awareness: Ads showed more than 3 million times on digital platforms (Google Search and Display Network and Facebook Ads). Radio Ads were heard 1.7 million times and press ads had 2.4 million impressions nationwide.
  • 1,650 Facebook likes assisted by the merge of their previous Facebook pages.
  • After just three months since the new marketing campaign started, Latitude Homes recorded the highest month of sales in its 10-year history.

Testimonial

"Working with Smokeylemon was the best business decision I ever made, we have an awesome website and our brand now matches our business.  The team worked tirelessly on our behalf and nothing was a problem for you guys, I would highly recommend you to any Franchise business looking for a knowledgeable and experienced Marketing Agency". Marc Hunter, Managing Director - Latitude Homes

If your brand needs reviewing, your website needs updating, or you want to review all your marketing, we would love to help. Contact us and we can talk through how we can work together. 

Contact us today