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
After
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The business cards looked outdated and overly corporate, they didn’t match the values and spirit of the brand.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
Back
Signage
Before
After
Collateral
All supporting collateral and clothing were changed to align to the new brand.
2. Website
A new website was needed to support the regions and to engage the customers in an interactive and user-friendly environment.
Before
After
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.
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
After
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
Google Display Ads
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