Connect the Dots to More Seller Leads
Utilizing Technology and Data to Optimize Marketing Performance
by Robert Rakowski
Lead generation and financing are likely the two most challenging aspects of real estate investing. HomeVestors®, the We Buy Ugly Houses® people, is America’s #1 Homebuyer and generates more motivated seller leads than any competitor in the discount homebuying business.
Enter Charlie Calise and Imaginuity
Charlie Calise is the Chairman of Imaginuity, an integrated marketing agency located in Dallas, Texas. For over ten years, Calise has handled the marketing and advertising efforts for HomeVestors of America and the famed We Buy Ugly Houses brand.
Charlie Calise
Imaginuity provides integrated marketing services throughout the entire seller journey, including brand experience, advertising, traditional and digital media buying, paid and organic search, social media, web development, UX, data analytics and database marketing services.
The Homeowner’s Journey to Sell Is Not Siloed, Neither Is HomeVestors Approach
Most companies take a siloed approach to marketing. For example, there may be one team (or agency) executing direct mail or television campaigns and another executing paid search or online display advertising. Additionally, there could be different agencies working for individual franchisees, companies, or regional groups. In some instances, these teams or agencies do not always communicate well together which can create a great deal of friction, inefficiency, and poor cross-organizational sharing and learning.
The Imaginuity approach for HomeVestors is to bring everyone together under one agency, all armed with data insights from a customer data platform like AdScience®. According to Calise, “When one integrated team—subject matter experts, media planners, direct mail specialists, broadcast buyers, SEM experts, data analysts and web developers—has shared, real-time access to information about what is working to generate seller leads, and what is not, they are able to make more meaningful cross-departmental connections and collaborate better. New ideas can flourish, and campaigns can be efficiently optimized, resulting in more, highly motivated seller leads.”
The Secret Sauce—AdScience® Customer Data Platform
Imaginuity manages almost two billion rows of first, second and third party data to make smarter marketing decisions for HomeVestors. AdScience®, Imaginuity’s proprietary Customer Data Platform, is leveraged with two goals in mind: to measurably improve the quality and quantity of motivated seller leads and provide an unprecedented level of transparency into all the client’s traditional and digital media performance.
“With this platform we help generate almost 100,00 leads per year for HomeVestors, and AdScience® aggregates an incredible amount of data to provide seller insights into every one of those leads. HomeVestors’ powerful CRM system, powered by Salesforce, along with the AdScience customer data platform, makes HomeVestors the most sophisticated home-buying lead generation system in the industry,” said Calise. Additionally, “It is no wonder that the independent HomeVestors® business owners are widely recognized as the most successful home buyers in the industry.” According to David Hicks, CEO of HomeVestors, “We remain the #1 homebuyer in America to this day. We have purchased more than 100,000 houses, which is why we say we have been leading the industry since the day we began franchising in 1996.”
AdScience® collects an abundance of data, including offline and online media performance, and demographic, behavioral, customer journey and transactional data, to provide timely, intelligent visualizations and actionable reporting for Imaginuity, ultimately making it easier to measure what is most important to converting more sellers. This also allows HomeVestors to extract the highest value out of every marketing and advertising dollar spent.
AdScience® connects marketing data with customer data to effectively activate custom audiences across multiple media channels. This approach allows Imaginuity to optimize marketing campaigns toward audiences that are most likely to sell their house.
“Utilizing data from such sources as the USPS, First American, Google, Facebook, The Trade Desk, Experian, Nielsen, and CoreLogic, we look at almost three-billion rows of data to understand who has previously sold houses to HomeVestors and how to get new sellers who look just like them,” explained Calise. “These look-alikes have a higher likelihood of doing business with them.”
There are hundreds of offline and online media channels available to reach customers. They can be reached in home through direct mail, traditional broadcast television or streaming through OTT (over the top) platforms such as Netflix or HULU, or on the go through out-of-home media and SMS text campaigns delivered to smartphones or watches.
To manage today’s marketing complexity, companies must look for ways to connect the dots of multiple customer touchpoints along the path to sell. This approach allows for the delivery of the right message to the right customer at the right time on the right channel, all the way down to their device of choice.
Refine your Media Mix
Take a smarter approach to attribution.
While many customers may appear to convert online (for example, scheduling an appointment on a website), their journey may begin offline where they were first reached by traditional media such as direct mail or television. The most effective marketing approach today is to track a seller’s behavior as they pinball between multiple offline and online media touchpoints, across different devices, on their journey from awareness to conversion. Understanding these conversions, or attribution paths, and which media types play nicely together can help you get the most out of every media dollar spent.
Connect Organic and Paid Search to Take You Higher
Today when customers are looking to sell, they often use search engines to find what they are looking for. In fact, over 90% of all web traffic comes from search engines, and 75% of Internet users do not look beyond the first page of search results before clicking. In addition, 46% of all Google searches are linked to something local. So, ranking highly in paid and organic search engine results is a top priority. This can be accomplished through an ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) program. However, this may not be all you need. To get the best results from search, your SEO program should be tightly integrated with paid search (PPC). Home sellers rely heavily on search engines to find what they are looking for and they search differently on their phone versus their desktop computer. The fact that Google changes its search algorithm (which determines placement in search rankings) almost daily makes managing search a daunting task.
Get with the Program(matic)
A relatively new way to advertise online is through programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising is the process of automating the buying and selling of online ad inventory in real-time through an automated bidding system. Despite its promise, it is often difficult to measure the effectiveness of programmatic online advertising because performance metrics are generally measured by impressions—a relatively meaningless KPI (key performance indicator).
One of the benefits of AdScience® is that it ingests data directly from the programmatic Trade Desk and gets performance analytics directly from the programmatic ad server. This yields insight into more actionable campaign measurement metrics such as video completion rates. The most efficient conversion paths can also be identified, for example, whether a customer viewed a programmatic display or a paid social ad but converted through a search ad or viewed a programmatic display ad and then converted directly on a website.
Programmatic technology ingested by AdScience® can also be used for new customer look-alike prospecting. This is done through machine learning and online mining for audiences that look like customers who have already taken a desired action. A programmatic approach is also an effective way to achieve competitive conquest for new customers by serving incentive-based online ads to your competitor’s customers.
HomeVestors®– More Than Just Data
While most people will recognize the HomeVestors “mascot” UG Lee, the caveman who was featured prominently in much of the company’s advertising to distressed homeowners, few realize the We Buy Ugly Houses® company is a national company made up of local, independently owned and operated franchises supported by some of the most powerful (and proprietary) marketing and data platforms available to real estate investors.
“Our franchises have the support, technology, training, and experience of a nationwide company, but they live, work and invest in their local communities. Institutional investors, i.e., Wall Street, simply cannot compete at that level,” said Hicks. “Our franchisees live in the communities in which they invest. They know the real estate community. They have local contractors they know and trust. Best of all, they have an entire team of other local franchises supporting them strategically and logistically throughout their entire rehab or wholesale process,” said David Hicks.
For more information on Imaginuity, go to imaginuity.com.
For more information on HomeVestors Franchise Sales, go to gethvadeals.com
