Maximizing Impact on a Limited Advertising Budget

Case Study: Cayman Islands Real Estate Marketing

The real estate industry is known for its intense marketing competition, given the ever-changing inventory and high stakes for clients. In this landscape, realtors rely on market knowledge and relationships. When a firm hits the ceiling for knowledge and networking capacity, a well-executed marketing program becomes the catalyst for continued growth. This was the scenario when one of Cayman’s premier real estate firms turned to Massive Media to solidify its market dominance.

The company faced many challenges for Massive Media to overcome including:

Poor visibility in search engines
Low monthly website traffic
Zero digital lead tracking ability
Low engagement on social media platforms
Limited budget for advertising

Massive Media adopted a comprehensive approach as part of a year-long strategy to implement a rebrand while deploying SEO, Google display ads, search ads, paid and organic social, and email marketing tactics.

Key Campaign Goals

To gain 15 new leads each month, as measured by website form fills for home viewing appointments, agent requests for information, and general contact inquiries.
Increase social media engagement and reach.
Appear on the first page of Google search results.

Actual Key Objectives Achieved

An average of 66 new leads a month, quadrupling the monthly goal.
Year-on-year triple-digit increases in social media page visits and audience reach, with up to 30% increases in engagement.
Instagram saw several-fold increases in website visits, with up to 10,000 visits a month, up from only 3,000 before Massive Media’s plan.

Social Media:

We first completed an audit of social channels and determined that the company needed to put more paid spend behind its ads and move away from repetitive posts that only showcased one topic: new home listings. The company was posting on its social feeds at least once a day, if not more, with a new listing or a repeat of a listing. The result was a lot of effort for little to no return in terms of leads or engagement.

The approach we took was to create themed buckets of topics and to feature unique features about the homes in a storytelling manner. The themes included:

Candid shots of the realtor teams in action.
Collections of homes with similar features, such as beach-front homes, condos, canal-front homes, and investment properties.
Aspirational style mansions and luxury residencies.
Lifestyle shots of people enjoying island life.
Neighborhood-specific shots.

This, combined with adding small amounts of spend to the posts, as little as $10-$50 per post, resulted in us posting 30% less content but gaining a 50% increase in engagement (likes, comments, shares, reactions); 272% increase in year-over-year visits to their Facebook page; and a 341% increase in the number of people who saw the content on social. Instagram saw similar results. Additionally, an average of 10 leads a month was provided by social channels.

Display and Search Ads:

For display and search ads, we focused on several key cities that were the most familiar with the Cayman Islands. These persons were already interested in purchasing property in Cayman or visiting. This allowed us to keep the spend low and to capture the most intent-driven leads. These ads used keywords and images/messaging split out for various audiences, including those looking to sell a home; and those looking to purchase; condos; and land.

For retargeting display ads, these followed up with specific messages for those who already visited the website to push them to contact an agent by featuring imagery with the robust agent team. We took this approach as enlisting an agent is the best way to find a home so they can curate a list of homes for the buyer. Contacting an agent is also the next step in the buyer journey for home buyers. With retargeting ads, these were segmented to those browsing homes over $500,000 vs. homes of lesser value.

Email Marketing:

The client’s best asset (other than its staff!) was its already established email list, which they wanted to grow and keep engaged. They already had above-average open rates at 21% and click-through rates at 3.4%. We brought the average open rates to over 30% and click-through rates to over 7%. To put this into perspective, real estate industry averages are 19-20% open rates and 2-3% click-through rates. We accomplished this by reducing the number of new listing announcement emails sent each month and by creating multiple forms of themed content. Home topics featured in newsletters were arranged by locations, value, reduced pricing, and views, for example, and included client testimonials, agent features, and informative blog posts created to educate the buyer. The blog post themes were mapped by the seller/buyer motivations, such as a first-time buyer, overseas buyer, or investor, with topics such as legal/tax benefits considerations; relocation and shipping; immigration and financing.

SEO:

With a newly launched website, the client was not showing up on the first page of Google search results when potential buyers searched for the company’s name directly or for general real estate terms. This means that people were likely to click on a competitor’s website instead. The first step to fix this was to ensure that the site was being indexed properly in Google, which means that Google sees it and knows to pull it up. After that, there are several technical backend items to address on the website that we fixed prior to focusing on keyword selections, updating basic on-page optimizations and finally building out further blog content. The changes resulted in the company appearing within the top listings on the first page of Google, with organic search accounting for a majority percentage of website visitors and a significant lead source, as measured by Google Analytics.

This case study illustrates how strategic marketing, even with a limited budget, can yield remarkable results, positioning the real estate firm as a dominant force in the competitive Cayman market.