Qualified Leads Increase by 747% for Harvard Real Estate with Facebook Ads

An amazing team that is efficient and on time. Thank you for all your efforts. I appreciate you all.

-Jamaal Nelson, Chairman, The Harvard Real Estate

Overview:

The Harvard Real Estate has been in the US real estate market for a long time now. Simple and fast along with transparency and trustworthiness is their motto.

Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, The Harvard Real Estate is founded by J.K. Nelson, a popular name in the USA.

Business Challenge:

The Harvard Real Estate has been selling Americans their dream house for many years. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic they suffered colossal losses and needed to improvise their offerings in order to stay relevant in the real estate industry.

During their research, they found that Americans were interested in either selling their current properties or wanted to buy a property at a lower market price.

Pivoting according to the need of the hour demands of the customer, The Harvard Real Estate decided to reinvent their offering. Instead of simply selling properties, they decided to purchase properties from Americans at their respective current market prices. Once they acquired these properties, they would refurbish or even reconstruct (if necessary) it according to their modern persona of a dream house. This would increase the valuation of the house. Then they could sell it to their audience, who are looking to purchase properties at a lower market price. Creating a win-win situation for all their stakeholders.

In order to execute this strategy, they again needed to think outside the box as they have always sold properties but never acquired them. Their old traditional marketing tactics were expensive and restrictive (due to COVID-19). This is when they started to look for ideas beyond their current team and started looking for a performance driven digital marketing agency to execute this new offering.

Objective:

Generate qualified leads (people that want to sell their real estate) for The Harvard Real Estate in USA.

Strategy:

The major problem that was identified in this elaborated plan was to find real estate owners that were willing to sell their properties to us.

We decided to go with the push approach (showcasing our offering to the audience rather than allowing them to come to us) and hence, decided to run our ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

After doing a thorough market analysis and based on the Harvard’s historic data from their previous campaigns, we narrowed our market down with potential customers.

Once our target audience was set, we followed basic Facebook guidelines of setting up the pixels and conversions, tested them for effectiveness and we were good to go!

In order to generate leads in an effective way, we needed to create a landing page for the ad campaign to get good Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). We couldn’t simply use a page from the current website as our landing page because a visitor coming through an ad expects to see the same offerings (as ads) with a CTA (Call-To-Action) on the landing page. Hence, we had to create a landing page to give us the best conversion rate for our ads.

One of the major components while running Facebook & Instagram campaigns is ad creatives and ad copies. Optimizing ad creatives and copies according to your target audience and Facebook’s guidelines requires a lot of research and is a time-consuming task. And most people still don’t get them right as they look at the business, product or offering with their view and not from how a customer would perceive it. Therefore, we believe in A/B testing ad creatives and copies.

For The Harvard Real Estate’s sell property campaign, we split our ad creatives in a 7:2 ratio (7 images & 2 videos) and 3:2 ratio (3 long form copies & 2 short form copies) for our ad copies with 5 Headlines, and 4 CTA (Call-To-Action) buttons.

Perfect recipe to A/B test all our variables! This will help in bidding according to target audience’s reaction of each variable.

Results:

At the time of writing this case study, we have run this campaign for The Harvard Real Estate for eight months and are still running them. We had a few bumps in the road but we managed to generate qualified leads consistently which delighted the client and they could implement their strategy effectively as we efficiently managed this campaign for them.

Here are a few stats to highlight our contribution:

1. We managed to generate 430 qualified leads via our ad campaign

2. Due to ad relevancy and landing page design and implementation, we have a whopping Conversion Rate of 31.25%

3. CTR (Click Through Rate) from our ads are at 41%

4. More than 5K people were reached from our target audience

5. We optimized the ads to gain an average Cost Per Conversion at $26.15 despite having a high average CPC of $8.17. This is an amazing cost per conversion as it means that we generated 1 qualified lead from 3.26 clicks for 8 months.

This is also the time when we became Google’s Advertising Partners, which is a huge accomplishment for a boutique agency like ours.