In a cold property market, the customer mindset is a conservative mindset.
First home buyers are taking their time, we’ve seen a step up in leads whose timeframe to purchase is longer than 12 months (source: Social Garden lead profiling data, Aug ’21 – Feb ’23).
Customer behaviours change due to a level of insecurity that results in lower urgency and longer timeframes to purchase. In a hot market, a potential buyer would typically have a reduced consideration set and a sharp eye on product and price.
Often the first point of contact for a buyer is the project brand — not the parent brand. However, with fears on track record & quality, how do you raise the value credentials of the master brand throughout those initial critical interactions and provide peace of mind to your customer?
A longer timeframe to purchase means evolving information needs. Customers with higher touch points directly correlate with higher conversions.
With 12+ months in the market, customers will be using your organic offering as an additional consideration level. It’s important not to treat organic as an extension of your website, but approach it with a different, softer value exchange.
Remember that you’re creating a community today, for your customers of tomorrow.
Frasers is doing exactly this. With rich organic content, they can directly address any roadblocks or queries that anxious customers might have. When you solve the need for one, you solve the need for many, and providing a free, no-strings-attached resource will ultimately build trust.
Frasers have their eyes set on the long-term prize. By generating value today for a prospective audience, you build out a future pool of prospects which you can then harness in your paid strategy — which for Frasers provides an opportunity to change how the brand communicates through a project lens.
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Now, the task of representing a master brand across customer facing projects presents a few challenges:
1. Creating economies of scale in content production and workflow
2. Ensuring brand consistency while capturing the project’s unique identity
3. Not all projects are the same in scale or if lifecycle.
Due to the nature of the master planned community (MPC) development cycle (i.e. planning and delivery of lots in stages), each community will have a range of prospects within each stage of the purchase cycle.
During the initial prospecting phase there will be more need for vision-based community content. As people move into the purchasing phase, the focus will increase on product and price.
As buyers move into the residents phase (i.e. settlement, construction, and ultimately move-in), the content will naturally transition to community building and engagement. To add to the confusion? All of these phases can happen at once. When it comes to medium density clusters (MDC), the content requirements are inverse to the MPC curve. There is a heightened need for prospecting content initially, to build maximum hype during the pre-market phase, and in the initial sales phase in order to achieve key sales-based financial targets.
As we move into the post-purchase/construction phase, content will shift to development updates. This then ramps up again as we move into the resident phase to maximise settlements and ultimately, referrals.
In order to successfully roll out a renewed content strategy for Frasers’ six Victorian projects, we created a ‘centre of excellence’, designed specifically to solve complex business problems and align delivery to our customer’s needs.
In order to create a centre of excellence we needed to generate our thinking tank, involving key members of Social Garden, project managers and selected community managers from within Frasers. This would allow us to understand the local addressable market and nuances between audience type across the projects.
This structure ultimately ensures that we can maintain strategic orientation whilst providing personalisation and relevance with renewed efficiency.
Next, an evergreen content hub was developed, essentially a fleet of assets to control the roadmap and deliver assets at scale. Each asset can be converted to the relevant project, while still upholding key visual elements from the master brand.
Content included significant content format developments including:
– Copy & design templates that were flexible to capture unique qualities of the project
– Long-form video content to be recut into social formats, allowing use across YouTube, web, and EDM placements
– Recutting of previous assets to meet the new content standards
By adopting sprint timelines and a delivery model we were able to control the rollout regardless of what stage a project is currently at & keep sight of overarching objectives.
Additionally, the centre of excellence allows all future Frasers projects to quickly join and have significant content available in our content hub, which will help reduce future resources for this partnership — which we have already seen across the Queensland and National projects.
For a project of this scale, it’s important to continually measure and improve. Social is constantly evolving, which means the centre of excellence needs to constantly involve too.
By thoroughly reflecting on insights & performance while staying the course, we are able to maximise initial learnings and optimise towards best performance.
The benefit of owning all the projects is that we have a significant testing ground and can benchmark against one another.
Each quarter, the COE team will complete a retrospective (in addition to the monthly report) to continually improve content and performance.
Seamlessly integrating organic content and paid advertising under one agency's expertise is like having a dynamic duo working tirelessly for your brand. The synergy between authentic, value-driven organic content and strategically targeted paid ads amplifies visibility, engagement, and conversion. Learnings from both paid & organic can be applied to each offering resulting in a richer value exchange with the potential buyer. With this unified approach, your brand's story gets the spotlight it deserves, driving meaningful results while saving you time and effort. We’re still measuring the long-term benefits of how a robust organic social strategy will increase performance across paid metrics, but so far — it’s looking good. Stay tuned.
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