For a leading third-party manufacturer, rising above the competition began with a new marketing campaign.
The Situation
Argon Medical Devices came to Schaefer with a need to create awareness for its brand and various product lines. Its key objectives included elevating awareness of Argon Custom Product Solutions (CPS), a division that offers private label and third-party manufacturing capabilities to clients.
Goals
Increase awareness of the Argon corporate brand and Argon CPS brand
Educate and engage a global Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) audience
Generate qualified leads at the top of the funnel to handoff to the sales team
Build loyalty and differentiation with precise, customer-centric messaging
Strategy
Argon CPS faced two crucial challenges: First, its awareness in this crowded market was low. Second, in a sector that is heavily driven by price, Argon CPS needed to position itself as a premium brand that brought greater value to customers through an unmatched mix of expertise and capabilities.
Solution
Schaefer developed a strategic campaign that differentiated Argon CPS by promoting its superior level of service, quality, and customization. The new tagline “Build It Better” laddered up to and tied-into the existing Argon corporate brand messaging.
Core messages highlighted attributes such as design and testing capabilities, US-based manufacturing facilities, and Argon’s ability to collaborate with client product development teams. Campaign graphics used upscale visual patterns to underscore the client’s endless customization capabilities and showcase specific product categories.
We then deployed a media strategy for email, social media, digital and online industry publications that carefully homed-in on a global audience of manufacturers and decision makers. Careful audience targeting ensured minimal waste — and maximum results.
Results
Our digital and email tactics carefully targeted recipients by geography and title, allowing us to track campaign results with a high degree of accuracy that:
Generated more than 36K website sessions from 31K+ new users
Achieved 3.3 million targeted impressions in less than one year
Achieved a 6% Paid Search click-through rate, 1.8x the industry benchmark
Launched 463K emails, opened by 20% of recipients
Tracked clicked-through rates of prime prospects, including Marketplace Optimization (MPO) click-through rates of .86%
Summary
Differentiation is always important – especially in categories driven by price or viewed as commodities. By elevating Argon CPS above the industry norm, we strengthened its appeal to higher-end device manufacturers who value quality, service and collaboration.
The Charles Schwab Challenge is one of the longest-running PGA TOUR invitational tournaments. The highly-anticipated event brings together top golfers from around the world to compete at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas. The historic course and club has hosted the event every Memorial Day Weekend since 1946, making the Charles Schwab Challenge one of the premier events on the PGA TOUR year after year.
Rising to the challenge
Coming off a global pandemic, 2022 was a year of transition for the Charles Schwab Challenge. People were still embracing intimate gatherings and with the tournament being played without fans one year and with limited attendance the next, the tradition of attending the Charles Schwab Challenge wasn’t top of mind for many fans. Additionally, 2022 ushered in a new pricing model for the tournament and increased revenue goals that required a shifted approach to marketing from awareness-based to conversion-focused.
An integrated campaign that drives conversion
Before partnering with Schaefer, the tournament utilized more traditional mediums to promote the event to a general North Texas audience. But as we prepared for the 2022 tournament, Schaefer recommended a more granular approach to targeting individual ticket buyers by splitting the audience to focus on two primary markets — avid golfers and social attendees. The goal was to create a more integrated campaign that not only got people excited about the tournament, but spoke directly to each audience’s particular area of interest wherever and whenever their needs arise. By leveraging a more individualized approach to messaging and targeting across tactics such as paid search, retargeting, geofencing, and paid social, we were able to capitalize on the buying period leading up to the event and increase opportunities for conversion.
Creative that can adapt to audience needs
If we had to achieve one thing to make this campaign successful, it was adaptability. A robust media strategy meant the creative needed to scale across a wide variety of mediums, from high-level awareness spaces like streaming TV to high-intent micro moments in the customer journey. That meant keeping design elements functional. So we opted for an abstract reference to course topography. The organic shapes allowed us to create compelling composites that featured the most important textures of the experience — environment, competition, and up-close views of the PGA TOUR’s best players.
Since we were targeting two audience sets, it was important that the messaging be specific yet modular. The line, Texas’ Best, extended across both target audiences while communicating the notoriety and pride North Texans have for the Colonial tournament. It also worked well with new player announcements.
The tournament field greatly impacts ticket sales. Top-ranked players and fan favorites draw big crowds, but player commitments can finalize weeks and sometimes days before the tournament. To improve performance, we build every concept to accommodate on-demand optimizations and leveraged that flexibility to announce new player commitments, some finalizing in the eleventh hour of the campaign. In the final weeks leading up to the event, we saw a big uptick in action, selling 80% of tickets in the last 30 days.
Results
Moving the tournament from more traditional mediums to a digital-first, multi-audience campaign allowed us to reach people at every touch point – connecting the dots across channels to guide consumers from I-want-to-go to I-want-to-buy. Overall, our campaign strategy outperformed industry paid media standards in Sports and Recreation to produce nearly 14K in daily ticket sales and $1.2M in revenue.
A few top channel results include:
Paid Search: 16% CTR, 31% CVR and $3.72 cost-per-conversion Industry Average: 8.8% CTR, 5.9% CVR and $31.50 cost-per-conversion
Email: 39% open rate out of 575K+ emails delivered to a qualified audience Industry Average: 20.5% open rate
Display: 0.11% CTR on location-relevant geofencing campaign Industry Average: 0.08% CTR
In Spring 2021, the Fort Worth Zoo was ramping up to unveil their new habitat, Elephant Springs. The habitat, which is home to the Zoo’s Asian elephant herd and a greater one-horned rhino, is part of the Zoo’s Wilder Visioninitiative. With opening day on the horizon, the Zoo needed a way to generate excitement and communicate the truly immersive experience to new and returning Zoo goers. After all, Elephant Springs is more than a habitat. It’s a destination worth visiting.
Opportunity
After more than a year at home, people were ready to look forward to something big. And the grand opening of Elephant Springs was the perfect way to delight and excite animal lovers everywhere. Featuring wildlife and environmental details unique to the natural habitat that inspired it, we wanted to highlight this much-awaited encounter as more of an adventure than an exhibit.
Goals
Increase awareness and excitement for the opening of Elephant Springs
Boost ticket sales from both new and returning customers
Develop a campaign that extends beyond opening day
Approach
Some of the best things in life aren’t things at all. They’re places. Filled with the sights, sounds and even splashes that make a place unique. Drawing inspiration from Elephant Springs’ authentic environment and immersive nature, we decided to focus the campaign around capturing the playful and engaging way both people and wildlife experience the habitat.
The only problem? We had to imagine it. To ensure the campaign was ready in time to promote the exhibit as soon as it opened to the public, we had to envision the experience based on renderings and small-scale models. The habitat has no shortage of water features — large pools and waterfalls designed to create new opportunities for animal enrichment and soakers that allow guests to interact with the herd directly. Alongside the Asian elephants that now call this habitat home, we decided to make water a main character in our campaign.
Creative
Working with wildlife is tough. Patience, flexibility and creativity are essential to capturing key frames and moments that can be utilized in the campaign. We partnered with zookeepers to create fun enrichment opportunities that allowed us to photograph organic moments of the elephants getting acclimated and enjoying their new yard. In the end, we were able to provide the Fort Worth Zoo with a full stack of assets that could be used for years to come.
To build excitement for the new exhibit, we created a delightful soundtrack made entirely of the splashes and features of Elephant Springs, composing a soundscape as adventurous as the environment.
Results
Opening a new exhibit attracts people from all over the state and beyond. To help meet the Zoo’s annual goals, we created a robust omnichannel campaign inclusive of traditional and digital media, including streaming audio, video and TV. Seeing an opportunity to expand awareness, we partnered with Visit Fort Worth to co-brand ads in Texas Monthly and on billboards across Texas. Additionally, we targeted travelers throughout DFW and Love Field. Because this was an awareness campaign, our success was measured in tickets sold (attendance), impressions served and reach across the state.
200% increase in website sessions
242% increase in new users on the Elephant Springs webpage
5.6 million website pageviews
1 million website sessions
681.3k new users on the website (16% increase in sessions and 22% increase in new users)
600K general admission tickets purchased and over 23k memberships/renewals sold during the campaign run (April – July)
The Fort Worth Zoo met their annual attendance goal in three months early
16% increase in organic search and direct channel traffic to the website
Mobility and innovation districts are places where pioneers make critical advancements in logistics and supply chain modernization. It’s also a place where technology breakthroughs are developed that can affect billions of people. They are critical to advancing how consumer and commercial operations move forward to improve lives everywhere. The challenge with innovation districts is communicating a tangible concept that resonates with valuable audiences and encourages entrepreneurs, scientists and business leaders to utilize the district’s capability.
We partnered with the AllianceTexas Mobility Innovation Zone to create a flexible identity package that communicates all the intangible benefits this testing ecosystem can provide mobility visionaries and their teams.
Making Intangible Value Tangible
We partnered with the MIZ team and entered into extensive discovery sessions to better understand where MIZ stands in the market and how we can highlight their value proposition and boost awareness of the one-of-a-kind opportunity that the MIZ offers mobility innovators. In marketing the MIZ, our first charge was to articulate the opportunity that the MIZ offers to technology innovators by creating a vision for something that did not yet exist.
Through this discovery the Schaefer team identified that the AllianceTexas MIZ was a genuinely unique blend of people, places and things, structured in a manner unlike any other innovation zones. We leveraged this differentiation into a defining position and archetype to inform the subsequent brand identity and campaign creative development. This allowed us to tangibly define the value that the MIZ brings to entrepreneurs and innovators that elect to use their district and capabilities. Ultimately, this helps the MIZ advocate for new businesses and create long term partnerships with innovative companies that bring jobs to North Texas and innovation to the mobility industry.
Messaging Full-Scale Innovation
We crafted “Innovation from the Ground Up” as a key message to clearly position the opportunity of the innovation zone. It nods to the full-scale capabilities of the MIZ and communicates it as a place where mobility innovators can push the boundaries of now to discover what’s next and do it all—ideation to implementation—at the MIZ.
Deploying a Detailed Digital Activation
We launched the updated identity with the “Innovation from the Ground Up” campaign, which introduced the MIZ as the premier, pioneering testing, scaling and commercialization ecosystem. The campaign solved three key communications requirements: promoting the MIZ brand, communicating the surface capabilities, and promoting the airspace utility. This reflects the total MIZ ecosystem and communicates it as a flexible, utilitarian space that is open for business across the mobility industry.
We developed a multichannel digital marketing plan to launch the “Innovation from the Ground Up” campaign, utilizing paid media, native and sponsored content, email drip campaign and display banners. For paid ad placements, we strategically chose publications that resonated with our target audiences in the logistics, aviation and entrepreneurship industries. The campaign also engaged prospects directly through a targeted email campaign, which encouraged website form fills to contact the MIZ to use their testing ecosystem. Ultimately, the digital strategy is successfully creating extensive brand awareness and driving both engagement and conversions from high value prospects which has yielded new business partnerships for the MIZ.
Early Results:
300% increase in form fills MoM since beginning of campaign
82% increase in Contact Us form fills
Display impressions increased nearly 200% MoM resulting in 141% more clicks
Golf is a timeless sport that brings people together to enjoy camaraderie and pristine, cultivated greens. But, what happens when you add luxury travel and experiences into a premium golf membership? You get Icon Golf – an esteemed golf and travel membership that takes players around the world. Icon needed to revamp their brand to generate more memberships, so they partnered with the Schaefer team to refocus their sales efforts with a full-scale, multichannel digital campaign and a new website.
In 2020, Icon invested in increasing their sales from 250 memberships to 1000. So, they partnered with Schaefer to revamp their brand, generate more memberships, and focus their sales efforts with a full-scale, multichannel digital campaign and a new website to meet their very aggressive goal.
Goals
Grow Icon Golf membership database from 250 to 1,000 in 18 months.
Refresh the brand identity
Develop a content marketing strategy
Build a CRM to streamline lead generation and membership management
Improve online user experience
Prioritize sales efforts
Roles
Strategy
Creative
Digital
Branding
Positioning
Client Services
Partnering to Develop a Structured, Integrated Sales Process
We began our relationship with Icon Golf on the ground level as they were initiating the formal development of a structured sales team. This allowed Schaefer to partner directly with the Icon team to merge sales and marketing efforts. Icon’s previous marketing efforts were primarily functioning by word-of-mouth and leveraging connections with existing club members within their portfolio. While this approach was successful, there was an opportunity to expand their sales efforts through digital automation to reach a wider audience.
We started by evaluating each medium against our overall goals and the need to fill the funnel with awareness initiatives and convert interested prospects into members. We found that paid search and streaming audio and video proved successful for building awareness, and third party publication emails allowed us to hit a very targeted audience that was ready to convert.
A Refreshed Creative Platform
We recognized an opportunity to reinvigorate their creative platform to better communicate the unique benefits that an Icon membership provides. Icon Golf offers members full privileges with an expertly curated collection of private golf clubs as well as luxurious member experiences and fully planned quests to exotic locales. So, Icon Golf is much more than a golf membership – it’s a full-package of golf and travel – and communicating that was the central challenge of updating their creative.
When creating the updated creative platform, we focused on the luxury aesthetic and benefits of an Icon Golf membership. We wanted the design and language to reflect the elevated perks and nature of the membership, all while highlighting the relationship-focused aspect of joining Icon Golf. The camaraderie between Icon members is a key strategic imperative, so we had to make that central in the updated creative deck.
We created the concept “Legendary is Within Reach” as our primary branded language alluding to the potential for legendary moments with legendary people, on and off the course.
A New, Optimized Website
The central piece of Icon’s rebrand was optimizing their website to generate more qualified leads. Previous to our relationship,the Icon Golf website was split into two different URLs – Icon.Golf and IconGolf.com to satisfy internal marketing objectives. However, this split up their traffic and made consolidating valuable lead information more difficult. So, we combined their properties into one streamlined website. To increase the site’s performance, we implemented key SEO and content updates targeted at their primary audiences.
Our team also redeveloped the site with crucial user experience updates to improve site accessibility and usability aimed at generating form fills from qualified leads. To improve usability, we simply added header and footer navigations to improve the overall user experience. In addition, we employed site tagging to capture key user behavior metrics in order to continue to drive future data-driven site optimization opportunities. Finally, we placed CTAs throughout prominent areas of the website so that users could always and easily make direct contact with the reps at Icon Golf. The final result is a website that supports Icon’s strategic marketing goals by generating more engagement and qualified leads.
Creating a Centralized Lead Strategy
To continue to round out the lead generation strategy, we implemented a CRM strategy to accurately target lists of valuable, interested leads with compelling emails. We connected key data sources – the Icon website, MailChimp, and Salesforce as well as other lead collection points to ensure that our data automatically fed into the sales process and reduced the work the sales team needed to do to generate more memberships.
We created a variety of emails around the central message “Legendary is Within Reach” that ultimately guided leads to complete a form fill and capture valuable data for converting more leads.
To round out the digital strategy for Icon, we created a multi-channel paid media strategy that targeted valuable audiences in paid search, paid social media, display banners and email. In addition, we cultivated strategic partnerships with golf publications and outlets to secure high-value placements in front of the most highly qualified audience.
Results
In 2021, Icon Golf had their best year ever, setting a record month for membership sales in December.
Reached 85% of their new membership goal in under 9 months
Last Click Attribution:
31 new memberships driven directly by campaign paid media
$450k in revenue
Total annual revenue surpassed 1.7 Million, resulting in a strong ROAS of 7:1
In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Fort Worth Zoo needed a way to sell holiday adoptions and memberships. More than that, they needed a campaign that cut through the clutter of holiday advertisements to connect with consumers and convince them that a Zoo membership is the perfect gift for anyone who enjoys a unique and rewarding experience.
Goals
Promote Zoo memberships and holiday adoption packages
Communicate the new delayed activation component of Zoo membership
Boost membership sales by defining the target audience and tailoring messaging to that base
Recapture some of the membership sales lost due to the Covid-19 pandemic
Help the Zoo sell 200 adoptions and boost membership revenue
Identifying the Right Audience
Before launching the campaign, we needed to identify and target the right audiences that were likely to purchase a holiday membership or a holiday adoption package. Before determining audience demographics we isolated Tarrant County as the primary market in which membership conversions would be most attainable
It was a challenge to promote both adoptions and memberships in one campaign, since the target markets aren’t the same. So, we had to carefully design our target audience to maximize exposure and conversion.
To define our audience sets, we identified parents with young children as a primary marketing target, and general audiences as a secondary target likely to buy holiday adoptions. We also incorporated strategic site retargeting to market to users that have visited the Fort Worth Zoo’s website, and targeted additional users searching for terms related to the Zoo and holiday gift ideas. We excluded current Zoo members from all marketing.
Refining a Compelling Message
For the first time ever, the Zoo offered memberships that allow delayed activation for up to nine months, which allows consumers to select when they begin their membership. This was done to help quell fears about the coronavirus pandemic and give Zoo members a chance to begin their membership when they feel safer. We created campaign messaging that reflected the new membership activation and featured it prominently across digital banners and paid social ads. The central campaign line of “Give now, enjoy later” communicates the spirit of giving a gift for the holidays, and indicates that it can be enjoyed at the recipients’ leisure. We featured the additional line of “choose when your membership begins” prominently across mediums to further communicate that a Zoo membership can begin whenever the member is comfortable.
Results
100
of Holiday packages Sold
180000
Profit Generated
318
Return On Investment
41
Total Revenue Increase (December 2019 vs 2020)
Thriving Under Challenging Circumstances
The Covid-19 pandemic has illustrated the need for brands to think outside the box and find new ways to make their products, services or experiences accessible and safe for consumers. For the Fort Worth Zoo, that meant creating a new delayed activation membership and connecting with people that are ready to experience the Zoo under different circumstances.
Boo at the Zoo has long been the unmissable Halloween experience for many families in Fort Worth. Since 2011, Schaefer has been tasked with keeping Boo at the Zoo top-of-mind for old fans and the next generation of families looking to establish a Halloween tradition.
Working on Boo at the Zoo is a rewarding creative problem for our team to solve each year, and it illustrates the variety and volume of strategy and thought that goes into marketing an event year after year – and staying relevant and top-of-mind in the local market.
Boo at the Zoo is a big deal in Fort Worth. It gives children a chance to celebrate Halloween alongside some of their favorite wildlife animals. This well-loved local tradition has cemented itself as one of the best family-friendly events in North Texas, and it’s our job to not just create awareness but inspire action and encourage the decision-makers in the family to purchase tickets before they sell out.
We’ve had the opportunity to work on this campaign since 2010. Each year we face the unique challenge of reinventing and refreshing the event to excite the attention and interest of children and parents in North Texas. The creative hurdle remains the same each year, but this year, the global pandemic created an entirely new set of logistic and messaging challenges.
This challenge requires us to the table each year with a set of new ideas that each communicates the value and excitement that this event provides for families across North Texas.
For 2020, the Zoo decided to alter the usual format from on-foot trick-or-treating to a drive-through event that ensured safer social distancing measures were addressed. Covid-19 health protocols presented another ripple in planning the creative assets and messaging that we pitched to the client. During the pandemic, normal protocols are out the window, and we had to illustrate that this year’s Boo at the Zoo was going to take place in the family car rather than on foot. It was imperative that we clearly communicated that this event still packed the same fun-filled adventure of years past, while offering a safe way to enjoy Halloween during the pandemic.
Boo at the Zoo is a rite of passage for many young Fort Worth families, and we’re so proud to work with the Zoo and play a part in this enchanting local tradition.
A season of ballet programming is made up of a series of performances, each standing alone as a unique story being told on the stage. How, then, do you create a campaign that communicates these different stories under one cohesive message? That was the obstacle we faced when ideating creative assets for the Texas Ballet Theater’s 2019-2020 season campaign, and here’s how we solved it.
Campaign Goals
Tell the individual story of each performance, while also fitting the unique designs into one cohesive, identifiable campaign.
Conceptualize ideas that work in photography to incorporate the dancers as crucial campaign assets.
Illustrate the ballet’s marriage of art and athleticism.
Attract a wider audience and convince them to become season subscribers.
The Challenge
Branding an entire season of ballet was a huge puzzle for us because each performance has its own story to tell, full of imagery and icons that are significant within the individual narrative but may not translate into one clear campaign. Plus, it was crucial for the dancers to be featured in each advertisement, so finding a way to marry all of those elements into a unified campaign was crucial.
We needed to create a full season campaign that is cohesive, blends together as a collective vision and message, but that also has enough individuality for each performance that a creative asset could confidently stand on its own. For that to occur, there needed to be enough interest and variety on a performance level as there was on the campaign level, so that the creative assets could be used in advertising on multiple platforms and mixed media.
The Creative Solution
We developed “Alive with Wonder,” a concept featuring the tagline Let Beauty Envelop You. This central message was accomplished by creating illustrations unique to each performance and then having those designs envelop the dancer on the page. Each pattern visually represented individual performances with elements that are important to the story on the stage.
This interaction between dancer and design alluded to the immersive experience of witnessing performances on stage and hammered home the overall campaign tagline – Let Beauty Envelop You.
Once finalized, the campaign imagery was extended into a full graphic system that allowed for both consistency and customization in the promotion of each performance. To accommodate the variety of mediums in our cross-platform media strategy, the flexibility of the system was imperative.
Making Life Better
The common misconception about ballet is that the performances are only suited for fans of high art or those that understand the nuances of performative arts. General audiences sometimes mistakenly assume that a barrier exists between them and enjoying and understanding ballet performances. The reality is this: over the course of a season of ballet programming, a performance will occur that is enjoyable for all types of audiences with different levels of ballet experience. Creating a campaign that cohesively communicated the different themes and tones of each performance and enticed a wider audience to attend was a hugely rewarding endeavor.
National Addy Award Winner
An Award-Winning Campaign
The Texas Ballet Theater’s 2019-2020 season campaign took home some prestigious awards from the American Advertising Federation at the local, regional and national levels. All totaled, the 2019-2020 season campaign won 9 Gold Awards, special Special Judge’s Awards at both the local and regional competitions and a National Silver Addy. It is such an honor to be recognized and earn shared success with our clients.
When the Texas Ballet Theater needed a way to reinvigorate their marketing, we created a comprehensive marketing campaign that expanded their ticket sales from a steady group of subscribers into a larger group of new season ticket holders.
The Problem
Season subscriptions to Texas Ballet Theater, while strong, had stagnated. Subscribers were offered the same options year after year, purchase the entire season or purchase single tickets at a later date. Within performing arts, the prospective ticket buyer ranges from the devoted fan to the person that wouldn’t even consider attending. Marketing resources are precious, and we have to ensure they are being invested where they will yield the highest ROI.
The Solution
Using data to drive decisions, Schaefer proposed restructuring subscriber packages to give existing patrons more choice and convince new people to become subscribers and single ticket purchasers. Beyond subscriptions, the campaign was designed to have a positive impact on single ticket purchases. Single ticket sales launched in the middle of the campaign on July 1st, and within the first day, more than 3,500 individual tickets were sold.
The Approach
One of the largest components of our overall campaign was audience segmentation. To accomplish this, we appended audience data from TRG Arts – the Ballet’s consultant.
We divided the Ballet’s existing consumers into four distinct groups of:
1 – previous year subscribers 2 – lapsed subscribers 3 – multi-performance buyers 4 – single ticket buyers
By building package options, we were able to convince larger subsets of people to subscribe to Texas Ballet Theater.
We added historic subscribers and single ticket purchaser data to create persona profiles based on audience demographics and psychographics. We then built lookalike audiences based on the four groups and mapped each of the groups’ behaviors to identify purchasing trends across multiple digital channels. This gave us the insight needed to better understand their consumption habits and likelihood to purchase either a full or partial season or if they were likely to be a single-ticket purchaser.
Once we isolated recurring trends in the audience segments, we hyper-targeted the right ticket package to each group through paid digital media. Further, website retargeting enabled us to identify those that had expressed interest but not yet purchased and then retarget them with the TBT message most likely to yield a purchase.
Goals
Clearly brand the full 2019-2020 ballet season, while also promoting individual performances on their own merits.
Earn more new, full-season subscribers.
Define the main buyer personas and outline their purchase-decision journeys to understand their motivations for purchasing a full-season subscription and a single-performance ticket.
Outline a way to recapture people that did not renew their full-season subscriptions from the previous year.
Results
Paid media campaign delivered 1.8 million targeted impressions, and generated more than $40,000 in ticketed revenue in just a few weeks.
After only 2 weeks of a dedicated full-season campaign, subscription sales up by nearly 3% YOY.
New subscribers up by 45% YOY.
Exceeded last year’s launch-day single ticket sales by more than 10%.
Total ticket sales up 18.43% YOY, despite a later season launch than 2018.
During the campaign, overall website sales totaled $199,000.
Earning highly qualified leads is critical to the success of a conversion-based digital campaign, and Schaefer Advertising employs a blend of intelligent thinking and data tools to develop strategic campaigns that yield highly qualified leads that meet our client’s business objectives.
The Approach
Pomona – by Hillwood Communities – is a master-planned community in Manvel, TX, located just south of Houston. To meet their sales goals, Pomona depends on driving awareness and conversion in order to build foot traffic to their community, and ultimately close home sales. In 2019, Schaefer Advertising leveraged very specific and unique tactics to create a full-funnel digital marketing strategy for the community.
To begin the marketing planning process, the Schaefer team carefully scrutinized data related to Pomona’s key target audiences by evaluating the current homebuyer segment against prospective homebuyers. This information provided us “look-a-like” profiles that we applied to our targeting criteria, enabling us to get very specific demographics, psychographics and geographical insights. As a result of this granular audience definition, we were able to identify that many of Pomona’s homebuyers were employed at the Texas Medical Center, located just 15 miles from the community.
With this knowledge, the Schaefer team developed a very targeted GeoFencing campaign as a tactic within the integrated digital strategy.
The Goals
Move high-value prospects through the lead funnel by:
Building brand awareness for Pomona among a very specific subset of the medical community within the Texas Medical Center
Capturing a strategic audience group to retarget with outbound marketing efforts
Driving qualified leads from the medical community to model homes within Pomona
Closing home sales in Pomona
The Strategy – Hyper-Targeted Geofencing
GeoFencing is a targeted digital strategy that specifically serves display ad units to users who have entered a digitally fenced area. In order to structure a GeoFencing campaign, a virtual fence is mobilized around the targeted area to capture prospects and then deploy ads. A corresponding conversion zone is also established, allowing advertisers to track prospects from the GeoFence to the conversion zone. At Schaefer, we utilize variations of GeoFencing strategies across verticals to satisfy numerous goals such as driving event ticket sales or, in this case, selling homes.
For Pomona, our team devised a GeoFencing strategy focused on capturing highly qualified prospects at the Texas Medical Center. We identified five key parking garages used by medical professionals that mirrored a large portion of the current residents of Pomona. Additionally, we eliminated patient traffic in order to maximize the media spend on the most qualified prospects. After outlining our geographic target area, we developed specific ad creative to target those audiences, with messaging focused on proximity between home and work – “Pomona, just minutes from the Texas Medical Center.”
The Ads
The Results
First GeoFencing campaign delivered 245,000 impressions and 18 conversions of highly qualified leads.
Second GeoFencing campaign delivered 335,000 impressions and 40 conversions of highly qualified leads.
The entire campaign delivered 580,000 impressions and a total of 58 conversions.
Making Life Better
A community is made up of far more than just buildings and geography. It’s about the people that say hello to each other every day, the experiences they share and the memories they make as neighbors. All of this turns a collection of buildings into a living, breathing community. We are proud to partner with Hillwood Communities, and help shape the fabric of their neighborhoods by delivering their message to the right audiences, and filling their communities with vibrant people.
