At any given time, 40% of Americans are planning a move. “Peak” season for buying a new home starts with the Super Bowl in winter and goes through fall. With statistics like that, it’s no surprise that the real-estate space is extremely competitive.
Trulia, a mobile service that helps home buyers find their next house, has enjoyed success in this space. To take things to the next level, Chief Marketing Officer Kira Wampler aimed earlier this year to launch the company’s first ever national campaign. Doing so started with the numbers, she said during a keynote address at the Mobile Marketing Association’s SM2 conference on Wednesday.
Trulia conducted more than 900 hours of research on more than 2,000 people, including interviews and ridealongs as home buyers looked for houses, to better understand their customers before launching the campaign.
What they discovered is that the average Trulia customer tended to be a female who was slightly more affluent than the average American and had more money to spend on the next home than the average home seeker. Sixty-two percent were ready to buy a home in the next six months, higher than the overall market.
Despite their eagerness to buy, most home buyers find that it takes 18.5 months from the beginning of their search to finally settle into their new home. The process, as Wampler puts it, “still sucks.”
“What this means for a brand is that there is huge opportunity to build a relationship with our customers and offer help along the way,” she said.
Wampler said her team worked closely with the data scientists and conducted channel, creative and product tests before finally launching a multi-channel campaign on TV, tablet and mobile. The documentary-like ads were tailored to the target audience identified in earlier research, and as a result were “not as Hallmark-y as what you might see with the entire category,” Wampler said.
The tag line, “That’s your moment of Trulia,” plugged the service’s mobile site and application as ways to find ease and assistance along what can be a tumultuous buying cycle.
Trulia also relaunched its mobile site and application, yielding a 40% year-over-year growth in subscribers, up from 20% prior to the campaign. That achievement, as Wampler put it, was a direct result of putting “the left and the right brain together.”
“We combined the art and the science for deeper consumer insights,” she said.
SmartBrief’s Ambreen Ali is providing special coverage of the MMA SM2 conference and will post live updates @SBoSM.
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