The Parade of Homes continues to evolve its marketing mix to keep pace with changing consumer media habits. While traditional mediums like billboard, TV, print and radio remain our best vehicles for reminding the masses that “the Parade is on”, more than 20% of our Parade of Homes advertising budget is now allocated to digital messaging.
The ability to demographically, psychographically and geographically target via digital allows us to be extremely efficient with our investments. We are also able to test and tweak content, which makes digital invaluable for identifying messages that gain the most “traction” so we can scale them upward to more consumers.
The category “digital media” covers a broad swath of advertising products that perform a variety of functions in our marketing mix. Current cross-channel digital touch points for our customers include:
Social Media Marketing: With over 20,000 followers and fans across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Houzz, we continue our full court press to connect directly with our fans via social media.
Real-Time Video: Our new :15 2016 Spring Parade of Homes video commercials have already racked up more than a third of a million impressions on YouTube and other real-time video networks.
Retargeting: Site retargeting allows us to serve ads to some of our most important fans; individuals who have already visited our website. As we expand retargeting, we will serve an increasing number of individualized messages, depending upon what pages a user has visited (i.e. serving Remodelers Showcase message to those who have visited remodeling pages.)
Lead Capture Overlays: Our most valuable relationships are those that are “H2H” or human to human with our customers. Email marketing is currently our best way of communicating in this fashion. In that spirit, we have added attractive lead-capture overlay “pop-up” forms on our website. Visitors are asked if they would like to be included in our newsletters, but have the ability to select “no” and close the form quickly if they so choose. Our email list continues to grow substantially via this new tool.
The high measurability of digital campaigns is helping us gather complex customer insights that will help us provide even greater value to members as we further segment the unique “tribes” and personas in our customer base.
A recent MIT Sloan Management Review study shows that only 15% of companies rank in the “most mature” stages of digital transformation. We remain committed to being on this cutting edge of digital in order to provide maximum value for our members.
Data shows that our efforts are paying off. Between 2012 and 2015, our annual website traffic increased from 172,000 to 302,000 unique visitors: a 76% increase. The results from the current tour show we are following that trend with 10% increases year-over-year for the first two weeks of the tour.
