How to build marketing campaign: Real estate service Wectory case
Flyer One Ventures doesn’t just invest in startups. It helps them upgrade their customer experience, build a brand, and improve and scale marketing across all channels.
In this article, we share a case of how F1V’s marketing team helps its portfolio startup (Wectory) achieve better results.
From idea to $1.3 million investment round
First, a quick story about the Wectory startup.
Three friends were once looking for a way to improve the landlord's rental experience. They thought property owners should be able to receive the rent money from their tenants in advance to make it easier to make their next big purchase, without having to wait for payments every month.
About two years ago, three entrepreneurs founded Wectory to solve this issue: landlords get paid for up to a year in advance, while tenants pay monthly installments directly to the startup.
Wectory manages rental payments from tenants under the agreement that the parties signed before. For tenants, it’s more convenient too, as they can remotely manage their payments through the app.
In June 2021, Wectory attracted its first investment in a pre-seed round led by FJ Lab. This list of investors in this round also included Sequoia, Accel, Lakestar and several angels.
In April, Wectory received $1.3 million during a bridge round led by Flyer One Ventures. After that, our marketing team began to work with Wectory.
Helping Wectory with marketing
Flyer One Venture set four marketing goals.
Help the company generate new contracts.
Decrease marketing spendings per contract.
Discover new marketing channels.
Increase ROMI (return on marketing investment).
Main challenges to achieve these goals for Wectory.
1. The company works in an absolutely new niche, where the buyer request isn’t yet formed.
2. The niche is related to housing, which falls under a separate category on Facebook Ads; hence, targeting options were more limited.
3. Wectory’s target audience is narrow; the estimated number of landlords in the UK is roughly 2 million people, which means that we couldn’t use traditional B2C sources like app install campaigns.
F1V came up with a four-step plan.
Step 1. Target audience research
In the UK, the average age of a landlord is 40 years old. This age group is a bit more conservative than the younger generation and they need more than just a link to the app. What they need is more attention from the company and details about the service.
A quick research of the pool of potential clients in the target region didn’t bring any immediate result, but it helped understand how to build our communication in the future.
Step 2. Redoing Facebook Lead Form to increase conversion rate
In the housing niche where Facebook has a different approach to ads, we couldn’t choose detailed targeting options and increase lead quality through it. So, to increase conversion, we changed the Lead Form.
We added three questions with manual user input, asking about their real estate, location and best way to reach them.
This approach helped in two ways: it sifted out irrelevant users and helped see a detailed portrait of Wectory’s potential clients. This info added up to what Facebook shares with advertisers based on clients’ profile data.
Step 3. Rebuilding newsletters
We have also helped Wectory change the way they communicate via email. Previously, emails were sent manually.
Our team set up emails through Hubspot. Now the email looks more convenient to read and a potential client pays immediate attention to the call-to-action button. We also changed the text in the email to describe the product better, which allowed the company to increase the Open Rate and CTR.
Step 4. Testing
We tested various marketing channels and creatives to get new leads. Here’s what worked.
Splittin the whole traffic by GEO. Our research and data from existing clients showed that most of the landlords have property in big cities. The marketing campaign focused on the UK cities with more than 200,000 population, and the 15-kilometer area around these cities.
We split the budget this way: London – 30%, all other cities with over 200,000 people living in them – 70%.
Doing a test with the visuals for sponsored posts gave us a cool insight: Single banners have a 50% bigger CTR than the carousel format.
Trying out different approaches also showed us what didn’t work and thus wasn’t worth investing in.
Messenger campaigns didn’t work. We aimed to attract potential clients to Wectory's support on Facebook Messenger, but those who contacted us there often dropped communication after their first message. We still think this channel has potential with autofunnels.
Google search ads showed low search volume. Almost all queries included tenants, which aren't Wectory's target audience.
Main learnings of Wectory’s marketing campaign
The average contract value in big cities is higher than in towns with over 200,000 population.
Landlords in London are more used to using apps; it's a lot easier for them to work through the app than for landlords from other regions.
Negative comments under Facebook sponsored posts didn’t spoil the performance. On the contrary, Facebook boosts reach due to extra engagement.
The most expensive audience with a top performance is 55+.
Results
Two-month results of working with Wectory.
Marketing costs went down by 1.62 times.
The number of applications from landlords for upfront payments increased by 2.54 times.
The number of contracts with landlords went up.
Cost per contract decreased by 4.24 times.
Average contract value increased by 1.57 times.
ROMI went up.
What's next
We will continue to scale Facebook Lead Forms campaigns.
The team will launch more newsletters to work with the current userbase.
Given that the company’s typical client is 40+ years old, Wectory will launch a website to complement the app and make it easier for this audience to use the service.
We will also test branding campaigns through GDN and YouTube Ads.
Given that messengers can be a good marketing channel with autofunnels, we will work on creating bots for Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
