Summary
Zoopla.co.uk is the UK’s most comprehensive property website, empowering consumers with the resources needed to make better-informed property decisions. They help users make sense of the residential property market by combining property listings with market value data, local information and community tools. While the property market was on a downward trend, they needed a way to communicate their unique proposition on a shoestring.
Zoopla were brave enough to take a universal and simple truth: ‘Everybody hates estate agents’ and turn it on its head. The juxtaposition became simple: Zoopla – We love estate agents.
The campaign was delivered with cost efficiency in mind, yet still resulting in one of the industry’s most talked about campaigns. While the client witnessed a discernible shift in estate agents’ perceptions of Zoopla versus their major competitors, the agency saved 24 per cent of the £24,000 budget working quickly and intelligently.
Despite the savings, the campaign ran in all major trade publications as well as on emails and in specifically targeted DM to prospect estate agents. The need for more efficient targeting led to creative solutions, such as the ‘love letter’ sent to agents detailing how many ‘dates’ they had missed in the previous week.
About Zoopla
Zoopla.co.uk is the UK’s most comprehensive property website, focused on empowering consumers with the resources they need to make better-informed property decisions. They help their users make sense of the residential property market by combining property listings with market value data, local information and community tools.
Zoopla.co.uk was founded on the principles of transparency and efficiency and everything they do aims to make the market more effective for both property consumers and professionals alike. Their mission is to provide the most useful online property experience by:
– Displaying property listings along with value and price trend information
– Providing rich property data and local market information in one place
– Enabling users to search for property in a variety of customised ways
– Allowing users to engage with professionals via tools like AskMe!
– Building relationships between home owners and local estate agents
By combining free, instant value estimates for every UK home with sold prices, local market information and hundreds of thousands of properties available for sale and to rent, Zoopla.co.uk has become the ultimate destination for property consumers to search for property and do their market research. Launched on 2008, they are the UK’s fastest growing property website, now attracting over seven million visits per month and are proud to have been awarded numerous accolades including being named one of the UK’s Top Tech Companies (Guardian), one of the Top 10 Most Innovative UK Companies (Smarta 100) and UK’s Best Property Portal (Daily Mail Awards).
Strategy
The broad issues the company face include competition from a bigger and more established ‘No.1’ in the market.
This competitor has not always been seen as being ‘on the side’ of the estate agent. Whilst not being viewed exactly as ‘exploitative’ this competitor is certainly seen as using its market position to leverage maximum value from the agents.
Discussions between agency and client highlighted a possible advantageous positioning for Zoopla as being in true partnership with agents and working alongside them in their best interests. Hence the positioning of Zoopla: We love estate agents.
The positioning was launched at the Property Professional Show to great acclaim, with queues of agents clamouring for ‘We love estate agents’ t-shirts.
Objective of the Campaign
– To communicate Zoopla’s core values of empathy with estate agents, lettings agents and developers
– To generate at least 200 new ongoing clients per month
– To retain existing agents
The target audience
Our target market is relatively clear. We are talking to estate agents, lettings agents and new homes developers. We have an existing database and took care to distinguish in our communications between the different types of agents, tailoring specific messages for each discrete audience
Media channels used
The campaign was launched at the Property Professional Show in London. This was followed by DPS press advertising and wraps in the major trade press. Manchester launch was communicated via DM to selected agents along with consistent DM by post and e-DM to an agent database.
Timescale of the campaign
January 2011 – ongoing.
Results
The campaign immediately generated an 87 per cent uplift in leads directly attributable to the advertising. In the first month, there were 417 leads that converted to 211 agents signing up for a monthly contract. With the total marketing spend in one month being £3,600 the return on investment stands at 3556 per cent. As a result of its success, the campaign will continue in trade press for another year.
Client Testimonial
“This was a campaign which felt right from day one. We were convinced that there was an opportunity to communicate with agents in a much more friendly and empathetic way than was the norm in the industry. ‘We love estate agents’ has given us a distinctive platform and a new voice in the market. It has revolutionised the way we are viewed and made the job of the sales force so much easier. We now find that estate agents are genuinely pleased to see our reps. This is by far our most successful trade campaign to date.”
Kyrenia Gross, Zoopla
