Driving Engagement and Sales with Customer-Centric Case Study Ads: The Hill Group success story
Overview
The UK housebuilding industry is currently facing negative connotations, with publishers and individuals reporting unsatisfactory experiences in build quality and brand experience; this is amid a housing crisis and a mounting pressure on the current UK government to address this.
Since 1999, The Hill Group have had the vision to be the most trusted housebuilder by creating exceptional homes and sustainable communities. This has been paramount to their success, standing as the third largest private-owned UK housebuilder. Devotion to customer service and quality products has resulted in The Hill Group being juxtaposed against the wider negative perceptions of new-build homes in the UK. This is evident through the positive real-world stories, high levels of customer satisfaction, and a 5-star UK Housebuilder accreditation.
The challenge for The Hill Group, within tried and tested digital performance media channels, was standing out from the crowd. With an amass of deal-led incentives, and aspirational product led creative messages, the sector sees a lot of noise. How could Hill stand out from the noise and position themselves through their central business accolades as a deliverer of quality service and products, going against the grain of negativity?
What was the role of digital within the media mix?
With creative and media strings to The Focus Agency’s bow, the output of the brainstorming stage culminated in the agreement that the route forward would be a people-first creative approach.
We designed social media ads featuring satisfied customers with professional photography and existing customer testimonials and made them fit for purpose. With multiple execution variations, our first step in the campaign roll-out was to push the ads into an A/B test to determine the strongest performer. Once we had a clear winner, we then added further variations within the ad copy to optimise and strengthen performance. The final stage was then letting Meta’s machine-learning capability run with the best performer to yield the highest return for the remainder of the campaign.
Killer stats
What results did you attain? What was the biggest achievement?
We had a two-fold objective:
- Primary: Educate and elevate the position of The Hill Group within the housebuilding sector.
- Secondary: Drive consideration of choice through positioning by measuring enquiries for new homes.
We saw significant improvements in performance from these ‘people first’ ads compared to other more typical ads that were running for The Hill Group.
Overall, the campaign yielded an increase of 331% in advert engagement and 300% in prospective enquiries, our primary and secondary indicators of performance respectively.
