Building the Igloo
How a DC apartment finder service used Internet marketing to increase leads by 900%
by John Nicholson | November 2010
Summary
Marketade worked with Urban Igloo, a DC apartment finder service, to implement an online strategy that drove a 900% increase in customer leads — in less than a year with no paid advertising. How? By acting like a partner, avoiding short cuts, engaging with outsiders, embracing metrics, and focusing on conversion.
The Challenge: How Do You Grow Quickly on a Small Budget?
Urban Igloo launched in early 2009, the brainchild of commercial real estate veteran Rick Gersten. It acts as an “eHarmony” for DC area renters and landlords, using the web to connect two groups often frustrated with current options. By focusing just on DC area rentals and by utilizing leasing agents to help renters narrow their search, it offers an experience that’s both more efficient and more personalized than Craigslist, the leading alternative.
In some cities like Chicago, apartment finder services have become the go-to source for both renters and landlords. In DC, however, Urban Igloo was trying to create a new market and new brand. By last summer, they were attracting a steady number of renters through traditional advertising. But as a startup with limited resources, Urban Igloo quickly realized that rapid growth would only come from a more scalable, web-based approach to marketing.
The Results: From 60 to 500 Leads per Month
We began working with Urban Igloo, and tracking our progress, a year ago in August. Because Urban Igloo is privately held, we can’t share all of their key performance indicators, especially for recent months. But we can share some data through the end of Q2 that give an idea of the growth they’ve experienced.
- Total site traffic increased by 5 times, from about 2,000 to over 10,000 visits per month.
- Traffic from Google and other search engines (all free) increased by 10 times, from under 300 to over 2,500 per month.
- Renter leads (visitors completing a renter form on the site) increased by 9 times, from about 60 to over 500 per month.
As Urban Igloo’s online presence has grown, so too has its business:
- Lease signings have increased steadily each quarter.
- Their brand is now widely recognized among DC apartment hunters and landlords.
- They’ve opened their first retail location, in the center of DC.
- They’re actively growing their leasing agent team to meet demand.
The Lessons: How We Did It
How has Urban Igloo achieved such growth? There are many reasons beyond Marketade and beyond the Internet; most notably, its service has met a real marketplace need and inspired substantial word of mouth. But here we’ll focus on 5 web-related lessons that we’ve learned — lessons that apply to in-house marketers, agencies, and business owners at companies of any size.
- Act Like a Partner. Urban Igloo has given us a lot of freedom and treated us much more like the Internet marketing wing of their company than an agency. We started out just doing search engine optimization (SEO) and reporting, but have since expanded into many other areas: a monthly email newsletter, a blog, Facebook and Twitter pages, PR, positioning, and eventually website development and usability. The result has been a holistic online presence, where each activity has benefited the others, often in ways we never expected (more on that below).
- Think Long Term. From the start, our SEO strategy has focused on writing quality content that’s relevant to visitors and worthy of links from other sites. After a few months, we had little to show for it. But rather than turning to short cuts that might have backfired, we focused on the long-term and now it’s paying off. The same is true of our social media, newsletter, and blog efforts — all of which have focused on becoming a valuable resource to renters and landlords, rather than using gimmicks to get more followers.
- Engage Outside Experts. Urban Igloo’s email newsletter, Rent Check, has been a very effective tool for maintaining contact with leads and encouraging followers to spread the word. But the first couple of issues took a ton of time to produce, and our content lacked punch. So we turned to outsiders with much more expertise and passion on the topics we wanted to cover: DC neighborhoods and real estate trends. In January, we launched a series of blog interviews with popular neighborhood bloggers and real estate experts. Each month, we feature a new interview in the newsletter. Readers love them, and the bloggers learn about Urban Igloo and often promote the interviews to their readers.
- Embrace Metrics. We track key metrics weekly and do in-depth analysis of traffic sources and site navigation at least once a month, focusing on actionable findings. One of the things we discovered last year in Google Analytics was that the “Neighborhoods” section of the website was getting a lot of traffic. But because there was little compelling content in this section, 80% of people who landed there “bounced” off the site. So we revamped the section, adding unique pages and content on almost 40 DC area neighborhoods. In the month after the change, the number of pages visited in this section tripled, time spent per page doubled, and the bounce rate was cut in half.
- Focus on Conversion. The increase from 60 to 500 leads per month wasn’t just a byproduct of increased traffic to the website. We also did a number of things to increase the yield of visitors turning into leads, including making copy more persuasive, increasing and highlighting calls to action, and simplifying the property search and contact us forms. The result: visitor-to-lead conversion nearly tripled between December and June.
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It’s been a lot of fun working with the Urban Igloo team. We thank them for the opportunity to share their great story, and we look forward to helping them connect many more renters and landlords in the years ahead!
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