This is the longest study case that I was involved in. I was in this business since it started helping them with digital marketing. I started working with them in Late 2016 and I quited in February 2020, because I wanted to start from 0 in the United States.
Vilahouse was created by the business man Florencio Ferrara in 2016. When I came across the business they didn’t have a professional logo, or web site, but they sold between 5 to 10 houses per month using very basic Facebook Ads. These are the stats of Vilahouse now:
We have done a lot of things during the years to reach this numbers, but I am going to order them in 3 Stages:
There were no signs of any kind of design lines of this new business. Florencio talked to me and we developed a very simple logo which reminded us to a golf court flag and a house (thanks to the fireplace). Back then the company's headquarters were located in Villa Allende, Córdoba, Argentina. And one of the main things that represents Villa Allende is the Golf community.
The next step was to improve their website, so I developed a profesional website, with the best SEO practices in the moment. The SEO positioning was insanely quick. In the first 3 months we were ranking in the first page of Google for one of the most important keywords in that time: “casas prefabricadas”.
Also we signed up for Google My Business and worked a little bit to improve local SEO.
In addition every single lead we got through the webpage, was stored in a SQL database in the PHP Admin of the hosting service.
Okay, we already had the webpage and logo. What’s next? We needed more leads. We were in a very good position back then to invest in Google Adwords (Now Google Ads). CPC’s were incredibly cheap. We launched one big broad campaign targeting “+casas +prefabricadas” and “+viviendas +prefabricadas”. Ranking first was pretty easy, since we had an proven SEO friendly website, the relevance score was 10/10, and the budget was decent.
Google Search Ads strategy won’t vary as much in the future as our Facebook Ads multiple strategies. The problem was there were huge restructurations in the business over the years that forced me and the team to adapt to them quickly.
In this first stage, there were about 6 people working as the sales force. In the beginning the strategy was simple, we created a facebook page to every salesman and they will get messages every day individually. The campaigns worked ok. They got around 20 to 40 messages per day each salesman. But this wasn’t the best way to do it… I will talk more about it in the next stage.
Disclaimer: I know this is not the best Facebook Ads Structure, but for that time it worked fine for the company and results. We have changed it a lot over the years.
Also in this stage we introduced lead nurturing stages to our email database. We used Mailchimp workflows and content marketing strategies to create a solid relationship with our leads. The campaign were basic, they received a series of emails explaining the advantages of the products, some youtube videos, testimonials, and promotions.
2019 was the year where everything grow really quickly. The main reason was the sales force restructuring and the openings of new offices. So basically we went from having 10 salesman in only one province to have 20 and then 50. Also we started to have salesman supervisors and teams.
In consequence, we needed to improve our marketing department. We hired a new Head Of Marketing called Martin Ortiz , in charged of the 360 marketing activities offline and online. And we subcontracted a social media agency who was in charged of organic posts in every social platform.
At this time, we were running the following campaigns:
Here you can take a look to some micro experiments I’ve tested in Facebook Ads. We’ve got some insane result with Lookalike Audiences from highly targeted Custom Audiences.
We were getting a lot of leads. But our problem was the quality, and our customer data was spread through different channel. We knew we had to integrate a CRM.
We were using Hubspot but it was connected only to our Facebook Lead Forms campaigns. In consequence we've changed the whole marketing and sale structure:
The main results we’ve got with these actions were:
This were the last actions we took before I left. This is for you to get an idea of the type of work I was doing in the last 3 years with these companies and the kind of skills I’ve learnt over the years. I could go deeper and deeper in each campaign but it was a very long period of time and I would have to write a book about it😅
Basically we went from 0 to:
And I was in charged of: