E-Marketing The New .Community

Ever since real estate sales were combined with print advertising, the challenge among marketers has been to design the perfect ad that both captures home shopper interest and attracts qualified traffic. The problem has been how to balance homebuilders' insistence to "feature the product" with the desires of ad agencies to be bold and creative?

Unfortunately, the need to compromise often results in the same sort of ads, featuring the same cute kids playing with the same cute puppies in their same new homes of master-planned communities. <>Imagine then the industry's reaction when a full-page ad recently appeared in two major metropolitan newspapers featuring only a new community's name, its log and website address with the words, "are you in?" placed near the bottom. (ad)

Industry experts and marketing gurus alike predicted failure, or at best, a small up-tick in website visits. Yet the pundits were proven wrong when the ad illustrated the impressive power of electronic marketing (e-marketing) to today's 21st century homebuyers.

That now-famous ad was placed by Rancho Mission Viejo, LLC during the weekend of May 20 and 21, 2000 in the Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register for the new community of Ladera Ranch in Southeast Orange County, Calif. The ad actually promoted the launching of Ladera Ranch's newest website which promised to provide even more information about the one-year-old community.

Prior to the ad placements, the community's website was attracting an impressive 6,000 to 7,000 hits and about 250 visits per day. During the weekend the new ad ran, daily hits soared to a height of 74,000 and more than 520 unique visitors were tallied. Though a detailed on-line tracking and database program created by San Diego-based Inter@ctivate, we were able to determine how people were directed to the website (via www.laderaranch.com or through such referring sites as Yahoo.com, msn, AOL and other search engines) as well as identify the most popular pages and even the dates and times of highest activity.

Since the new website was launched, more than 1,760 (as of 7/24/00) additional people have placed their names on the website's on-line information list and completed the detailed registration and homebuyer questionnaire.

In addition, home sales have jumped to more than 14 per week, for a total of 130 (as of 7/24/00) since the weekend of May 20, and an astonishing 675 sales (as of 7/24/00 since the community's grand opening last July. Plus, sales people for Ladera Ranch's merchant builders are reporting that greater number of home hoppers are now using their first on-site model home tours as the final "tire kicking" step to a home selection process that began with on-line community scanning and homebuilder floor plan previews.

Print advertising still needed. Still, as sophisticated as our e-marketing campaign has been, it has served to reinforce the understanding that print advertising is still the dominant force driving homebuyers to our website.

According to our on-line homebuyer registration information, the vast majority of website registrants were attracted to the site through advertisements placed in the major newspapers. However, currently complementing Ladera Ranch's print campaign are such non-traditional advertising venues as cable advertising, on-line banner ads, proper tagging on major search engines, magazines, advertorial placements, feature and news publicity, movie theatre and bus shelter ads, and more.

Streaming video and e-mail. In our effort to steer away from "Velcro" marketing and instead brand Ladera Ranch as a meaningfully different new community, we've learned that often the "tried and true" tricks of the advertising trade are made even more effective if they are combined with our changing technology. As an example, in addition to using colorful animated graphics and leading edge design on our website, we've now introduced streaming video and an e-mail response system to help create dialogue with our on-line home shoppers.

Message boards and virtual tours. Soon, we hope to use the site to actually link homebuyers to the electronic mail boxes of the sales people at each of different merchant builder sales offices. Message boards could be created to help homebuyers quickly obtain answers to their posted questions.

And, scheduled to coincide with the debut of Ladera Ranch's new information center (called the I-Gallery) early next year, will be streaming video of virtual community tours from different perspectives including a virtual tour of Ladera Ranch's future main street area, a fly-over of Ladera Ranch as it's envisioned at build-out, and even a hike along the miles of trails now preparing to open in and around the community.

Ultimately, the goal will be to deliver to sales offices the most informed, prequalified and motivated homebuyers possible. Through e-marketing today we are creating the .com munity of the future.

For more information, contact:
Anne Marie Moiso
Marketing Manager
Rancho Mission Viejo, LLC
P.O. Box 9
San Juan Capistranco, CA 92673
Phone: 949-240-3363 www.laderaranch.com

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