North Property Group
Overview
North Property Group (NPG) are one of the few remaining independently owned sales, lettings and investment agents in England. This allows them to work exclusively for the benefit of their clients helping them to buy, sell, let or rent properties across the UK.
Tim and Oli of NPG approached us to build them a flagship website for their Real Estate and Property Investment company. The NPG website needed to be visually impressive to stand out from competitors’ websites, displaying the variety of their portfolio but keeping navigation simple and ultimately driving leads to fill in forms, pick up the phone or indeed visit their office.
An online marketing strategy was formed with SEO and PPC campaigns to drive traffic and quality leads to the website.
NPG also had several third-party applications that needed integrating:
- Salesforce integration to drive leads directly into the sales pipeline.
- Jupix integration so that homes and rental properties could be managed centrally.
Our Approach
We developed the NPG website to represent their business as a premium Real Estate brand. Taking their existing brand guidelines and logo, we built a three-part website that separated their three sub-brands (Rental, Living and Investment) with data sync, style and a global harmony across the network. This seamless experience was created using a WordPress Multisite.
Design Premium Website Design
NPG provided us with their brand guidelines, colours and logo alongside some rough parameters that they would like for us to use for their new site design. We took this brief and utilised a mobile first design technique to ensure that visitors on all devices received a great user experience – starting with the mobile view, then tablet and desktop devices. It was important to create an image-lead design to capture visitors’ attention – we also wanted maximum engagement from potential leads so there are “calls to action” throughout the website encouraging call back requests or prompting users to get in touch.
Development Custom Integrations
The website was developed on WordPress, specifically as a WordPress Multisite installation as this was deemed the most appropriate platform for NPG with their 3 distinct areas of focus.
3rd Party Integration: Pardot / Salesforce CRM:
NPG use the Salesforce CRM to manage their Sales pipeline and Pardot – Salesforce’s automation software to direct an manage leads. In order to further streamline the process, we integrated the website forms to communicate with Pardot passing not only the form contents but also key attributes from website such as the page / referral / property information to illustrate what the client might be interested in. This automated data capture and distribution allows NPG to react quicker for potential leads and help increase the conversion rate.
3rd Party Integration: Jupix Property Management & Automation:
Duplicate work is never fun, but it’s important to have all properties (both rental and to purchase) available to see on NPG’s website as well as Zoopla’s website, one of the UK’s biggest and most popular property directory.
We integrated into Jupix so that it would automatically pull properties that NPG manage into the main website, whilst still allowing custom changes where necessary leaving our client with a single platform to update rather than repeating work. The Zoopla and Prime Location property information such as gallery images, floor plans, location and any supporting documentation are automatically synced across ensuring consistency whilst allowing site specific changes such as SEO content. Additional expansions to this platform could see an integration into Rightmove with no additional work needed for the end user.
Search Engine Optimisation and Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Improving the online presence of NPG and increasing the quantity of their leads was an integral part of this process and would be key to their success in 2018/19. After an in-depth audit to review their website, competitors, keywords and backlinking opportunities we prepared a Search Engine Marketing Strategy (results below).
Challenges
Online Presence + Lead Capture
NPG needed to establish a definitive online presence for leads and easy way for potential clients to reach out.
Revenue Producing Tool
A tool for generating and converting leads was required to assist the sales pipeline and automate as much of the process as possible.
Solution
Industry Standard CRM
A WordPress Multisite was developed to easily manage and separate the three independent brands (Buy to Live, Investments and Rentals).
SEO and PPC – An Online Digital Strategy
Spotlight Studios’ main part to play in NPG’s growth was developing the online strategy both in terms of Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
Rather than just driving traffic to the website (the goal of their previous marketing company) we prioritised the quality of leads that we were directing to NPG whilst also significantly reducing their cost per click (CPC) so that they could concentrate on closing the deals rather than wasting resources qualifying inbound leads.
Results
Design
Review the pictures included within the case study or why not click here and take a look for yourself and see what you think.
We were very proud of the results and it seems the British Property Awards were also impressed as NPG achieved Gold in 2018!
Integrations
Jupix Logo RGB
Prime Location
Pardot Logo Blue
Rightmove
SEM Campaign
Organic Search Traffic +22.1%
Total users +27.9%
Core Focus Keyword Increases
- 4x Focus keywords with upwards of 50 placement increases (i.e. 65 > 9)
- 5 x Top 10 rankings
- 3 x Top 5 rankings
- 2 x Top 1 rankings
- Positive movement on over 25 terms
Pay Per Click
Increased from ~1 lead per day on average to ~3 leads per day. A typical month would generate ~90 leads with a total monthly spend under £2,000.
Support
Hosting, Security and Support
The NPG Network is hosted on our high SLA Business Hosting (100% Network uptime and 2hr recovery) across our Manchester servers. This keeps the website online, fast and gives us complete redundancy as well as keeping within strict GDPR guidelines.
WordPress Webmaster
Our Webmaster service ticks a lot of boxes for NPG. At the core of the service, WordPress, the website plugins and the custom theme files are kept up to date regularly to make sure that there are no lapses in security and that the website continues to run on the latest code with the most efficient operations.
Feedback
Peter and his team built us an incredible website which the team at North Property Group are delighted with; we have spoken with various web design companies and Spotlight are by far the most informative, helpful, efficient and reactive. Our site was complicated in many ways and they have made it work seamlessly. I would recommend this company to anyone looking to have a website built and cannot thank the team enough for all of their help.