THE CHALLENGE
Heyday is a brand-new rental home community in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, designed to capture the feeling of home ownership without the hassle through innovative design and a unique approach to community. Because single-family rentals are still a fairly new concept for renters, Heyday Companies approached their elite website and build their brand presence in the Sun Prairie market, primarily through digital advertising.
THE SOLUTION
Beginning in March 2023, Catalyst provided a recommended digital strategy to heavily push the opening of the Heyday Sun Prairie community in August 2023, with a goal of gaining three new leases per week for the first year. As the first built-to-rent offering in their market, it was essential for Heyday’s advertising to educate the consumer and convey their unique selling propositions.
Initial contracted services included search engine optimization (SEO), search and display, and social media marketing (SMM) ads. Once leasing officially began, Heyday also contracted with Catalyst for reputation management, social media content planning, and programmatic display ads.
The campaign strategy included the following:
- Search and display: Catalyst recommended this service as a lead generation campaign to bring qualified leads and traffic to Heyday by showing ads to users searching for rental homes in the market. Search and display campaigns can generate a high number of valuable impressions at a low cost, which is important for a brand-new product. It also helped Heyday gain immediate exposure for competitive keywords that typically take longer to rank for organically.
- SMM: This campaign also focused on brand awareness but generated prospects through direct messages to the community. It gave Heyday exposure on highly engaged platforms by using a variety of descriptive ad formats. The Catalyst team recommended carousel ads because the additional images and copy provided more opportunities to show users the community.
- SEO: Catalyst tailored content on the Heyday website to rank higher on a search engine results page and receive more traffic. Though it is often a long-term strategy, the Catalyst team always recommends SEO when launching a new website.
- Reputation management: In the short term, Catalyst recommended this service to build the community’s online reputation with recommended approaches to requesting reviews during tours. In the long term, Catalyst plans to maintain and improve the community’s reputation.
- Programmatic display ads: The Heyday community faces a lot of competition in nearby towns. To best capture the attention of those residents and their prospects, Catalyst recommended programmatic display advertising to target competitor communities through geofencing.
THE RESULTS
This combination of digital campaign strategies proved very successful for Heyday, giving them a very strong start to leasing the first phase of the community. As a result of consistent lead generation and tours from Catalyst’s full-service efforts, Heyday is hitting their original goal of three leases per week and averaging 10–15 leads per week.
As of November 1, 2023, the Catalyst and Heyday teams agreed to scale back the push due to the initial success. Though many services are still live, social media content planning and reputation management have been paused. As Heyday looks to expand their product into other markets — including nearby Oak Creek — there is now a wealth of data and results available to leverage in future marketing efforts, including the keywords and calls to action (CTAs) that perform best.
Reporting highlights include:
- From March to July 2023, a total of 131 lead forms were submitted on the
Heyday website. From August to December 2023, an additional 146 lead forms
have been submitted. - The Heyday website ranked for 19 high-volume keywords within the first 6
months, 10 of which averaged in the top 20 positions on Google. - Heyday currently outranks their top 4 competitors in SEO.
- Heyday currently has a 4.6 review rating on Google.
- The Google Search campaign has averaged a click-through rate (CTR) of
10.25% since launch (compared to the industry benchmark of 7.45%).