Vista Developers: Inspired Blue Ridge Mountain Communities
Developing upscale communities that blend gorgeous landscape views with state-of-the-art amenities and infrastructure.
Vista Developers, LLC is a residential development company based in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Hendersonville, NC. They specialize in the development of upscale mountain communities carved out of the natural landscape that surrounds them.
Vista’s beautiful communities speak for themselves. Their infrastructures and amenities go above and beyond what you would expect in these quiet mountains. But an influx of online competition was making it harder and harder for people to see what Vista was accomplishing.
Many of Vista’s clients are moving from a colder, busier city life to find peace, quiet, and a bit of warmth. The lifeblood of Vista’s lead generation efforts is in their ability to draw people who are looking for a new life and not just a new home. Word-of-mouth and PPC advertising were no longer sufficient to communicate Vista’s unique value to far-away leads.
Stale Lead Generation Tactics
Vista’s tactics were lost in the noise of so many ordinary home builders – especially considering their broad, national target market.
No Lead Nurturing
Vista is selling a change in lifestyle, not just a new home. Their clients needed to be sold on the Blue Ridge Mountain lifestyle before they would be interested in floor plans.
Outdated Sales Technology
Vista, like many property developers, was cutting-edge when it came to their own expertise, but they needed help getting up to speed with the latest marketing and sales technologies.
How well are your tactics communicating your value?
In Vista Developers’ case, PPC and basic SEO tactics weren’t effectively communicating the hidden beauty that they were offering. Property development, in most cases, depends on your ability to sell the unseen. The tactics adopted by any successful property developer have to emphasize improved visualization of what hasn’t yet been built.
For Vista, we focused on producing quality content that demonstrated the peace and tranquility of a Blue Ridge Mountain lifestyle. We also leaned heavily on Vista’s pristine track record of developing beautiful and luxurious infrastructures without compromising any of the natural beauty that makes their locations so desirable. Visualization is an essential tactic for property developers. Whether it’s video, 3D visualization, or simple storytelling, the new standard for property developers is increasingly embracing visualization tactics.
Selling a lifestyle takes thoughtful nurturing.
Vista recognized that they weren’t selling houses as much as they were selling a lifestyle. Adjusting their tactics to address that shift in thinking was a good first step, but they also saw that more needed to happen between capturing a lead and closing a deal.
We developed personas and scenarios for Vista that helped us to understand the research and decision making that Vista’s clients were undertaking. With that research in hand, our strategies could focus on nurturing those leads through that process in a more helpful way.
Our goal with lead nurturing is not to force people through a funnel – our goal is to foster mutually beneficial relationships with quality clients. We do this with authentic, value-based communication.
Hubspot workflows allow you to apply automated decision making to the process of nurturing leads. Workflow automation can be used in email marketing, social marketing, video marketing, and even determining what content your leads see on your website. The goal is to deliver the right content to the right person at the exact right time.
Upgraded sales and marketing technology was a quick win.
As advanced as Vista’s communities were, their sales and marketing technology was due for an upgrade. Our experience has taught us that two of the smartest upgrades any property developer can make are their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and automated processes.
We helped Vista upgrade to HubSpot’s CRM and Marketing Hub and automated many of their lead capture and lead nurturing processes. In addition, we integrated all of their relevant data sources into a single data visualization dashboard so that they could track progress on their marketing and sales goals.
Finding sales or marketing bottlenecks and addressing them with a technology upgrade is the quickest win for any property developer, but there are now over 7000 marketing and sales technology products to choose from. Evaluating the right fit for you might seem a bit overwhelming. Vista learned quickly that partnering with informed strategists made the process of choosing a lot less complicated.
year over year increase in new contacts
We broadened Vista’s content strategy to include educational content on the Blue Ridge Mountain lifestyle and all the area had to offer.
year over year increase in total form submissions
We built Vista a new conversion-friendly website that highlighted more of their unique value and offered a free education on mountain living.
year over year increase in brochure requests
Vista saw a significant increase in requests for information when we added depth and value to the content they were distributing.
In February 2016, we re-evaluated our digital marketing efforts and agreed that what we were doing was no longer enough to continue ranking well, and no longer the right strategy to speak to the modern consumer. We then decided to move to an inbound marketing strategy and upgraded to the HubSpot platform, and ever since our traffic, rankings, and the quality of contacts have improved dramatically. Obviously, the steady influx of leads is enough to delight us, but their customer service is icing on the cake. Doug and Danielle have proven time and time again they have our best interests at heart; they are always quick to respond when we reach out to them, they have committed to getting to know our business like it’s their own. We simply could not be more pleased.
What We Learned
Doug Fowler
President and Executive Strategist
We’ve been working with Vista Developers since 2005, which is an exceptionally long-time for any client / agency engagement. Our relationship over the years has continued to evolve from that of a search engine marketing supplier to a full-service digital marketing strategy and implementation partner.
Over the last several years, we’ve learned that property developers in general are lagging behind other industries when it comes to leveraging marketing technologies and digital strategy. It presents a great opportunity for smaller, forward-thinking organizations like Vista to fairly easily grab market share in the digital space.
Danielle Tebo
Digital Marketing Manager
I’ve spent a lot of time with Ed and Linda of Vista Developers over the years, discussing what sets them apart and the unique draw of each of their communities. The decision to shift their marketing from strictly search optimization allowed us to take all of that passion and use it as the driving force behind how we would communicate with their audience. We worked hard to showcase exactly who they were, as community developers, and how their mountain communities are the result of more than just a homebuilding process.
The results have validated my own love for the mountain lifestyle they sell. We’ve had tremendous success with each campaign, and I’m glad to be a part of it. I get to produce content and execute strategies that are inspiring to me as a person, and I get to see others with similar passions respond to that content with the same enthusiasm. It’s not often we get to decide how we want to be marketed to, but Vista has provided me with that rare opportunity.