Challenge
The premiere business unit of CoStar Group, CoStar is an online subscription service that delivers real-time, verified commercial real estate data and analysis. CoStar wanted to generate sales leads from the retailer/brands vertical.
Managing this project would require me to secure approvals from multiple levels of stakeholders, from the sales team to the C-suite.
Action
I chose to use email marketing, paid search engine marketing, and banner ad campaigns to drive prospects to a landing page offering an opt-in form for timely, relevant content.
CoStar already produced quarterly “State of the Market” update videos, including one for retailers — premium content available only behind the subscription paywall. I decided to leverage this content to make a lead generation offer, a bite-sized version of the full-length video available only to subscribers. Here’s what I did:
- Secured a budget of $25,000 for digital ads and paid search marketing for driving prospective customers to the offer on the landing page
- Composed a marketing plan that broke out email content by retailer persona (broker, owner, brand, restaurant concept)
- Created a communications calendar denoting when each topic’s email and various social media posts would deploy
- Wrote SEO-optimized landing page copy that acknowledged the customer’s pain points and made an offer to solve their problem
- Pruned the video + added a call to action, providing the desired cut times to CoStar’s video production team along with a call to action to be added at the end of the video
- Provided final copy and direction to the design and web teams to create the landing page, offer page, digital ads, and email campaign
- Secured stakeholder approvals from the sales team to the C-suite and deployed the lead generation campaign
Result
The lead generation campaign launched! Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic hit only days later (March 2020). The campaign was immediately paused out of respect for the industry CoStar serves, as stay-at-home orders would cause turmoil and uncertainty for retail brands nationwide.
The good news is that CoStar can put this lead generation campaign back into play at a later time.