The Brief
Red-Fern have been the digital partner for FI Real Estate for over five years, working with their internal marketing and technology teams to develop multiple websites and digital strategies for their extensive property developments around the UK.
As part of our continued partnership Red-Fern were tasked with designing and developing the flagship company website, elevating their existing technology stack and delivering a digital asset that would allow their internal marketing and technology teams to achieve the companies long-term vision.
Discovery
As with every project that Red-Fern delivers, we have a proven process for developing clear and actionable digital strategies. This always starts with an in-depth discovery process.
Working with all the project stakeholders, we chaired several discovery sessions, allowing us to audit, understand and agree the target audience that would be using the website. The discovery document was presented and agreed, allowing the project to have a clear strategy, design, development and approval process.
Key Features
- Discovery & Strategy Development
- Technology Strategy
- Bespoke Website Design & Development
- Content Management System
- Mobile First Approach
- Advanced HubSpot Integration
- Google Maps Integration & Property Search
- Call-to-Action Tool/Implementation
Business, Technology & Marketing Goals
Positioning the expected outcomes for any digital partnership is key to long-term success. A key aspect of our discovery process uncovered what would make this project a resounding success:
- Easier to use and more intuitive property search
- Focus on mobile user experience
- Easy to use page creation for specific landing pages to engage with specific sectors and businesses
- Strategic user journey’s with Calls-to-Action to engage with the user and generate leads
- All properties managed on the website, not linked to a third party software
- Detailed reporting on attribution of marketing spend and leads generated
- HubSpot Integration
Defining the user journey and navigation
After researching, detailing and discussing the existing website data and target audience, the Red-Fern team developed an in-depth navigation, page layout and user journey schema. This navigation structure allowed all the project stakeholders to understand and discuss the proposed site structure. This process allows the website to have a clear design and development strategy.
One of the key strategies identified in this process was to make sure that no pages or property searches left the user on a blank page or with no results. The website HAD TO always give the user an option to continue their journey or make contact with one of the sales agents.
The Website & Technology
Once all the project stakeholders have agreed the project strategy, site map, technology and marketing direction from the discovery phase, Red-Fern assigned the specialist team of designers and developers.
Prototype
Visualising how the website will look and engage with the intended users starts by creating a visual prototype, this means that no coding is involved at this point.
The prototype is a clickable representation of the website that allows all the project stakeholders to test the desktop and mobile versions for all the pages. The Red-Fern team designed a stunning, clean, modern and user friendly website, addressing all the project objectives. Once the prototype is approved, the site is then passed through to development.
Development
Whilst the design and user journey's were taking shape, Red-Fern's technical team worked on developing the bespoke property search and Google map search components ready to integrate this with the design. The key objective with these bespoke tools was to make sure that users of the website were never presented with an empty search result, they would always be shown the closest property to their search criteria, plus a call-to-action to speak with a sales agent.
Integrations
The website is fully integrated with HubSpot, allowing leads from specific properties to be sent to the correct sales agent, whilst at the same time all marketing data and automation is collected in HubSpot.
Reporting
With any investment into a long-term digital asset, Red-Fern create a full Google Data Studio report. This report creates a single point of truth for all the FI Real Estate marketing channels into one easy to use report. Since creating this report the marketing team use this for their monthly meetings to report on all paid, organic social activity.
The Future
With a joint foresight for the long-term business, technology and marketing goals, plus having been partners for over 5 years, the teams at Red-Fern and FI Real Estate are continually developing new websites and digital strategies that align with the acquisition and development of their property portfolio.
