Traffic Digital Agency

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company.

Our company is HomeFirst. We are an owner and operator of manufactured home communities throughout the Midwest. We provide a range of services to other community owners, ranging from marketing to sales to financing assistance for their customers for home renovation, refurbishment, and construction. Primarily, we market manufactured homes for sale and rental.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I am the owner.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with Traffic Digital Agency?

We wanted to generate a lot more qualified traffic into our sales centers. We have a reasonably well-known brand and a good product. Over the years, we have continued to pour money down the drain in trying to drive qualified traffic. Qualified leads come from the Internet searches straight to the sales team.

People say that 97 percent of people looking for housing are looking on the Internet first. That’s what we do and what we're relying on. In the past, we’ve had less qualified people coming in the door, and that hasn’t worked very well for us.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

Traffic Digital does SEO and pay-per-click. Their team stripped down our website, rewrote it, reconfigured it down to the skeleton. Then they relaunched it. While we have some consistency in how it looks, it's a brand-new website from top to bottom. They tied in all the real estate search engines. It's been phenomenal.

We started working with them in mid-November 2013 when they took over our existing website. We went live with our website on February 1, 2014. We have no plans to stop the work. It's ongoing. We’ve had to add staff because of the volume. We’ve had to modify procedures. We're way ahead of revenue projections by 100 percent over what we had projected. The only thing we changed in our marketing was bringing Traffic Digital onboard.

What was your process for selecting Traffic Digital Agency with which to work?

I was introduced to Traffic Digital by two other clients of theirs who were at my house on two separate weekends, raving about Traffic Digital and what they had done for their companies.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

Our monthly budget with them hovers around $20,000, including the range of services.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

As of May 31, 2014, we had executed 275 sale or lease transactions throughout our communities. At the same time last year, we had 127. Year to date, as of June 15, 2014, we have 4,425 people who have contacted us by phone, Internet, or came into our sales centers. We think that we are hitting about 75 percent qualified lead rate this year, which is double what we had last year. With 4,425 visitors, that's about double last year's numbers.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

I’ve worked with advertising, marketing, and PR firms for more than 30 years. Traffic Digital's accessibility and level of communication is like none I’ve seen before. The responsiveness to any question or query that we’ve thrown at them is phenomenal. Even though they’re adding customers and clients every day, they’ve done a great job of staying ahead so that they don’t have anybody too busy to respond to their customer right away.

The two people who were at my house on two separate weekends were raving about Traffic Digital. The first man said that his business was going crazy. I asked them what they did, and they said they were working with Traffic Digital. The next week, the same thing happened. The following Monday, I said that we would interview them. My partner said that we just signed a renewal with the other agency. I told him to stop the renewal.

Traffic Digital delivers way above and beyond what they promised. It's a pleasure working with them.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

If our budget permitted, we would probably try to do more. However, we haven’t been able to be as prepared and ready for the volume of business as we need to be. On our end, we would have planned a lot better and hired better people more quickly than we did. It's a great problem to have.