Eagle Creek Homes
A Diamond in the Rough
Eagle Creek Homes was founded in 1999 as a personal housing construction company. Today it stands among the top West Michigan custom home builders. Over the years, it became renowned for its high-quality, high-design craftsmanship and its stellar customer service. Eagle Creek Homes provides an unmatched level of customization and workflow transparency. Now, with Deksia’s help, it’s also a lead generating machine.
Eagle Creek is armed with expert craftsmen who take pride in their work, and who work closely with their customers to make sure that their dream becomes a reality. Its transparent custom workflow involves clients in every step of the home-building process, ensuring that their vision stays on track while remaining within budget. Eagle Creek is committed to building you a home, no matter how impossible your dreams might be. They stand with you side-by-side in every part of the process to make sure you can make the most informed and best decisions for your new home. Although Eagle Creek Homes builds around 30 houses a year, it is looking to expand.
Eagle Creek Homes reached out to Deksia for several reasons:
• Develop a marketing plan to launch a new brand
• Boost social media engagement
• Generate inbound leads
• Website improvements and custom website development
Discovery
Eagle Creek Homes is Unique From its Competitors. We Discovered Why.
When Eagle Creek Homes came to Deksia, its brand was in its infancy. We performed extensive shareholder discovery and uncovered the outlines of its vision, the origin of its products, and its future objectives. Client surveys and competitor research allowed us to better understand client demographics, and to learn what potential new clients are looking for in a new home building company.
Through our discovery process, we identified several areas in which its brand needed work:
• The brand wasn’t fully fleshed out
• The target audience was misrepresented
• Its marketing messages were unclear and inconsistent
Our discovery process allowed us to find out where the company needed work, but it also allowed us to identify the “Big Idea”: what made Eagle Creek stand out from its competitors. Its strengths were its willingness and skill in customizing homes and the transparency of its workflow with homeowners.
With our new knowledge, we were able to create a brand and marketing strategy that allowed Eagle Creek Homes to rise above its competitors.
Brand Strategy
Giving the Brand a Makeover
Through our discovery process, we identified that even though Eagle Creek Homes had been in business for a while, a brand was never fully developed. Its logo was inconsistent with its positioning in the market, its messaging was underdeveloped, and there was no sense of unity to its brand colors.
Without a strong brand, a business lacks an identified purpose and has a weak presence. So we devised a plan to recreate the brand based on its stronger, improved sense of purpose that aligns with the evolution of the company’s success.
We thoroughly rebuilt all of the visual brand elements to better resonate with the market segment it competed within. We also redeveloped its messaging to appeal to the interests and desires our research indicated were influencing affluent homeowners to decide to build.
We implemented the new visual elements on the website, environmental signs, magnets, and anything with Eagle Creek Homes’ name on it. The brand now represented Eagle Creek’s strength and unity as a business.
Marketing Strategy
Getting ECH in Front of the Right Audience
With a goal and a plan mapped out, it was time to make things happen. Our plan was to offer something none of our competitors had and to create a website that was competitive, easy to use, and promoted consumers to take the next step.
For the launch itself and to gain and nurture the attention it would receive, Deksia proposed and developed the tactics Eagle Creek Homes would need.
These tactics included:
- Digital advertising retargeting website visitors people who interact with the ads
- Email campaigns
- Blog posts
- Hosting four housewarming parties
We utilize a marketing funnel system to attract and convert customers to your business. Our digital strategist defines the funnel and implements a series of steps to achieve the goal. The funnel system allows us to look at the performance of the data, analyze the placement of ads, and adjust them constantly to keep creating content and advertisements that get in front of the right target audience.
Data drives decisions, those decisions drive leads, those leads drive sales.
Website
From Malfunction to Function
Eagle Creek Homes website reflected the issues we identified in the discovery process. It lacked continuity in design and appeared disorganized, but the biggest problem was that the website was missing a lot of the basic functional needs that people want when shopping for a home. Worse, because its competitors had already implemented many of these features, Eagle Creek was quickly falling behind the market.
Consumers want to feel confident in their decisions; an effortless-to-navigate website will ease their concerns, and be more responsive when encouraged to take the next step. The information they need to know should stand out from the page and be easy to find even when scrolling. The flow of the website should feel natural and effortless.
Deksia takes a structural approach to designing websites. Before a website can be successful, it not only needs to look good, but most importantly it needs to function.
Deksia implemented new elements onto the website, and updated old ones, including:
• A full visual redesign of its logo and page layouts
• Created interactive plot map that shows available housing in custom developments
• Shot online tours and hosted them in virtual galleries
• Created a catalog of house plans prospective homeowners could shop online
• Wrote monthly blog posts to keep the site active, improve SEO, and drive customer engagement
• Dramatically improved Eagle Creek’s performance in organic search engine results, creating a new source of free leads
Once the website was relaunched, we didn’t stop there. Becoming a lead generation machine doesn’t happen overnight, it requires research and testing. The website became a platform for testing not only the digital initiatives, but the visual initiatives as well. Through trial and testing in digital media and their website, we can continuously identify what is working, what isn’t, and what we’re missing.
Print Design
Creating Brand Awareness & Cultivating Curiosity
Prior to Deksia, Eagle Creek Homes print pieces were inconsistent. Inconsistency in messaging and visuals erodes potential customers’ willingness to trust a brand, even if only subconsciously. It also changes how they understand what a brand represents. On a foundational level, Deksia needed to establish the concept of the brand and make sure that people understood what they’re going to get with Eagle Creek Homes.
Eagle Creek Homes had some environmental design out in the world. We applied the new visual designs and messages to all of the environmental signage, including neighborhood signage, office and entry signage, and driveway signs. We also extended their environmental design, creating heightened brand permeation.
The visual elements and messages were unified throughout not only the printed signage, but in the digital advertisements as well.
Digital Ads
A Magic Money Machine
Perhaps the most notable work Deksia has done for Eagle Creek Homes is digital advertising.
Eagle Creek Homes stays in front of potential customers via social media retargeting. We gathered data about Eagle Creek Homes’ audience, refined the audience, and refined the message and the aesthetics. Tracking the success of our advertisements and constantly refining them has allowed us to choose how many leads are generated, and how often we get them because of the work that we have done over the past two years. Monthly ad rotation allows for new creative to be uploaded to the retargeting campaigns, and it also prevents ad fatigue.
Our digital strategist makes sure that the advertisements are on the right social media platforms. Where the ads are placed have been vital to gaining the traction that we need to satisfy the goals of the strategic marketing funnel. Overall, we’ve been able to refine advertisements to such a point that it’s now like a magic money machine. We have been able to not only achieve the desired ROI, but have exceeded it.
Facebook and Instagram monthly ad rotation: Utilizing the list of 1,500 emails and all previous website traffic, Eagle Creek will stay in front of potential customers via social media retargeting. Monthly ad rotation allows for new creative to be uploaded to the retargeting campaigns – this also prevents ad fatigue, when Facebook and other platforms charge more because users have stopped engaging with ads.
Photo & Video
Creating Intriguing & Authentic Material
When ECH came to us, all of their ads were static. In some sectors static ads are a good choice, but not for Eagle Creek Homes. Our expert professional photo and video personnel have created moving ads that allow potential home builders to experience the true magic of Eagle Creek Homes. As a company that prides themselves on their ability to customize, we created ads that explored floor plans, and feeds into the wishes and dreams of prospects. Now, none of Eagle Creek Homes ads are static, and the results have been dramatic. Eagle Creek homes has become a lead generating machine.
Photo and video were essential to redesigning the website. Beforehand, it didn’t have an online catalog, or a virtual tour system. Our team worked aggressively to create visual elements geared towards encouraging prospects to visualize themselves in an Eagle Creek Home, and to take the next step.
Success By Design
We believe you need a repeatable system to get customers.
One that will deliver sales over and over so you can quit feeling frustrated and helpless. Quit wasting time and money, and be empowered to focus on what is important to you rather than sales.