Analytics And Data, Case Studies, Event Marketing, Growing Your Business |

July 30, 2016

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Real Estate Event [Case Study] $9K Revenue For First Hosted Event

Back in April/May 2016, a real estate agent hired Hale Associations to formulate a marketing plan that would allow him to sell event tickets. The real estate client was established, but did not have much of an online presence outside a few subscribers to his podcast.

After Richard Hale was able to talk to him and discuss strategies, we were able to approve an online marketing campaign that would allow him the reach he needed to sale tickets.

Case Study Outlook

Objective: Sell real estate event tickets
Niche: Real Estate
Real Estate Marketing Segment: List Presentation
Pricing: 3 Levels Of Pricing – $199-$349
Lead And Traffic Sources: Facebook, Active Rain, EventBright

Our Planning And Approach

  • Build Landing Page
  • Use EventBright To Sale Event Tickets
  • Run Facebook Ads
  • Join Active Rain

Building The Landing Page

The landing page we built was designed with Divi Page Builder, a drag and drop page builder designed specifically for WordPress websites. There’s several key points to any landing page;

  • Strong CTA – We built a strong CTA above the fold, this is the prime real estate for your landing page. The copy we wrote had strong action. You should always A/B test your landing pages by using different copy, CTAs, images and positioning. We only had 40 days until the event. Our copy was a rock star from day one, so we didn’t do much editing.
  • Integration – Since the client didn’t want to mess with payment processors, we decided to integrate the landing page with EventBright. All ticket sales would be done through their platform. EventBright has custom widgets that we could use and integrate with the website.
  • One Main Purpose – A lot of marketers and designers overwhelm customers by adding too many elements to the page. This is often a mistake. We made it very clear what our priority offer was and what we wanted customers to do. Simple is better.

EventBright

As I said earlier, we integrated everything through the EventBright platform.

We built a second landing page on EventBright’s platform. We also used EventBright for easy payments and felt it would be more trusted than trying to set up payment processing on the website.

Running Facebook Ads

Since we only had 40 days to get everything done and we wanted to target local audience segments, we decided to run our ads on Facebook.

We chose to run an ad with an image that represented real estate training. Our client had hosted a prior event of him speaking in front of attendees. We felt it was very relevant, appropriate and would give users the visual impact they needed to click on the ad. This worked very well.

Since we had two main landing pages, we wanted to test both.

  • We sent Facebook traffic to the landing page we built on his main website.
  • We also built a landing page on the EventBright platform and sent traffic there.

We wanted to see which landing page sold the most event tickets. We were shocked by the results (below).

Facebook allows you to target audience segments and locations. This allowed us to directly target those in the area of the event and users that had interest in real estate.

We did such a great job targeting interest, our ad spend was only $5-$10 a day, eventually totaling $200 in cost for our client.

Joining Active Rain

I wanted our client to get the most exposure for his event, so promoting real estate events in the past, I knew Active Rain was a great platform to join.

He joined Active Rain for free, he was able to create a great profile and also published a high quality article there. The content was not used to promote the event, but rather show his expertise in real estate listings.

Real Estate Events Case Study

The Results

It took us 5 days to build, integrate and setup everything mentioned above. That gave us 35 days (5 weeks) to promote the event.

The real estate event tickets were high priced tickets, starting at $199 all the way up to $299.

The strategy we decided to use was to give early ticket holders the lowest price at $199. We called it an “earlybird special.”

  • 32 event tickets sold – $8,341.00
  • After EventBright Cost – $8,100.68
  • Walk-Ins for event – $1,002.40

Facebook ads only cost us $200, leaving our total revenue at $8,903.08

Huge Conversion Rate Driving Traffic From Facebook To Website Landing Page

High Conversions Using Facebook Marketing

What impressed us the most was our conversion rate with Facebook traffic to our website landing page. I thought we’d see more sales driving traffic to our landing page on EventBright, but that was not the case. Split test like this allowed us to build on the landing page that wasn’t converting as well.

We used 2 tracking links, one to track Facebook traffic to EventBright and one to track Facebook traffic to the website landing page.

We saw 35.42 percent of traffic convert that hit our website landing page.

We saw only 0.73 percent of traffic convert when we traffic went to our EventBright landing page.

A conversion test such as this is extremely helpful because we used this data to change the EventBright landing page for the next event. Just out of curiosity, we saw conversions increase by 21.4 percent.

On top of these results, we also saw a few hundred new subscribers and a few hundred new downloads. On the website landing page, we added optins for users to use and it worked well.

What We Learned And What You Can Take Away

Tracking and testing is important to any business. It allows you to build, test and consistently make the right improvements. Test everything.

While $8K in revenue is not overwhelming, I’d take $9K for a few hours work any day of the week. Imagine if your real estate events were bringing in $9K revenue over and over again.

Facebook marketing works and it’s great to use for local events, but your ad and landing page are equally important. Learn how you can build a Conversion Rate Optimization Roadmap.

If you have a local event planned for the future and need help promoting it, reach out and contact us. We’d love to hear from you. Hope you found this case study helpful.

 

Analytics And Data |

May 27, 2016

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How To Protect Big Data

Here are three quick tips to help protect sensitive data. 

The main question is, how can real analysis and business goals be supported while also ensuring that your sensitive data is protected no matter what specific form it happens to take – files, streaming, structured, etc.?

Although the task might appear to be a daunting one, it is possible to address specific data protection issued using a focused practical approach that can offer concrete benefits for the near term.  Protecting sensitive information from those who don’t have a right to see it -whether that happens to be the eyes of a trusted partner, a contractor or someone within the organization – is an achievable and reasonable goal to have.  So let’s break this issue down by providing three quick tips.

 1. Discover sensitive date and understand it.

Ask 5 colleagues of your what data records are considered as payment card information and most likely you will be given 5 different answers.  Before you roll out a data protection strategy for your enterprise, a cross functional team should be formed to determine what is considered to be sensitive data and what needs to be protected.

All data is not high risk.  There have been many failures based on the fact that the distributed data landscape was not well understood or where sensitive data is located.  Remember that sensitive data gets shared and duplicated with third parties such as vendors and business partners and across both non-production and production systems.

 2. Monitor data activity and audit it without slowing performance down.

When data activity is monitored and audited it will provide you with complete insight into all data transactions and their whos, whats, whens and hows.  When you have complete access history, it allows you to understand application and data access patterns as well as the ability to respond in real time to suspicious activity, enforce your data change controls and prevent data leakage.

The best monitoring solutions also offer automated complicated reports that are delivered on a scheduled basis.  These should be distributed to oversight teams for escalation and electronic sign-offs.  Remediation activities results should also be documented.  Be wary of any solutions relying on native logging since they likely will inhibit instead of support you being able to do real time analytics.

 3. Mask sensitive information within documents, analytics, reports, databases and applications.

Mask your sensitive information without data privacy being compromised.

Yes, that is correct.  Data can be masked inside of analytics platforms without anything getting broken.

This technology is called semantic masking.  It de-identifies data within context that is based on rules that ensure consistent and accurate results for analytics.  What is valuable about semantic masking is its ability to retain usefulness of data while adhering to regulation and compliance requirements at the same time.

Here is an example scenario for us to explore.  Semantically masked data has the same gender and symptoms but the ethnicity, family income and age are masked intelligently to a valid data point set and proper range.  This results in privacy being protected while researchers still achieve valid results.

Every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is being created, so it is now time to obtain a thorough understanding of sensitive data and get business-driven security policies established in order to keep business, customer, personally identifiable information (PII) as well as other kinds of sensitive data safe.  The foundation of successful data security strategies is focusing on discovering, auditing, monitoring and data masking. This piece by Barclay Simpson covers a lot of what’s important.

The bottom line is that with more and more analytics systems now storing sensitive data it increases the risk exponentially of there being a breach.  With more data stores risk is far greater.