Understanding the homebuyer journey to create a highly-targeted paid search campaign

In our research, we identified three key audiences to target – current customers, non-customers looking for a home loan (homebuyers), and real estate professionals (realtors, title companies, builders, etc.). Homebuyers would be targeted at different stages of their home buying process and real estate professionals were targeted to help with referral traffic. This strategy would aid us in establishing credibility for the bank as a respected leader in the community.

To uncover the opportunities for our audiences, we needed to outline the homebuyer consumer journey. By truly understanding the journey for each audience, especially online, we were able to take our learnings and develop a content strategy focused on capturing their attention at different touchpoints.

From this, we created a highly-targeted paid search campaign to capture buyers as they searched for a mortgage provider. By using product-focused keywords and actionable ad copy, we were able to give maximum visibility to the bank and capture bottom-of-the-funnel opportunities. We also created a social ad campaign that included Facebook native lead forms to  help us capture people further down the path – once they were ready to submit a mortgage interest form. Using a native lead form created a seamless user experience as people could submit information without having to leave the Facebook app.