Design Thinking for Innovation Assignment:  Learning Launch

Challenge

This is a challenge pertaining to the real estate industry.  It is a business transformation challenge  where there is a dire need to move traditional marketing into digital marketing space in order to  generate buyer leads.

Most property agents are accustomed to traditional marketing methods such as road shows, door- knocking, cold-calling, sending mailers, newspaper ads, etc. Some of these methods have been  around for a long time because it allows the agents to access their potential targets quite easily.  For  eg,  in my country,  door-knocking clearly targets certain community house owners who may have a  higher potential to buy another property near their vicinity so that their children can live near to  them. However, clearly, in today’s age, traditional marketing is deemed intrusive, expensive,  time- consuming and does not work as well.

To move into digital marketing for lead generation, the challenge is to discover how we could move  traditional marketing into the digital space while yielding higher quality buyer leads, use less agent’s  time, and cost less advertising dollars per lead. We decide to use design thinking to solve this  challenge.

Selection

The team has already gone pass the “What is” and “What if” stage. At this point, the team has a  reasonable understanding of the potential buyer profile, demographics, interest that could make  them a high quality buyer lead if we could reach out to them effectively in the digital space. The  team has also decided to use Facebook advertising as a small scale experiment and use the Learning  Launch tool to discover possible targeting ideas within Facebook ads that could yield the best quality  leads at the lowest advertising cost.

Application

Before we use the Learning Launch tool,  we made some assumptions on which targeting method  within FaceBook that would accomplish our challenge objectives.  We did the targeting configuration  based on the buyer’s profile (discovered in the “what is” stage) and ran a small advertising budget  for 2 weeks. During the two weeks, we analyse the number of buyer leads that we got, the potential  of them (high quality or low quality)  and the cost per lead.

The results that we got was not what we desired.  While some buyer leads were of high quality, the  cost per lead was much higher than expected.  Something was amissed in the way we configured the  targeting.  We re-look into our starting assumptions, kept what we felt was working with our results,  but change some of the other assumptions after engaging with those buyer leads who are less  interested in our properties.

We made a 2nd run of the Learning Launch tool after re-adjusting our targeting options, making use  of the information that we got from the acquired buyer leads. This time round,  the results were far  better;  we managed to acquire buyer leads who are truly interested in our properties at a much  lower advertising cost per lead. As these were really keen buyers, we also have had better  engagements with them with less time consumed as compared to traditional marketing methods.

Insights

The Learning Launch tool was great in testing our assumptions under a small scale environment.   Very quickly, we realised the following insights:

1) Despite a great deal of work in discovering the high potential buyer leads profile and

property needs through the “what is” stage, the learning launch allow us to re-adjust our  findings and assumptions as it gets into a real life situation.  Some of the assumptions  derived from the “what is” stage were not wrong; they were just not suitable for the current  properties that we are selling, but those assumptions could be useful for other category of  properties.

2) The learning launch tool allows us to make mistakes fast and cheap. During the 2 weeks of

the first run, we knew something was wrong but because the budget we used was relatively  low, we could quickly pivot to other assumptions without heavy losses.

3) We realised that some of the initial assumptions tested were due to personal/ experience

biasness that may have contributed to the poor results of the first launch.

Approach    The learning launch was a great tool that eventually allow us to successfully transform our  traditional marketing methods to digital marketing which is less intrusive, better leads quality and  lower ad cost per lead. However, if we were to re-use the learning launch tool again (on another  challenge), we would include a few more members of varying experience and know-how to mitigate  away any personal/experience biasness in designing the Learning Launch.

