With Zoopla planning to maximise the festive peak for agents and consumers alike with the launch of a major new marketing campaign, set to go live next week, Andy Marshall, the portal’s chief commercial officer, reflects on past marketing campaigns and the value he says they have created for agents. 

It’s no secret that Zoopla, like many other well-known consumer brands across the UK, invests significantly in marketing to drive both awareness and preference amongst consumers.

Something I often hear from agents is what return on investment these marketing campaigns truly give to them. Today, I want to take a moment to look a bit closer at our recent marketing campaign (and share more insights about what it’s delivered for you) – as well as give you a sneak peek of what’s on the horizon for next year.

Building our unique homeowner database

We’re now much more than just a portal and for consumers specifically, we want to be their number-one destination if they want to sell their home or understand its value. Our latest ad campaign which focused on ‘house price research, without the awkwardness’ resulted in a clear step-change in Zoopla’s brand perception towards being a partner that can support the search and research needs of homeowners looking to find or sell their properties.

This resulted in an increase in unique homeowners tracking their properties on My Home by 33% and means that overall, we’ll have over 1m homeowners tracking their properties on Zoopla by the end of the year – on top of the 70m visits we get to our website each month. For agents – this means we are fostering a more comprehensive relationship with homeowners before their next move, building a connection and association with our brand and ensuring they return to Zoopla (and of course to you, our agents) when they’re ready to take action.

This will increase the overall volume of applicant and vendor sessions and, we believe, the quality of applicant and vendor leads as we nurture those with the highest propensity to instruct over time.

Driving high-intent leads

The data is already starting to prove this out. Our latest campaign saw a 57% increase in monthly active homeowners i.e. homeowners that are returning to Zoopla and completing a high-value action. This could be anything from tracking their property to saving a listing or submitting a lead with Zoopla. By building our homeowner database and offering them clear onsite journeys that not only don’t get in the way of but actually support their buying or selling intent, we’re aiming to maximise the lead potential for agents.

We build this kind of thinking into our combined product & marketing efforts to increase monthly engagement with valuable audiences and will keep improving the results we’re delivering for our customers over the coming year.

Suring up the pipeline for FY23

Our marketing campaigns will become more important than ever next year as the property market experiences a drop in demand and an anticipated drop in transactions to 1m due to the cost of living crisis and an increase in mortgage rates. However, despite this, there will always be a cohort of sellers looking to move and, right now, house prices and affordability will be one of their key considerations. Be it those older homeowners who want to release equity or second steppers who have an expanding family and need a larger property with more space.

Of course, we will also capture new applicants: rising rents and energy costs may prompt a move to more energy-efficient new builds and again, Zoopla will be there to support those journeys and nudge would-be buyers to speak to their local agent for expert advice.

Our upcoming marketing campaign, which is launching at the end of December will not only capitalise on the still-expected Boxing Day bounce but will also drive traffic to the Zoopla website and app during a traditionally busy period for the market – converting them into both vendor leads and applicant leads for you, our customers.

And we won’t stop there. Watch this space for 2023 as we deploy product and marketing efforts that will enable us to continue to build our market share in FY23 and ensure we have a continuous flow of primed sellers and applicants for agents throughout the year.