Small Business Marketing Case Study - The Think Tank Group

The Think Tank Group is a Leeds based "Estate Agency" type company, started in February 2004. With a focus predominately on Lettings.

Main Issues : Getting tenants to the website was the first issue, then, once they were rented out, getting more landlords on board was the next issue.

Marketing Solutions

Website : The Think Tank Group initially built its business online. We helped create the website, and found a way to ensure all of their properties were uploaded to the popular property portals such as rightmove, fish4homes and propertyfinder.

Once we did that, we started using Goole Pay per Click to drive traffic to the website, until the web site could be found easily on the search engines. 6 weeks later, The Think Tank Group hit the search engines, and we "powered down" the Pay per Click advertising.

We programmed the whole of the website, apart from the way you can serach for a property, which was a seperate property search portal, that we integrated in The Think Tank Group website seamlessly.

Once this was done, The Think Tank Group started to achieve arund 35,000 unique visitors every month.

Website Statistics and Analysis : We also use a piece of software that allows us to find out more about the customers hitting that website. We can find out for example, what people typed in google or msn, etc to get to that website. We can track how many hits, at what time of day, we can find out what browser they use and even what the most popular entry page was (that way, we get to improve that entry page, to make the site even more relevant).

Email Newsletters : The use of the Email Newsletter has resulted in a good number of active subscribers. Mainly the newsletter is targetted at Buy to Let Investor landlords, who often forward the mail to friends, colleagues & family. The newsletter continues to grow in subscriber numbers.

To Let Boards : The Think Tank Group had never used To Let boards before, as the website tended to rent out everything fairly quickly. However, it was noticed that it was more difficult to get landlords on board, as they were not aware of the ability to rent their property out. Therefore we decided to print 25 To Let boards, at a cost of £20 each, and then instructed a company to place the boards at the properties that were available. Once let, the boards were removed and place at the next location. The result of this was a marked increase in the number of landlords coming through and placing their property with The Think Tank Group.

Leafletting : Getting landlords has always been the most difficult aspect of the company. Therefore, we organised for 50,000 A4 leaflets, full colour, at a price of £1183.21 to be dropped (costing £35 per 1000). An average of 4,000 leaflets were dropped each week, meaning a 12 week marketing run. This, combined with the To Let boards and offline newspaper advertising ensured an increase in landlord activity and recognition of the Think Tank Group Brand.

Advertising : Whilst we prefer not to use advertising directloy for getting awareness and generating leads, in this industry, we felt that the one place that advertising was especially needed, was the Home section of the Yorkshire post, which is published every Friday. We implemented this with 2 half page adverts per month.