The Santa Lucia Preserve is an exclusive ranch community near Carmel, California, co-located with the Santa Lucia Conservancy. Serving fewer than 300 families, the Preserve aims to protect nature while providing a strong sense of community for its residents and members. In late 2018, with limited prior social media and no prior digital marketing presence, the Preserve partnered with Level Up Digital to drive sales of these multi-million dollar properties and exclusive memberships.

The Challenge: Developing a digital presence for a niche market. 

The challenge for our Level Up Digital team was to develop from scratch a digital marketing presence and program to generate leads and traffic from a high income, high net-worth niche of executives and tech entrepreneurs seeking homes with a private club membership. Additional challenges included: how to tie campaign performance to actual sales of memberships/homes and how to market a product with a high price point and long consideration period (several months to several years). 

The Journey: Finding the right digital marketing partner and setting goals.

Prompted by a Board member who had done work with Andrew from our Level Up team, the client sought advice on how to move their marketing online. Together, we agreed on two main goals. First: create awareness in the target market. Second: develop a sales funnel to build website traffic, generate leads, and drive sales of homes, homesites (land), and community memberships.

Our Solution: Audit the site, identify platforms, deliver targeted ads that convert. 

To get our client the best possible results, we started by conducting an audit of the Santa Lucia Preserve website and evaluated its performance. We then identified the best marketing platforms to reach the target market and developed campaign performance reporting through HubSpot so we could tie campaigns to individual prospects.

Next, the Level Up Digital team developed a strategy to showcase Santa Lucia Preserve’s properties on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube, and LinkedIn Ads with a combination of prospecting and remarketing.

Additionally, we developed 2 high-quality downloadable PDFs to act as lead magnets. The first was a real estate guide to showcase the Preserve and all of its available homes and homesites. This asset is updated to match current availability. The second was a  membership guide that showcased the Preserve and detailed the different types of memberships available. Both guides were made available to prospects who provided their contact information. Lastly, we captured leads via Unbounce landing pages and created several versions to test the conversion rate. 

Implementation: Create campaigns, implement tracking, continually optimize and improve. 

The client committed to a reasonable monthly spend, which was paused for 2 months during the start of the pandemic and was resumed with changes to reflect the benefits of the client’s product offering as a refuge in difficult times. We were able to implement full-funnel tracking by combining tracking from several platforms:

• Google Ads and Google Analytics Tracking

• Facebook Ads Pixel Tracking

• HubSpot Tracking down to the individual person after they became a lead, all the way until actual sale.

Throughout the campaign, we made adjustments to spend across platforms to ensure high-quality leads. 

Results: Exceeded Expectations for Real Estate Sales and Memberships.

Santa Lucia Preserve experienced record sales activity, meeting its 2020 sales goals before the end of the 2nd quarter. They sold 16 homes and 32 homesites for a total of $94 million. Additionally, they sold 47 Ranch Club Memberships and 73 Preserve Golf Club Memberships, far exceeding expectations.  Per the client’s marketing team, “Buyers flocked to the community to enjoy the benefits of open space and outdoor activities, convenient services, and a ‘work from home’ refuge.”

The Level Up Digital team was able to deliver the following measurable results:

• Increased Google Ads traffic by 150% from 2019 to 2020

• Achieved a Google search click-through rate of 8.62% vs. a benchmark of 3.17%. 

• Delivered a CPC of $1.94 vs. a benchmark of $2.69

• Increased Hubspot form completions by 72%

• Improved leads captured from Unbounce landing pages by 889% 

• Increased site traffic by 32% year over year. 

Our digital marketing delivered 280 phone calls, 779 Unbounce landing page form fills and 111 Hubspot form fills. By partnering with Level Up Digital, the Santa Lucia Preserve was able to far exceed its 2020 goals.