How to find more International buyers

From Zero to 600% ROI in 3 months!

Client: relo real estate
Location: Costa Del Sol
Website: www.reloreal.com

Breaking into the real estate market is no small feat, especially in a competitive region like the Costa del Sol. For startups, the challenges can feel insurmountable: low visibility, minimal trust, and fierce competition from established players. However, with a clear strategy and the right tools, even a brand-new agency can thrive.

In this case study, I’ll take you through the steps we used to help a startup estate agency achieve a staggering 600% return on investment (ROI) in just three months. 

Let’s break it down into actionable strategies, starting with the most fundamental element: branding.

1. Laying the Foundation: A Comprehensive Branding Exercise

Why Branding Matters

Branding is more than just a logo or color scheme. It’s about creating a distinct identity that resonates with your target audience and sets you apart in the market. For our client, this meant building a brand that exuded trust, professionalism, and local expertise – key factors for attracting property buyers in the Costa del Sol.

The Process

We began by diving deep into their business values, target market, and unique selling propositions (USPs). From there, we developed a brand that would appeal to both international buyers and local investors. Here’s what we focused on:

• Core Values and Mission Statement: We articulated what the agency stands for—providing high-quality properties and excellent customer service.
• Visual Identity: A sleek, professional logo was created alongside a cohesive color palette and typography that reflected the sophistication of the Costa del Sol market. This also matched their ambition to move into other territories in Spain.

The Outcome

This comprehensive branding exercise gave our client a professional identity that built credibility from the outset. Every marketing effort, from their website to their social media ads, reinforced this brand, making them instantly recognisable to their audience.

Branding is a key element of any successful business, and it is something that is quite often overlooked. In an area like the Costa Del Sol, buyers are looking for a lifestyle and not just a brand. Your brand needs to reflect the audience and their dreams of a better life. If you have a brand that doesn’t match the audience, what possible reason would a buyer have for using your services over one of your competitors, perceived value is highly attributed to your brand. This encourages people to open the door with your company.

2. Crafting a High-Impact Website (Obvious, right?)

The Website as a Conversion Machine

A website isn’t just a digital brochure; it’s a powerful tool that can drive leads, nurture prospects, and convert them into customers. For our client, we designed a website that did all of the above while offering an exceptional user experience.

Key Features We Implemented

• Responsive Design: With over 60% of web traffic coming from mobile devices, the site was optimised for seamless functionality across all screen sizes.
• Fast Load Times: A slow website can kill conversions. We ensured the site loaded quickly, keeping visitors engaged and improving SEO performance.
• Integrated Property Search: Users could easily browse, filter, and view properties by location, price range, and property type, enhancing their experience.
• Professional Imagery and Videos: High-quality visuals showcased the properties and the lifestyle offered in the Costa del Sol.
• Clear Calls-to-Action (CTAs): Each page was designed with conversion in mind, featuring CTAs that guided users to inquire, book a viewing, or subscribe to updates.
• Data Collection Features: Their platform engages users at any stage of their journey with the website, if they are just browsing for information, looking to book a viewing, shortlist a property, share listings with their own contacts. The website is perfectly suited for this.
• Content: Content always has and always will be the significant factor in ensuring you have a successful website presence. And by successful, we mean a website that attracts the relevant audiences organically. To do this, we provided our client with a website that allows them to create content on various levels such as; news/blog articles, Area Guides, Landing Pages, Search Page Content and much more.
• CRM Integration: A fundamental aspect of your website should be it’s integration with your chosen CRM system, allowing you to efficiently connect any enquiries or website interaction with the CRM. Enabling your sales teams to focus on the best opportunties quickly.

Results

The website quickly became a lead-generation powerhouse, converting casual browsers into serious buyers. It reflected the agency’s professionalism and provided a seamless user journey from discovery to inquiry.

3. Driving Highly Relevant Traffic

Why Traffic Quality Matters

You could have the best website in the world, but without the right audience, it won’t perform. Our next challenge was to drive highly relevant traffic to the site… specifically, potential buyers looking for properties in the Costa del Sol.

Our Approach

Google Ads

We launched a series of targeted Google Ads campaigns. These ads were specifically designed to capture high-intent traffic, appearing only when users searched for terms like “Costa del Sol properties for sale” or “luxury homes in Marbella.” The Google Ad campaigns were very comprehensive, focusing on many long tail keywords too to drive as much relevant traffic to the website as possible, for as little cost as we could.

Social Media Advertising

Using platforms like Facebook and Instagram, we created highly targeted campaigns. By leveraging advanced targeting options, we reached users based on their location, interests, and behaviors, such as following property-related pages or showing interest in luxury travel.

SEO

Within 3 months, we were able to achieve a steady flow of 50+ organic unique visitors to the website per day. This starts with a comprehensive SEO content plan, and implementing the right content into the right areas. 

With SEO, focus needs to be made on the pages that you want to rank for a certain term, then any additional terms around that would all lead back to this pillar page.

Many people focus on the more glamorous and vanity driven keywords, BUT you can achieve much more success by thinking outside of the box and diversifying to target the lesser thought of keywords.

Still to come from an SEO perspective, are the Link Building and Internal Linking strategies which will be worked on indefinitely to get the very best results possible.

The Numbers

Within weeks, the site was attracting 300 unique visitors daily – each one a potential buyer actively searching for properties in the region. This influx of targeted traffic laid the foundation for lead generation, and a great platform for future success.

4. Re-Engaging Visitors with Remarketing Campaigns

The Power of Remarketing

Not every visitor converts on their first visit. In fact, most don’t. That’s why remarketing is such a critical component of this digital strategy. It has allowed our client to stay top of mind and re-engage users who have already shown interest.

What We Did

• Dynamic Remarketing Ads: These ads automatically displayed properties that visitors had previously viewed, enticing them to return and take action.
• Email Retargeting Campaigns: We set up automated email sequences targeting users who had submitted inquiries or browsed properties. Personalised recommendations kept them engaged.
• Social Media Remarketing: Users who had visited the website but hadn’t converted were shown ads on Facebook and Instagram, reminding them of the agency’s offerings.

The Impact

Remarketing significantly increased the likelihood of conversion, helping us turn casual browsers into serious leads. It also boosted brand recall, ensuring our client stayed at the forefront of buyers’ minds during their decision-making process.

We split the ad spend for Paid Search and Paid Social, and ad spend on the Paid Social side of things will grow to take more of the Ad Spend share over time. This is due to the fact that relo will be building more audiences as time passes, which presents more opportunity to remarket.

5. Creating High-Converting Landing Pages

Why Landing Pages Are Essential

Driving traffic to a generic homepage can dilute your message and reduce conversions. Instead, we created tailored landing pages designed specifically to convert traffic into leads. This works by increasing the relevance of the page that the user lands on following conducting their search.

Our Strategy

• Focused Content: Each landing page targeted a specific audience segment, such as those searching for beachfront villas or city-center apartments.
• Compelling Headlines and Copy: The content was crafted to immediately capture attention and communicate value.
• Optimised Design: With minimal distractions, clear CTAs, and persuasive elements like social proof and urgency, these pages were built for maximum conversions.
• A/B Testing: We continually tested different versions of the landing pages to optimise performance and improve conversion rates.

The Outcome

These high-converting landing pages played a crucial role in generating leads, with conversion rates significantly higher than the industry average.

Check out the sample page here >

The Results Speak for Themselves

In just three months, our client achieved incredible growth:

• Daily Website Traffic: From 0 to 300 unique visitors per day.
• Enquiries: Month 1 = 30, Month 2 = 50, Month 3 = 70.
• Property Viewings and Sales: 8 viewings, 3 completed sales.
• Pending Sales: 12 deals in progress.
• ROI: A remarkable 600%.

Ready to Transform Your Agency?

This success story demonstrates what’s possible with a well-executed digital strategy. If you’re ready to take your estate agency to the next level, we’d love to partner with you.

Get in touch today, and let’s start building your success story –