Transeastern Homes, a top Florida-based builder since 1986, hit a growth spurt in 2002 that triggered a seven fold jump in the number of residential communities in the company’s burgeoning portfolio and the marketing team growing from two to fifteen. The marketing budget ballooned almost overnight to $5 million and the team suddenly had hundreds of initiatives ranging from ads, Web sites, brokering open houses, golf tournaments and 4^th of July firework festivals to execute each year. It also had aggressive marketing campaigns to launch new communities and support sales at existing properties until sellout. Transeastern managed 1 million+ direct mail pieces, 1 million+ e-mail blasts, $2-3 million in print ads, $2 million in radio/TV spots, and 10 special events yearly.

With only 15 people in the marketing department of Transeastern Homes in charge of juggling over 100 different promotional efforts to help the company drive nearly $500 million in annual sales at multiple residential developments across the state, it was time to make a change to a better system of coordinating all the marketing efforts.

“When we were smaller, we could keep track of everything using paper files, Microsoft Outlook calendars and Excel spreadsheets, but even then some important items never made it into the folders, and doing things like comparing vendor costs took a lot of time,” said Joel Lazar, VP of Sales and Marketing. “With our growth, it was clear we needed a better system.”

Home Economics

Lazar needed an affordable, easy-to-use Windows-based project management tool with marketing-specific fields and functions that could be deployed out the box without customization. After looking at several solutions, he selected MarketingPilot and had the Interbase Professional edition installed on key workstations for roughly $2,500 per user, including media buying capabilities.

The newly installed MarketingPilot was immediately utilized. The firm’s event coordinator was able to input each activity into the system under an appropriate category such as “Job” or “Media”, and then break it down into specific tasks. Every print or online ad, TV or radio spot, brochure, direct mail piece, e-mail blast, sign, billboard, Web site, special event or other project in the pipeline could be easily entered and tracked via MarketingPilot from conception to completion. Each user could see his or her unique tasks at a glance, and managers could check status by user or project at any time.

Expenses could be entered as well and linked directly to jobs, vendors, media buys and so on. With a few clicks, managers could determine actual spending and compare changes from different vendors in different markets. Lazar notes, “MarketingPilot makes it easy to capture the data and gives us the answers we’re looking for in seconds.”

Savings

Transeastern has been able to achieve significant savings using the MarketingPilot system. Lazar estimates the system has also saved at least two full-time employees by enabling his staff to work more efficiently and refine their marketing strategy by showing what worked and what didn’t in each campaign.

Lazar says the system paid for itself within six months of purchase, in direct cost savings alone.