What do you do if your company is being described as “stodgy” by Millennials? How do you attract a younger audience without alienating your Gen X and successful Boomer clients? That’s what Windermere Real Estate was facing.

With a nearly 50 year legacy and flashy brands like Zillow and Redfin invading their space, Windermere needed to step up their game.

Easier said than done when your budget is limited, and you’re up against VC-backed and publicly traded companies with plenty of money to spend. So they needed to get creative and find a space where they could stand out. That space was Spotify.

The music platform, a favorite among Millennials, gave Windermere the space to create their own branded station with home-themed playlists that could appeal to all generations. Spotify also provided branded QR codes to directly engage consumers with Windermere’s channel in an off-line environment, i.e. OOH, business cards, and TV ads.

Since launching their branded station, Windermere has earned more than 100K monthly active users and seen an 18% increase in direct traffic to their website. Spotify now plays an integral role in Windermere’s media strategy.

Challenge

Windermere Real Estate is a residential real estate network in the Western U.S. with more than 300 offices and 6,500 agents. Established back in 1972, the long-standing brand found itself competing with more modern real estate companies like Zillow and Redfin.

“We were getting a lot of feedback from our own agents and franchise owners that they weren’t seeing us, they weren’t hearing about us, and yet they thought that they were seeing and hearing from our competition all the time…and that really prompted the impetus of, we’ve got to stand out more,” says Windermere CMO, Julie Dey.

The challenge was not only to be more impactful in the market, but to do so with a relatively small budget.

“We’re in a space where our competition is mostly public companies, publicly traded companies or VC backed firms that have a lot of marketing dollars, and we’re a private, independently owned company and we have a lot less. And then we’re hearing all this noise from the competition about we have great technology and our widgets are really great…I don’t have a lot of money, but what I do have needs to feel like we’ve got a gazillion dollars, and that definitely led us to, I would say, more creative ideas.”

For those creative ideas, Julie turned to Britt Fero, the principal & founder of Seattle-based marketing agency, PB&. “Windermere has been a real estate company for many years, and there’s the constant challenge of keeping agents engaged in their brand.”

Keeping their agents engaged and involved wasn’t Windermere’s only challenge, as Dey explains.

“Primarily our buyers would typically mirror the demographics of our agents, which was fairly a Gen X, Boomer-type generation, so we definitely knew that we had a gap in terms of reaching a younger audience…but we didn’t want to focus on Millennials or Gen Z at the sake of abandoning our Gen X and really successful Boomer clients.”

“It’s really a dual challenge at a broader level, adds Fero, how do we continue to kind of build pride and visibility amongst agents, but also do that as new-generation real estate consumers come into the market and create a strategy that can create that overlap?”

Execution

“What drew me to PB&’s approach is the way that they think and look at a problem, this is very strategic and very laser-focused,” says Dey. According to Fero, “We couldn’t just go buy spots and dots, there wasn’t enough money for that. It wasn’t going to stand out in the right way, and it would just feel kind of that [it] could potentially get lost and spread us too thin, and so we said, what’s an audio program that we could develop, and Spotify, not only was it the number one streaming platform for millennials, it also offered some creativity, it allows brands to create these branded stations and as we looked at it, there wasn’t any other real estate company active in that space in particular.”

Since music traditionally plays a significant role in many home-based occasions, Fero believed Spotify would offer Windermere the opportunity to authentically integrate itself into those moments. “Agents use music at open houses.…they give gifts to their clients once they buy a property. What if we could offer open house soundtracks that agents could use that are curated and designed for those occasions.”

Dey adds, “As that kind of client gift goes, it is a good reminder of the great relationship that you had with that agent, so that when you do have a change of circumstance, where you do need a new house or house in a different city or whatever it is, you have that agent top of mind and a very favorable opinion of Windermere.”

So why choose Spotify over other music platforms?

“Spotify actually allows brands to [create stations] without any investment. Pandora offers a branded channel that comes with significant investment, and so thinking about limited dollars that mattered, but, more importantly, it was the right place to be…Spotify was the right audience for us, and it was growing in terms of popularity against millennials, it was the number one streaming platform.”

In collaboration with Windermere, the PB& team rolled out roughly eight original home-themed playlists the first year. They formulated the song mix based on other Spotify trends, the popularity of songs, and the popularity of other playlists.

“We started with a lot of playlist topics that are really closely tied to big home occasions…open houses moving day, cleaning, housewarming parties, dinner parties, the holidays, things where home is really centric, says Fero.

“Spotify has a generated playlist for almost anything you could think of, and they obviously have full access to all the best data and algorithms, and so I draw from what they’ve already created as kind of a base, and then I’ll also match a mood to a playlist. So, if we have a playlist called cleaning motivation, I don’t want, like, slow jazz,” explains PB& strategist, Kaila Robinson.

“It’s a mix of both Millennial and other generations. We didn’t want to exclude. Again, we knew that overlap was going to be important, so those playlists are designed to be relevant and consumable by both audiences,” adds Fero.

Windermere continually added new playlists to their station and changed up their song mix, depending on what music was seeing the most traction. But even with that, Fero knew they couldn’t, just build it, and people will come.

“We knew we had to do some lifting…we did run ads on Spotify that link back to the station and raise the visibility, and we also merchandised the station with agents…people were engaged in Spotify, they’re listening to music, and now we’re going to give them a new option for music to check out in the environment they’re in.”

Early on, in 2019, Spotify was a standalone campaign for Windermere, but as the traction grew, by 2020, Spotify became a more integral part of their media strategy.

“We actually created a TV spot around Spotify, around music being kind of part of our lives in our homes that drove to the Windermere Spotify station, and we ran that spot in very specific programming, so we owned moments like the Oscars, The Masked Singer, American Idol…We’re going to surround those music events with a music message, again, really thinking about how to be authentic to those platforms…and really use that to connect all the dots and drive traffic into the Spotify channel and also raise the visibility of the brand,” explains Fero.

Windermere not only leveraged the Windermere Spotify station as an advertising medium but as a tool as well. Fero says Spotify offered branded QR codes that they then integrated into other marketing assets.

“So essentially, think about it, a QR code where if you snap a picture of it with your phone or through Spotify it will take you directly to that playlist. And we thought, God, that’s such an awesome way for agents to integrate that into their own branding and to kind of close that loop with clients or promote the playlist in different ways so that it could be integrated into collateral. It could be used as email signatures, it can be used on social.”

“We would amplify a lot of that work through our own Windermere branded social media channels, says Dey. When we would release a new playlist and share that with our followers and do some boosted posts and some ads around that to help kind of make that connection between consumers and agents in the whole full effort.”

Results

Windermere’s main KPI for this campaign was engagement, something Fero tells us was very successful.

“We looked at reach metrics, like impressions, so that we know we’re delivering volume, but we really look at engagement with the station and with the playlists, and you know what we’ve seen is there are over 40,000 active users that engage with Windermere’s playlist every single month, and, for us, that’s a pretty big number.”

• Windermere’s station trended over 100K monthly active users in the summer of 2020.
• 10K active users engage with the Windermere playlists each month.
• Currently over 32K total playlist follows.
• Currently 755 profile follows.
• In 2020 Windermere experienced a 2600% lift in their playlist follows as they moved to an integrated strategy.
• In 2021 to date, they have seen the growth of another 20% and a 28% increase in their channel followers.
• In 2021 to date, there have been 2.4MM streams of their music, and 7.7MM minutes played. There’s an average of 60+minutes streamed daily per user.
• Windermere had the #2 most followed user-generated cleaning playlist on Spotify.
• Windermere ads running on Spotify have delivered a CTR that’s 600% over Spotify’s benchmark.
• All of this also contributed to an increase in branded search terms, an 18% increase in direct traffic to the site, and a 22% increase in social followers in 2020.
• Over 50% of Windermere streams come from Millennials with another 25% from GenX/Boomer and 20% from Gen Z (a growing audience).

Dey tells us, “The amount of traffic that we were receiving from branded search terms like Windermere was increasing, which you can’t exactly make that connection back to Spotify, but, through Spotify and other programs that we were running like that, we’re creating more awareness of the brand and people are showing that curiosity and going to Windermere to find out more.”

Key Takeaways

“The biggest thing we’ve probably learned is that pop performs really well. I think that’s just clearly the biggest audience on Spotify, and so finding different ways to lean into pop, whether one is really upbeat and the other one is maybe softer, kind of finding niches within pop, has generated our most successful playlist to date,” according to Robinson.

“What it’s showing us is just the importance of really having our finger on the pulse of culture and where are those moments that we can start to play that and, again, feel authentic and not like we’re trying to insert the brand somewhere it doesn’t belong,” adds Fero.

“Every year we’re adding anywhere between five to ten new playlists to bridge what’s going on in the culture, how we’re feeling about it, what we think might be important or interesting, and I think one thing I love about the Spotify opportunity is that it’s flexible and allows for this kind of creative opportunity,” says Dey.

“We’ll see how it plays into bigger efforts over time and if it continues to kind of have an integrated campaign wrapped around it, but I think it will always have that constant because music can really be that shared language that is a relationship builder,” says Fero.