hunters estate agents

Hunters opened its first branch in York back in the early ‘90s, and has since grown to become one of the UK’s leading estate agents, with hundreds of branches open across England and Wales.

They offer national coverage with local expertise and have ambitions to become the nation's favourite estate agent.

The highlights

• Enjoy is Hunters lead digital agency partner, working with them for 5+ years.
• While initially focused on driving localised branch performance, today we manage all of their strategic and performance marketing activity.
• Over the years, we’ve collaborated with Hunters on a number of flagship projects, from building their data dashboards, to brand tracking campaigns, digital strategy, activation and more.
• Our partnership has played a pivotal role in their growth, and we’ve helped position them as one of the leading names in the property sector.
• Our achievements include a 1,340% ROI, a 149% increase in revenue generated through digital, and a 630% increase in valuations.

The background

We’ve worked with Hunters since 2019, collaborating across 4 different brands within their portfolio, on both a B2B and B2C basis. Initially, we focused on driving localised branch performance. Today, we lead on all of their strategic and performance marketing activity, providing a range of digital marketing services across their paid, owned and earned channels.

Over the past 5 years, we’ve developed a brilliant partnership with Hunters, scooping-up their supplier of the year award in 2021, and more recently, supporting them through their acquisition by The Property Franchise Group.

The challenge

From the global pandemic to inflation spikes and regulatory reforms, the property market has faced several challenges in recent years. It’s also a dynamic and increasingly competitive landscape, with established estate agents and digital-first challenger brands all battling it out for market share.

Despite these obstacles, our partnership with Hunters has played a pivotal role in their continued expansion, and we’ve helped position them as one of the leading names in the property sector. As part of this, we’ve delivered several flagship projects which have all contributed to their success. Here, we outline just a few.

Our work

Data dashboard

Aiming to grow their national presence, Hunters approached us to identify potential areas for expansion.

We used our data engineering, data analysis, and visualisation expertise to produce an interactive map, along with data dashboards to highlight branch performance. This project offered Hunters a number of benefits:

• It enabled them to understand which branches were over and underperforming, taking marketplace nuances such as property value, audience demographics and localised demand into account.
• With this insight, Hunters could concentrate on improving underperforming branches, drawing lessons from the successes of the top-performing ones.
• Our work also helped Hunters pinpoint potential areas for openings and acquisitions. By identifying regions with similar marketplace conditions to their top-performing branches but with less coverage, we paved the way for Hunters continued expansion.

Brand tracker

In order to establish themselves as the “nation’s favourite estate agent”, Hunters would first need a baseline of brand awareness and sentiment — and a repeatable process to measure this over time. We’ve helped Hunters achieve this, through delivering regular brand health reports.

As part of this, we survey 1,000+ UK homeowners / first time buyers via our online panel partners, with questions designed to determine levels of brand awareness and consideration within the marketplace, for Hunters and their competition. We then analyse the results to identify emerging challenges, opportunities, and trends. This process allows us to continually adapt and reshape Hunter's strategy, applying data-driven insight to maximise the results.

Strategy & activation

To help Hunters grow in line with their ambitions — and bring continuous improvements to brand awareness and consideration — Hunters needed a solid strategy to underpin all of their organic activity.

Through our discovery programme, we noted that channel activity was disjointed, and proposed that greater consistency and content quality would generate better results.

To support this, we created an integrated content, social media and email marketing strategy, with channel-specific content calendars. This has enabled Hunters to engage with its audience more regularly, offering more relevant content across different channels and touchpoints within the user journey.

So, what next for Hunters and Enjoy? Well, recently we created an evolved digital strategy as part of a new retainer, which has seen the scope of our work extend to Digital PR, SEO and Paid Media. We’re not only responsible for the strategy, but also the day-to-day activation across these channels. And, although it's still early days, Hunters are already enjoying the results.

The results

While operating in the changing and challenging property landscape, our long-term partnership with Hunters has gone from strength to strength. And the results speak for themselves:

• 1,340% return on digital investment
• 149% increase in revenue generated via digital
• 17% increase in brand visibility
• 47% increase in consumers
• 630% increase in valuations

"Our long-term partnership with Enjoy has been hugely beneficial to our business. From the brand campaigns that have raised our visibility, to the wider initiatives that have driven more customers through our digital doors; they’ve generated some spectacular results for our business, and we’ve had a lot of fun along the way. Here’s to many more years of succeeding together!"

Austin Hedley-Richards​​​​, Digital Marketing Manager