Zillow Chief Marketing Officer Amy Bohutinsky said the company’s foray into television advertising is working well, and that the Seattle-based real estate company now commands more than 50 percent of all real estate visits across the category. That’s up from 25 percent two years ago, prior to its national ad campaign, one that’s known to pull on the heartstrings of viewers.
“It is this TV campaign that has fueled most of this,” said Bohutinsky, referring to the company’s “Find Your Way Home” campaign.
But Bohutinsky, who has worked at Zillow for 10 years, was also clear about the company’s core principle when it comes to advertising.
“Don’t spend on advertising until we are really, really, really good at building great products and driving free traffic,” said Bohutinsky, speaking today in a video interview on the Twitter-owned Periscope app.
Bohutinsky said the company still drives the bulk of its traffic through earned or organic channels like public relations, social media, content marketing and email marketing. And while substantial traffic comes off those channels, Bohutinsky said that they use advertising as an accelerant to grow even more audience.
“It is something that has worked exceptionally well with the Zillow brand,” she said.
Yes, it has. The Zillow Group, which also consists of Trulia, StreetEasy and Hotpads, reported 139.6 million unique visitors for the month of March. The company also recently said that it operates three of the top five brands in the rentals business.
Zillow has said that it plans to spend more than $100 million this year advertising its properties in a continued push to grow audience, with a large chunk of the advertising spend occurring this summer during the peak home buying and selling season.
In today’s video, Bohutinsky called the TV spots for Zillow “beautiful and really meaningful,” but she also said that the ads just work.
She added that Zillow Group will continue to evaluate advertising for all of the company’s brands, making decisions based on the stage of the brand’s life cycle.
“The decisions we make everyday as a multi-brand portfolio is: What are the right strategies and tactics to build each individual brand at this stage and time,” she said. “And, in doing that, how do we make our Zillow Group footprint as large and meaningful as possible so it benefits our advertising.” She declined to say how much each individual brand is spending on advertising this year.
Even so, Bohutinsky said that there’s a huge opportunity to create a dominant brand in real estate.
“Right now, there is still so much opportunity in this category of U.S. consumers who don’t use Zillow or Trulia or any other national real estate brand, so there is so much opportunity,” she said. “We still think it is really important as a company to capture that opportunity, to invest heavily to be able to own the hearts and minds of consumers when they are shopping for homes.”
Bohutinsky’s comments come amid chatter that Zillow could be sold, possibly to Google.
Here’s a look at one of the ads now running in the “Find Your Way Home” campaign:
