Built to sell sections, not just chase clicks.

Sanderson Group is a family-owned developer of luxury retirement villages in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a track record stretching back to Omokoroa Country Estate in 1987 and a 2019 sale of three villages to Arvida Group for approximately $180 million.

Omokoroa Country Club is their newest project, a $280 million development on the Omokoroa Peninsula in Tauranga's inner harbour with around 170 standalone villas, approximately 50 apartments and an 80-bed dementia care facility on a 17-hectare site. Stitch was engaged in mid-2023 to run the digital media and marketing automation programme for the village launch, with creative delivered by Feast Creative Queenstown.

Selling a high-consideration property to a discerning buyer is not a click-bait exercise. The campaign needed to find a narrow audience of pre-retirees and recent retirees with the appetite, the equity and the timing to buy into a new village, then nurture them through a sales cycle measured in months, not minutes. All of this had to happen in the trough of the NZ property cycle, with annual sales down 41.3% from the June 2021 peak to 58,763 by May 2023 per REINZ, and in a measurement environment already fractured by Safari and Firefox cookie blocking and Chrome's announced deprecation pathway.

The brief was simple to write and difficult to execute. Drive enough qualified leads to fill the development, at a cost per lead that protected margin, with attribution clean enough for the board.

We built a privacy-first audience strategy on first-party data, then activated it across Meta Ads and Google Ads. Audiences were modelled rather than scraped, and we measured everything against modelled outcomes rather than the platforms' marking of their own homework. The media programme was managed end-to-end by Stitch, with daily optimisation against cost per qualified lead.

Behind the media, we built a marketing automation programme that did the heavy lifting once a lead was captured. Triggered emails carried the prospect from first enquiry through to sales-ready, with content matched to their stage and their stated preferences. We unified the enquiry, web, ad and CRM data into one trusted view of each prospect, so the sales team knew who was warm before they picked up the phone.

The work began on 16 June 2023 and the campaign has continued in market, with the lifecycle programme compounding on the media spend rather than burning out alongside it.

• 80% of leads from paid advertising, 20% from organic search and the marketing automation programme
• 15,000 triggered emails sent, 61% average open rate
• 5,100% increase in traffic to the Omokoroa Country Club website
• 3,438% increase in website views
• 70% increase in average engagement time and 30% increase in engaged sessions per user
• Millions in lot sales banked despite a trough property market
• Stack: Meta Ads, Google Ads, marketing automation, first-party audience modelling
• Timeframe: June 2023 onwards, sustained campaign

"We are thrilled with the outstanding results achieved through our partnership with Stitch. Their expertise in digital media and marketing automation, combined with the creative prowess of Feast Creative, has propelled Omokoroa Country Club to new heights. We look forward to continued success as we set new standards in retirement living."

A 1,282x return on ad spend is not a media result. It is what happens when you join the media, the data and the lifecycle into one programme that does not stop selling between ad impressions. We built it, we ran it, we measured it.