Brand Awareness Isn’t Soft. It’s Infrastructure.
A slower housing market isn’t just a challenge to manage. It’s a window to get ahead. While others pull back or lean entirely on incentives to drive short-term conversions, Gunn Jerkens and Brookfield Residential NorCal made a different bet.
It was a bet built on a simple but often overlooked premise: buyers who already know you are easier to convert than buyers who don’t.
The Insight
Conversion campaigns are a critical part of the mix. The question isn’t whether to run them; it’s what you put in place before them. When awareness does its job first, conversion campaigns don’t have to rebuild familiarity and trust from scratch every single time.
The alternative is to treat brand awareness not as a soft marketing expense, but as pipeline development: build the audience first, then give them a reason to move.
That’s exactly what we did.
Phase 1: Life. It’s On. (January – February 2026)
Before asking anyone to act, we focused on one thing: making Brookfield Residential NorCal impossible to ignore.
A full-funnel media strategy put the brand in front of qualified buyers across video, display and social—not to generate immediate leads, but to build the kind of familiarity that makes conversion easier when the moment arrives.
The results were immediate and measurable:
- Web traffic more than doubled compared to the prior quarter
- Organic traffic increased 110%
- Video completion rates exceeded 99%
- Paid media grew more efficient over time as audiences self-selected and engagement quality improved
On average, it took just 3.1 interactions for a buyer to convert. In digital marketing, that’s remarkably low. It means buyers arrived already warmed up, already familiar and already closer to a decision than they typically would be.
Even more telling: 75% of buyers who ultimately converted had been reached by CTV—connected television ads served on streaming platforms. That’s not a coincidence. It’s evidence that high-impact video, watched in a laid-back environment at home, was building the kind of brand familiarity that made everything downstream perform better.
Awareness channels weren’t just generating impressions. They were shortening the path to purchase.
Phase 2: 70th Anniversary Event (Launched March 2026)
With a warm, engaged audience already in place, Phase 2 had something most campaigns don’t: a head start.
Brookfield Residential’s 70th Anniversary was a milestone worth celebrating and a natural moment to give buyers a compelling reason to engage. The campaign launched with a clear business goal: drive qualified traffic, generate leads and get buyers through the door. Conversions here meant exactly that—phone calls and form fills from buyers ready to take the next step toward a visit.
The results reflected the strength of what had been built in Phase 1:
- Over 12,000 landing page views in the first month
- Branded search surged with a 22% click-through rate
- Social drove more than half of total traffic
- 35 conversions were directly tied to buyers first introduced to the brand during Phase 1
Those 35 buyers didn’t appear out of nowhere. They had been in the funnel since January, nurtured through awareness and re-engaged at exactly the right moment. The incentive gave them a reason to act. The awareness method made sure they were ready.
Performance didn’t start from zero. It accelerated.
What This Means
The pressure to chase short-term conversions is real, especially when the market is slow and every lead feels precious. But the data from this campaign makes a clear case for a different model.
When awareness is treated as infrastructure rather than overhead, conversion campaigns work harder, cost less and perform longer. The audience is warmer. The message lands faster. The trust is already there.
In a market where buyers take longer to decide, the smartest investment you can make is in the time before they’re ready to act.
That’s not a soft strategy. That’s how you build a pipeline.
If you’re ready to rethink how your campaigns work, we’re ready to help.