Estrella has a long and fascinating history! A master planned community in Goodyear, AZ, it was founded in 1988. Visionary at the time, today it features family neighborhoods, an active adult gated community, 72 acres of lakes with a “yacht club”, two Residents’ Clubs, championship Nicklaus Design golf club, commercial areas, restaurants, schools, churches, over 40 parks, and over 50 acres of trails. Tucked into the foothills of the Estrella Mountains, Estrella is already home to 21,000 residents.

In 2021, Harvard Investments reached out to Sieb for a marketing evaluation of the community, and consideration to take on this project from a branding, marketing, and lead generation perspective. In a newly formed Joint Venture with Värde Partners and Toll Brothers, they purchase the remaining thousands of acres, including water rights, certain amenities, and entitlement to build over 14,000 additional dwellings. Were we interested? You bet! As the conversation grew, the JV entrusted us to manage all branding and marketing, PR, social, the Welcome Center — as well as provide recommendation and managing the go-forward needed for upgrades to programming, facilities, amenities, events and much more.

EVALUATION & RECOMMENDATIONS

From club and community amenities to onsite marketing trail, signage, Welcome Center, parks, advertising campaigns, public relations, social media, and nurturing — we took a deep dive into it all. Our report, packed with research, statistics, revenue-based recommendations, and a fast-tracked critical path, became the working bible. Estrella had sold enviable numbers of homes over the years, yet we saw opportunities for enhanced and streamlined systems, technology, messaging and more. We knew we could provide far more leads while lowering costs dramatically and we were convinced we could help improve the existing Estrella experience. The client agreed and gave us the opportunity to prove it!

Welcome Center Refresh

A community of stature deserves a Welcome Center designed to impress. We wanted to showcase the surrounding Estrella Mountains and the “wild and free” natural lifestyle of Estrella. Working with Creative License, we designed the space for maximum impact and minimal building renovation, using existing electrical, lighting, etc. The unique benefits of Estrella shine through — from the abundant amenities to the onsite commercial, medical, 65+ miles of trails, 55 parks and A+ schools. Sieb spearheaded both the user and back-of-house technology including design, functionality and programming design, relying on our friends at CAKE to program.

WEBSITE

The new website had to be completed in record time— as there were at least seven tech systems linked to the old site that had to be decommissioned. Far more streamlined, using apis designed to feed inventory into the system automatically, and focused on higher lead capture, our new site was designed, written, and programmed in 90 days. The site’s UX improvements reaped immediate benefits as we crafted an uncluttered, user-friendly, streamlined site designed to drive leads directly to the homebuilders.

EVENT COORDINATION

Who doesn’t love a good party? Marketing for Estrella was fully turned over to us on January 1, 2022. With that, we also had the opportunity to work with city of Goodyear on the annual Goodyear Lakeside Music Festival — an all-day festival known and loved throughout the valley. We brought the fun — with fireworks, games areas, and thousands of LED light and glow-in-the-dark giveaways. Expectations were for 6,000 attendees, 8,500 showed up. Can’t wait for next year!

MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

Lead generation is the lifeblood of any business. There’s nothing more important than finding those ready, willing, and able to purchase your offering. What we found when we dug into the prior campaigns was plenty of traffic to the site, but very low lead generation when measured against dollars spent. Within less than 90 days, we had cut the spending in half and doubled the leads. As importantly, we put more guard rails into every campaign so our builders could see the quality of the leads, and effectively assess, rank, and respond.

SOCIAL CAMPAIGNS

We appreciate quality partners, and there are none better than The Ferraro Group. We have brought them into about a half dozen client projects and are never disappointed. Working hand-in-hand on strategy, they took the reach and awareness for Estrella to a 10x multiple within 90 days, without adding any additional costs. The magic is all campaigns align with the research, branding, paid media, events, website, and other endeavors.

COLLATERAL

Our philosophy on collateral is to focus first on lead generation and view collateral as fulfillment to the promise. Existing materials were tired, dated, and inaccurate. We had an opportunity to quickly realign all pieces to be more convenient, accurate, on brand and — importantly — provide clear messaging that is easy to consume.

BRAND GUIDELINES

We were surprised to find there was no existing Brand Guidelines for stakeholders, so we got to work to clean up and refine the logo and secondary logos and create a Guidelines document. With literally hundreds of stakeholders, this has already helped to realign the visual branding to a higher standard.