Strategic Opportunity
Real Estate Agents are increasing their advertising spend on social media as an additional channel for marketing properties, themselves and their agencies. Domain’s offering in this space launched five years ago but competitor products were attracting customers with new features and streamlined user experiences.
A significant opportunity existed for Domain to improve their current offering by leveraging data collected through their property portal and app to create social media ads targeted at high-intent property seekers. They set out to achieve this by launching a product called Social Boost.
The Social Boost product was critical for us. Our Agents wanted it, and the opportunity cost of not doing the project was losing our Agents to a competitor. In addition, there was a significant financial cost in not having a well-performing solution delivered quickly.
Improve Time to Market
Alembic was engaged from the beginning of the project, and remained involved throughout the delivery process; from discovery and design to implementation and release. The team collaborated with stakeholders across various teams within Domain to understand the problem and build a solution that enabled Domain to release a competitive offering in the space of marketing real estate through social channels.
The key features developed were better audience targeting of ads, agent branding on campaign creative, an instant go-live campaign booking experience, and improved reporting and insights into campaign performance. Automation of campaign booking, provisioning and billing were also essential.
The real positive in our engagement with Alembic was that our dedicated developers, Will and Nick, were as invested in the success of the product for the business as if they were direct Domain employees.
"They were keen to collaborate and be involved with other Domain teams beyond the direct delivery of the work that they were doing. So, for me it was the knowledge that you’re not just hiring ‘warm bodies’ to spit out code – rather we had a couple of highly engaged collaborators with our interests at the forefront."
Serverless Event Driven Architecture
The solution was an event-driven, de-coupled system built on a serverless architecture. The tech chosen supports spikes in usage during busy booking periods and scales-to-zero in off-peak times (i.e. running cost is minimal when the service isn’t in use). Removing the need to manage traditional servers also allowed Alembic to move quickly in building the solution with a focus on delivering value early. The new tech stack was integrated seamlessly into Domain’s existing technology ecosystem with additions such as per-developer testing environments and true Continuous Deployment.
9x Increase in Booking Volume
Alembic worked with the product, design, engineering, go-to-market, sales and support teams to deliver Social Boost, which launched nation-wide on 1 July 2021. The product resulted in a 9x increase in booking volume over Q1 FY22 and the end-to-end automation of the new product has set the stage for even further growth.
While our existing social product allowed Agents to advertise on Facebook, Social Boost performs at a much higher level. It has a lot more bells and whistles and it is far, far superior to our old model. And that’s fantastic. It complements our overall suite of products and keeps Domain up-to-date and on trend.
“This project was very much focused on delivering a baseline solution which enabled us to learn and iterate. The Alembic team allowed us to achieve the baseline offering, and after release Alembic continued to collaborate with other Domain stakeholders to better understand problems that existed, and what they saw as opportunities to improve the customer and user experience”.
“We’ve created a direct link between the end user and the team — there was a clear pathway to leveraging other activities within the group to bring Agent, Customer and Vendor feedback into what we planned for our V2 activity. That shows how much trust was built up between Domain and Alembic — they really were part of the team” concluded Ryan Job.
Better Outcomes Through Collaboration
We love working within companies that have a highly aligned strategy and strong relationships between their businesses and their engineering teams. When engineers work closely with the business, we get better outcomes.
Domain deeply understands how to use consultants. They welcomed us into one of their most strategic projects, trusted us to deliver, and supported us throughout.
Domain uses technologies that we love at Alembic including React, GraphQL, TypeScript, and Serverless. It’s an exciting time to be part of the Domain team.
