How Opendoor & Mavrck Exceeded Industry Benchmarks & Improved Brand Awareness Through Creators

The Challenge

Opendoor is a leading digital platform for residential real estate. Headquartered in San Francisco, Opendoor has been on a mission to make the home buying and selling process easier since 2014. One of its most recent marketing objectives was to invest in brand media to create demand and generate awareness. Thus, an investment in an influencer marketing platform and a partnership with Mavrck came to be.

As part of its digital marketing strategy, Opendoor has worked with Mavrck on several influencer marketing campaigns, which have helped take its social media presence to the next level by activating its new brand purpose. One of Opendoor’s latest influencer marketing campaigns centered around the theme “For Life’s New Opportunities,” a campaign that sought to celebrate life’s most important transitions and offer Opendoor as a simple and certain solution when one needs to move.

Opendoor’s goals for this campaign were to activate influencers at scale with a primary key performance indicator (KPI) revolving around engagement — specifically, cost per engagement (CPE) and engagement rates driven by creator content.

In addition, Opendoor wanted to see an increase in brand awareness, consideration, and consumer trust — proven by data collected from its quarterly internal research studies.

As a data-driven tech company, Opendoor prioritized campaign measurement and speed of execution. Not only did Mavrck’s team of experts feel confident that it could scale Opendoor’s influencer partnerships to achieve its KPIs, but they also knew that having performance metrics available to Opendoor in real-time would be a game-changer for their reporting needs, given how Opendoor is a datadriven company at its core.

With Mavrck’s Services team streamlining the entire campaign process from start to finish, Opendoor was confident that the contracting and payment process would be completed within the necessary timelines.

The Idea

Opendoor’s brand purpose is to empower people during some of their most important transitions in life. Sometimes life opportunities can come as a surprise, happen in a moment’s notice, are fleeting, but are full of joy. The reality of the opportunity often requires a lifechanging move, that then comes with doubt, stress and unfortunately inaction to say “yes” to the opportunity at hand.

No matter the opportunity or obstacle, Opendoor aims to be a trusted partner during those big moves. And it knows that above all, what consumers want is to be reassured that their real estate needs are going to be as stress-free as possible.

Whether folks are relocating for a job, moving to accommodate a growing family, or starting fresh in a new city, Opendoor’s brand purpose shone through creator content generated from influencer campaigns. Opendoor prioritized working with creators who, like its target audience, were in the midst of a life-changing transition.

The brand encouraged the creators to take to social media to start a conversation about life’s big opportunities and share their personal stories about how Opendoor can help them say “yes”.

The Activation

Creators took to Instagram and Facebook to share posts, Stories, and Reels that recounted their homebuying experience with Opendoor, as well as the life changes that brought them there. They were also asked to tag @opendoor (for Instagram) and @opendoorHQ (for Facebook), plus use the hashtags #OpendoorPartner and #BeOpen while also including a trackable call-to-action (CTA) link in their Stories and/or bio.

Opendoor then repurposed the content on its brand-owned TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. Additionally, the brand utilized TikTok Spark Ads to launch a round of IGCdriven paid advertising. These paid ads achieved a 19% higher click-through rate (CTR) and a 22% lower cost per click (CPC) compared to organic IGC repurposed on Opendoor’s brandowned TikTok.

Mavrck’s Services team was instrumental in helping Opendoor scale its campaign. From campaign setup to creator sourcing to contracting and negotiation to final reporting — Mavrck’s expertise helped make the “For Life’s New Opportunities” collaboration Opendoor’s top-performing influencer campaign to date.

Not only did the campaign achieve a high CPE and the highest engagement rate of any Opendoor influencer campaign thus far, it also significantly exceeded industry benchmarks for Instagram posts and Reels. The campaign’s Instagram posts resulted in an average engagement rate of 12.3%, which surpassed benchmark engagement rates in similar industries like Retail/eCommerce (9.4%), Internet/Web (9.3%), and Lifestyle (7.7%). Similarly, the campaign’s average engagement rate for Instagram Reels content of 10.5% outperformed industry averages for Internet/ Web (8.2%), Lifestyle (7.8%), and Retail/ eCommerce (2.2%) — all based on Mavrck data collected in Q2 2022.

Opendoor then conducted a survey to measure its brand health after the campaign. It found that as a result of IGC, it had reached peak levels of brand awareness, interaction, and consideration among those who follow social media influencers. These investments in influencer marketing helped Opendoor increase its brand awareness year-over-year (YoY), thus contributing to their overall brand goals.