Real estate is the world’s largest asset class, estimated to be worth $280 trillion. Yet it invests less than 1% of its revenues into technology or innovation, lagging significantly behind other large industries. By 2019, after years of avoidance and neglect, investment in real estate technology began to accelerate. Commercial real estate (CRE) firms were scrambling to catch up and the world’s largest players were all competing to be the leader in the burgeoning “PropTech” market, estimated to reach $12.11 billion by 2025.
Challenge
As a Fortune 200 company with 200+ years of real estate experience, JLL is the second largest commercial real estate firm in the world with more than $16.5 billion in annual revenue. Despite counting the world’s largest companies as its customers, JLL lacked credibility and market share in the emerging PropTech market despite acquiring a string of technology companies over the prior several years.
The founders of Tract were the first marketing hires amongst a small founding group of tech entrepreneurs tasked with building and scaling a technology division within JLL. In Sept 2019, JLL Technologies (JLLT) was announced — though, at that time it had no brand, no website, and offered only a disjointed suite of technology products and services.
As senior marketing leaders, we were tasked to:- Create a technology brand that would strengthen the parent brand, influence the emerging PropTech category, and allow JLL to attract technology buyers and talent
- Position JLLT as the industry thought leader by telling a single, cohesive story and strategy that united our disjointed technology offerings
- Quickly build a robust, agile growth engine and infrastructure to grow, measure, and scale awareness, consideration, and pipeline to JLLT’s entire portfolio of technology products and services
Solution
By aligning the business on our technology objectives, we were given the greenlight to establish JLL Technologies as a sub-brand with a unique but complementary set of brand guidelines and a single digital presence (JLLT.com) to drive growth.
Brand Marketing
JLL Technologies was born out of careful consideration for the company’s technology growth ambitions balanced with the demands of a global real estate services business.
To differentiate our brand and reach a new tech-savvy audience, we developed a brand marketing strategy exclusively for JLL Technologies that:- Evolved and modernized JLL’s existing brand elements and color palette to attract and resonate with a technology audience
- Preserved a strong association with the parent brand to build on the trust and credibility garnered by JLL’s 200+ years of CRE leadership
- Introduced new brand elements, like the slash (/), that were used in our brand identity and across all digital touchpoints to reflect the dynamic market forces bringing together real estate and technology
- Defined JLLT’s messaging, tone, and style guides to create a unique, modern brand personality
- Created a branded house under JLLT, then aligned the child brands through a visual refresh
Digital Marketing
By early 2020, JLL’s technology products were scattered across dozens of websites managed by different departments. Each product came with a different team, brand identity, messaging, content strategy, and MarTech stack. This lack of shared strategy curtailed JLLT’s potential for growth.
Our first task was to centralize on a single digital presence without impacting revenue. The scope of this project included:- Design and build a user experience and conversion journeys to efficiently capture leads and build pipeline
- Align and refresh messaging across our product portfolio
- Implement a new MarTech stack capable of enriching, nurturing, and automating lead management
- Analytics solution that allowed marketing to report on its impact
- Keyword and SEO strategies to rank on relevant product categories including migrating high value content without impacting traffic
Leveraging lean product development principles, we shipped a single technology-focused website (JLLT.com) within four months for a fraction of the cost that the core business spent on its own web development efforts. The following year, we were able to leverage the same infrastructure to quickly ship a thought leadership microsite (hybridworks.jll.com), a cross-functional initiative with JLL, to lead and influence the emerging hybrid workplace market opportunity.
Results
JLL’s new position as a market leader in real estate technology and PropTech has enabled the company to weather the pandemic storm. In its most recent earnings call, “technology” is mentioned 15 times, and JLL’s stock price has nearly doubled since JLL Technologies was announced in September 2019.
The success of JLLT’s new brand and growth strategies resulted in:- Tens of thousand leads captured through digital channels within nine months of launching website
- Successful launch of two new SaaS products generatating >$1M in marketing-sourced pipeline within the first month
- Grew brand awareness 300% for JLL Technologies in the first half of 2021