Ian Port
Director of Content, Zillow
“For us, success means capturing our audience’s attention and providing trustworthy information that helps people take the next step in their housing journey with Zillow.”
Company information
- Zillow Group, Inc.
- Industry: Technology/Real estate
- Company size: 5,850
- Revenue: $ 1.96 billion
- Location: Seattle, WA USA
- Knotch products: Content EQ, Content Strategy Consulting
Zillow.com, the online real estate matchmaker, brings together home buyers, sellers, renters, and more with real estate agents, rental listings, and home loans, and boasts over 300 million visits per month. Yet with all that traffic, only a tiny percentage of consumers are actually in market at a given moment; most are still dreaming about that future home.
Zillow’s challenge is to identify those website visitors who are truly in market. Content plays a huge role in engaging visitors, and more than the thousands of listings available, the site also offers educational, instructive, and entertaining content around everything home and real estate.
But what content speaks best to these in-market prospects?
Building brand perception and laddering up high value actions
According to Ian Port, Director of Content at Zillow: “We’re always trying to demonstrate the power of smart, trustworthy content, and that comes down to two questions: First, does it drive engagement and improve people’s perception of the Zillow brand? And second, does our content help people take the next action with Zillow — whether that’s touring a home, connecting with a home loan officer, or listing a rental with us?”
Architecting the best content on the block
Zillow engaged with Knotch for assistance in content intelligence, leveraging Content EQ measurement platform along with Knotch’s Content Strategy consultancy. The platform measures engagement performance of individual pages of content, together with a unique brand sentiment layer with multi-part questions of the reader/viewer and how the content is impacting sentiment. Included in Content EQ are tagging capabilities around content types, topics, themes, content length, and more to provide deeper granularity. This unique combination of quantitative and qualitative reporting is then brought to actionable insights by the Knotch team to help determine the right content for the right audience at the right time in their journey with Zillow.
Welcome home content intelligence
“Zillow is a data-driven, highly collaborative company, and our partner teams wield nuanced understandings of their tools and audiences,” says Port. “When there are questions around what content can or should do, Knotch equips our team with the platform’s rich data and provides insights to bring to the conversation. We’ve been using Knotch to find out which types of content are best at building the Zillow brand, and generally how our content work impacts audiences.”
As Zillow continues to finely hone their strategy with content intelligence, the overall Zillow.com experience is increasingly enhanced with relevant content no matter where the prospects are at in their home journey.
“The Knotch platform gives a multidimensional view of content performance. The results often surprise even our team of seasoned, talented pros. And sometimes the truth is not what you’d wish it to be. But without a doubt, this clarity helps us make better decisions about where to invest as a team, and what content to show which customer. The Knotch platform helps us answer these questions, and the clear result for Zillow has been higher quality, higher performing content all around,” shared Port.
“Which content works best, and where? The Knotch platform helps us answer these questions, and the clear result for Zillow has been higher quality, higher performing content all around.”
– Ian Port, Director of Content, Zillow
