Helping a proptech marketplace reach new heights.

Overview

Hybr are a student letting and property rental marketplace based in the UK. Founded by Hannah Chappatte while she was studying at Bristol, they secured record breaking seed funding in 2023 and have been scaling the brand across various cities, including Bristol (their home turf), London and Manchester.

I joined the team as the Head Of Growth at a critical time in the companies life. Aiming firmly at product market fit, Hybr needed to grow their marketshare in some key local markets so that they can head towards their next raise with confidence.

Working in the nexus between product, marketing, and sales, my role was to establish the growth team and strategy and then execute at pace. I was put in charge of all marketing channels, including their Webflow marekting website, PPC campaigns, organic SEO growth and events.

As Hybr is a marketplace, I had two core user archetypes to consider

• Students
• Landlords

The Opportunity

Hybr had a tonne of opportunity for improvement across the brand and the marketing operations. They had a very poor UX on the marekting and product spaces online and had no real marketing communications or operations in place. Their was also no use of recent AI developments in their marketing stack, leaving at risk of falling behind.

They had good traffic and a strong brand, so there was a solid user interest that could be built on and that is where I went to work.

The Strategy

With any marketplace, it is SUPER important to have a solid understanding of the users on both sides. I first established some user profiles to form the bases of the strategy.

Defining Our Users

It was important to define something specific for us to target and borrowing from Alan Cooper’s process of creating a UX profile, we defined a few profiles for landlords and for students.

Knowing that students were highly online, defining the core channels around this would be key to a strong growth strategy.

Defining Our Funnel

Based on the user profiles for both landlords and students. Our channels were as such:

• Awareness/Acquisition - SEO/content, events, press, paid social, partnerships
• Activation - paid search, external marketplaces, product marketing, UI/UX, customer engagement.
• Revenue - product marketing, customer success, funnel ops
• Retention - customer engagement
• Referral - customer engagement. product marketing

Target CAC

We had an overall target customer acquisition cost of around £6-8, and I am super proud to say we achieved it. Market fluctuations meant that it went up a bit here and there but overall this was a huge success.

This left us with a 20:1 ratio for let conversion, a more than achievable ratio for the product team to handle (with out help of course…)

Building a new website

Focusing first on the low hanging fruit of the marekting website. I worked with Stephen McShannock (go check him out, he’s great and a really lovely guy!) to design a new website and improve the SEO optimisation. While Stephen worked on the design, I worked on the metadata, content structure and optimisation of the site.

New CMS structure

Along with the new site user experience, we also restructured the Webflow CMS to be more flexible and scalable. Using reference fields, I created relations between the data to allow for more complex filtering in the front-end, enhancing the user experience with highly relevant content on each page

Web UX/UI Results

The result was an aggressive new brand that was a lot more engaging and hard to ignore. Coupling this new design with some best in class SEO optimisation, we saw an almost instant increase in traffic that has been growing ever since.

SEO Optimisation

Optimising the metadata

All of the metadata was below par and needed serious work. This included

• Optimising the page titles and descriptions with keywords
• Adding OpenGraph metadata and images - to make content stand out when shared
• Structuring the H tags - ensuring they followed the hierarchical structure and that there was only 1 H1 per page
• Adding alt-text to all images - to ensure we can add some more keywords to the page and make things more accessible to visually impaired website visitors.

Injecting AI into the content creation process

Instead of hiring content writers I added ByWord to the growth marketing stack. ByWord allowed us to scale content on autopilot by writing blogs for relevant keywords. Their API integration with Webflow mean that we could add content straight to the site and publish it, which made thing super fast!

SEO Results

The result was that we were able to add hundreds of blogs to the site and increased impressions on Google by 10X.

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Multi-variant testing PPC campaigns

As the product was built as a web app, it was not optimised for web SEO. It did not have any actual pages and did not have server side rendering enabled, so crawlers could not read the content.

This meant that organic traffic to the product was very poor or non-existent at times. It was agreed to fix this issue with the new product roll out and growth in the meantime would use some paid channels to fill in the gaps that organic could not.

Working with Mayank Pokharna, a marketing expert from India with HUGE knowledge of the co-living and proptech markets (if you need marketing help and you are in the proptech industry, he is your guy!) We developed a programmatic approach to ad testing.

We created a series of ad groups with variables:

• City
• University
• Property Type
• Bedrooms

This could like like this:

• {roomNum) bed {propType} to rent in {city} = 5 bed flat to rent in Bristol

We tested these ads at scale using thousands of variables and identified what was working and what was not, moving spend to double down on successful ads.

This resulted in a 500% increase in enquiries into the funnel at an average cost per acquisition of £3-6.

Creating social media strategy

There was a tonne of opportunity to improve the quality and cadence of social media from the Hybr brand. Hiring social media marketing expert and founder of The Content Club, Heather-Jade Stanley, we go to work on creating strategies for landlords and students across various channels.

Focusing on Linkedin for landlords, HJ made highly engaging content while focusing on some core content groups

• Work life at Hybr
• Property market news and updates
• Property market culture

As a result we grew engagement on linked in to XX and increased our following by XX%.

On the student side I managed HJ to execute a more complex strategy across TikTok and Instagram. Testing meme content, student life, relatable content and student calendar content (results day etc).

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This resulted in a 640% increase in video views and a 900% increase in profile views on instagram and some significant growth on TikTok followers

Conclusion

While I headed up the growth engine at Hybr, I achieved a tonne of growth for a great brand with a great vision. Increasing users by over 1,500% and taking the company through it's highest growth period in the 4 years since its founding. Q1 and Q3 of 2024 were MASSIVE with huge results from some key channels.

I had a great team around me and it was a pleasure to work to help students find more suitable property while studying at university. the company is going from strength to strength and I cannot wait to see what the future holds for them.