South Africa's private real estate market has been under pressure, and with new entrants like Capitec raising the stakes, every marketing rand needs to work harder to find the right customer. SA Home Loans came to TDMC with a strategy that had gone stale - plateaued results, underperforming ROI, and market share slipping to competitors. TDMC rebuilt the approach from the ground up: a full-funnel strategy, sharper segmentation, and a measurement framework that, for the first time, gave the business real visibility into its customer journey. Within the first month, website leads were up 45% year-on-year. Qualified leads - those meeting basic affordability criteria - grew 41% over one month.
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Executive Summary
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Introduction
SA Home Loans has spent 25 years helping South Africans into home ownership, operating in a property market that's grown tougher with every passing year. As competition intensified and the broader real estate market contracted, protecting market share stopped being about outspending competitors and started being about outperforming them - getting more from every marketing rand in a category where margin for error keeps shrinking.
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The Problem
The existing strategy had gone stale.
Results had plateaued, ROI was falling short of expectations, and market share was slipping to competitors - a problem compounded by a private real estate market that was contracting in its own right.
The foundation underneath it had real gaps.
A full audit of SA Home Loans' digital marketing surfaced structural issues across targeting, channel execution and overall strategy - the kind of gaps that no amount of additional spend could fix on their own.
The data couldn't be trusted.
Without clean, reliable data, decisions weren't being made on real insight. Conversion tracking was broken, reporting was close to non-existent, and there was no visibility into where customers were dropping off along their journey - making it impossible to know what to fix, let alone how.
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The Solution
TDMC treated this as a rebuild, not a refresh - starting with the data foundation, then building the full-funnel strategy on top of it.
Rebuilding the full funnel from the ground up
The new approach introduced complementary messaging at every stage of the customer journey, paired with refined audience segmentation, a narrower and more deliberate keyword strategy, and revamped creative across every channel.
Fixing the foundation: data, tracking and reporting
Before any strategy could be trusted, the underlying infrastructure had to be rebuilt. TDMC repaired broken conversion tracking, reconstructed SA Home Loans' analytics profile, and built a reporting framework from scratch - giving the business real, reliable data to guide decisions at every stage, for the first time.
Targeting the markets that mattered most
Strategy centred on the country's main metros, with particular focus on the Western Cape - a clear outlier in South Africa's real estate market, and a region where opportunity justified the extra attention.
Built for a long buying journey
Buying or selling property is rarely a quick decision, and the strategy was built around that reality - with fully developed retargeting and re-marketing in place to stay present with prospects throughout an extended consideration period.
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Results
The impact was immediate, and it held.
- 45% increase in website leads, year-on-year, in the very first month of the new strategy
- 41% increase in qualified leads - enquiries meeting basic affordability criteria - over one month
- A rebuilt measurement and reporting framework that, for the first time, gave SA Home Loans real visibility into performance at every stage of the funnel
Carmen Hockey, who heads up SA Home Loans' marketing division, put it simply: the partnership with TDMC contributed to impressive outcomes, including 45% year-on-year growth in website leads within a month of their involvement. She added that the team's commitment to great results, combined with TDMC's expertise and increased financial investment, accelerated their digital growth - a result she credits to the effectiveness of their enhanced digital strategies, built on first-party data and refined audience segmentation.
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Conclusion
As SA Home Loans marks 25 years of facilitating home ownership for South Africans, this partnership arrives at a pivotal moment. Chief Operating Officer Zakheni Dlamini noted that the value of the partnership extends to both current and future customers, calling it a timely collaboration that enhances the business's ability to engage with its customers. He added that the partnership has already made a significant impact on their digital strategy, with excitement about what's ahead as they continue drawing on TDMC's expertise in performance marketing and data analytics to support their growth ambitions. For SA Home Loans, this wasn't just a campaign refresh - it was the foundation the next chapter of growth could be built on.
