CoStar Group
Highlights
CoStar wanted to improve bookings and renewals across the commercial real estate market.
The company needed a unified marketing and communications platform to enable its global marketing teams to quickly create and publish new content.
Acquia Site Studio
Site Studio has empowered more people on CoStar’s team — both technical and non-technical — to contribute to the digital platform.
The Client
CoStar Group is the global leader in helping navigate the digital world of commercial real estate (CRE). The company offers a powerful portfolio of the most heavily trafficked sites for office, industrial, retail, apartments, businesses for sale and land. LoopNet.com is CoStar Group’s online marketplace for commercial property.
The Situation
CoStar Group had ambitious companywide and marketing-specific goals, including:
- Improving bookings and renewals for the CoStar suite across the commercial real estate market
- Investing in new advertising packages that leverage augmented reality, virtual reality and drone-captured video
- Acquiring and marketing deeper, more versatile sets of CRE data to integrate and enhance product offerings
- Growing investments in diamond, platinum and gold ads that provide increased exposure and branding benefits for CoStar clients
- Expanding further into the residential real estate market with a focus on Apartments.com
- Unifying CoStar Group brands on one digital platform
- Empowering cross-brand marketing teams with tools that made them more agile
- Establishing a design system and governance to easily construct and replicate sites, ensuring brand consistency
- Optimizing its investment through a well-planned and implemented digital strategy, measurement and best practices
The Challenge
CoStar Group wanted a unified, worldwide marketing and communications platform to enable its global marketing teams to create and publish new content and campaigns at the speed of business. The company needed to move LoopNet, its online commercial real estate marketplace, from a Sitefinity platform to a Drupal platform in less than two months.
The Solution
CoStar tapped technology partner Phase2 to lead its digital transformation. Phase2 quickly got to work, migrating content from the existing LoopNet site, integrating Google Analytics, developing a custom API so form data could be delivered to a CRM and providing Acquia Site Studio consulting to the CoStar Group team.
Recognizing the need for rapid development and ease of page creation and site replication to empower non-technical marketers, Phase2 configured Site Studio on top of a newly installed Drupal platform. Then, it determined the reusable components and custom code and created page templates and site sections with scalability and accessibility in mind.
Site Studio allowed for accelerated product development, lowering the cost of setup, training and deployment and lessening marketing’s reliance on IT for maintenance. Its visual page builder and drag-and-drop functionality allowed for quick page creation, and pre-set design components prevented contributors from straying from brand guidelines.
The Results
Thanks to Site Studio, more people on CoStar’s team — both technical and non-technical — can now contribute to the digital platform. The unified platform empowers CoStar Group’s marketing team and facilitates speed to market. With LoopNet.com successfully launched, Phase2 and CoStar can review other properties within CoStar's larger digital ecosystem.