Union Street Media is a real estate website and marketing intelligence platform providing cutting-edge digital marketing services for real estate agents. Their 60-person team manages real estate clients of all sizes, ranging from small mom-and-pop brokers to enterprise clients with over 500 agents and offices around the country. Their expertise includes building responsive realtor websites and running both organic and paid advertising.
As Union Street Media's real estate customer portfolio grew, its lean digital advertising team faced increasing operational challenges. Fluency helped Union Street Media automate repeatable tasks and sync real-time MLS data directly into dynamic ads on major ad platforms. These solutions drastically improved efficiency, reduced costs, and gave the team time to focus on developing cutting-edge digital strategies.
Now, Union Street Media produces customized, data-powered ad campaigns that deliver measurable, hyper-local results for its clients at an accessible price.
Highlights
The challenge: delivering tailored, cost-effective digital advertising strategies for real estate brokers
Union Street Media faced a significant operational challenge as a lean-but-mighty team. Nicole Crisbacher, Senior Marketing Manager at Union Street Media, and her two employees handle all paid media for more than 950 real estate campaigns. However, managing so many different digital campaigns became increasingly challenging as their customer portfolio grew.
As markets fluctuate, the Union Street Media team needed to expand their offerings outside of traditional advertising strategies to help clients remain competitive.
For example, “Just sold” postcards are popular with real estate agents because they’re a familiar, tangible way to establish a consistent presence in the neighborhoods they serve. But at roughly $100 per 1,000 postcards, it’s also expensive (especially if an agency has sold multiple homes in different neighborhoods).
Adding to the challenge is that “every keyword in the real estate sphere is super expensive,” said Crisbacher. “There are only so many keywords available because they’re highly localized.”
A real estate conglomerate like Zillow or Realtors.com can pay high keyword bids as part of a volume-driven lead approach, but small brokers can’t afford the money or time to chase expensive, nonviable leads. This has historically deterred small or regional real estate brokers from digital advertising efforts.
The Union Street Media team believed that investing in digital advertising automation would provide two key benefits:
- They could lower operational costs to attract new real estate agents with smaller advertising budgets while expanding their customer portfolio.
- Automation could free up time to achieve their ultimate goal: spending more time developing, implementing, and optimizing innovative digital strategies for their customers to stay ahead of the curve in a competitive market.
The solution: using a Digital Advertising Operating System to enhance efficiency, expand media mix, and gain creative capacity
Their search for improved advertising operational efficiency led the Union Street Media team to Fluency. What started as a way to automate their ad campaigns and operations has evolved into a strong 5-year partnership between Fluency and Union Street Media.
“Because we can automate so much with Fluency, we’re able to offer top-notch custom advertising solutions to our real estate clients at an accessible price point,” said Crisbacher. “Instead of telling agents we can’t do something, Fluency has made us a ‘yes’ team.”
Powering campaigns directly from data sources
One of the core functions driving Union Street Media’s automated efficiency is Fluency’s ability to sync data from any source directly to dynamic ads within major advertising platforms via bidirectional APIs. Building ad campaigns directly from data sources means the Union Street Media team can, for instance, sync MLS listings right to live ads.
Fluency enables the Union Street Media team to:
- Automatically turn ads off on every channel once a property sells
- Include detailed data like street addresses, the listing agent, and listing or sold prices
- Run ads for open houses as well as active or recently sold listings
- Confidently assure clients that ads always show recent data, as dynamic ad content automatically updates from MLS listings
Using data-powered automation to build, launch, manage, optimize, and report on ad campaigns has given Crisbacher and her team “a ton of opportunities and flexibility.” Additionally, a centralized, cross-channel view gives them critical visibility for assessing performance at a glance and adjusting strategies quickly if needed.
“Because we have access to all these data points, we can make little tweaks that give our customers a really honed-in, custom advertising strategy without a lot of manual work,” said Crisbacher.
Automating campaign parameter set-up with Blueprints
Fluency Blueprints are the primary tool the Union Street Media team uses to implement their advertising strategies at scale. Blueprints dynamically connect campaign strategies and account data to major ad publishers, enabling real-time advertising management.
In fact, “anything listing related wouldn't be possible without Blueprints,” according to Crisbacher. MLS listing data updates every four hours—too frequently for a human team to manage across multiple properties for multiple agents. Crisbacher emphasized that some of their customers “have over 20,000 changes made in their account every month.”
With Blueprints, Crisbacher and her team can set up a broker’s campaign framework at a high level and then let automation handle the ongoing campaign management.
Since many of their real estate customers’ campaigns follow a similar structure, Crisbacher’s team can use Blueprints to streamline campaign setup and launches for new customers. Crisbacher says it’s not uncommon to “have a kickoff call with a customer in the morning and have their ads live that night,” assuming the company has access to the customer’s accounts and budget confirmation.
“We have two people running our daily ad operations, but Fluency’s automation and AI tools make us operate like a team of five,” said Crisbacher. “The fact that our team can not only handle all the paid advertising efforts but also think of new ideas, test things out, help build out new products with engineering, work with the sales team…that wouldn't be possible without Fluency.”
Bringing new strategies to life with programmatic advertising at scale
In addition to operational gains, Fluency has helped Union Street Media expand its channel mix. One of their most successful products was the introduction of its “Magic Mailer” programmatic ads through Fluency’s integration with Basis Technologies DSP.
“The idea of doing ‘Just sold’ mailers digitally is something I have in my notes from years ago,” said Crisbacher. “It was just not feasible until we brought in programmatic automation with Fluency.”
Programmatic advertising enabled Union Street Media to overcome three key real estate advertising challenges:
- Lack of measurability: Unlike postcard mailers, which often lack clear tracking, Union Street Media’s real estate customers can see the exact impact of their programmatic campaigns alongside other marketing channels.
- Hyper-local targeting: Programmatic offers more precise targeting than search or display ads. Meta and Google Ads can only target prospects within a 15-mile radius. Programmatic can target hyper-local audiences within 1 mile of a specific address, similar to direct mail postcards.
- Cost-effective: At an average CPM of $.50, programmatic is a fraction of the cost of direct mail (which averages a CPM of $50). Agents can target 100x more households at the same cost.
Programmatic “Magic Mailers” check all the boxes Crisbacher and her team needed to make a compelling digital product for real estate brokers: greater measurability than postcards, more precise targeting than search or display, and all at a lower cost than any other advertising channel they offered.
Technology-enabled strategies as an agency differentiator
Magic Mailers also help Union Street Media differentiate its strategic offerings in a crowded agency market.
“When we tell realtors that we can target within a 4-mile radius of a just-sold home, they immediately say, ‘How? Every other agency can only do a 15-mile radius,’” said Crisbacher.
Chris Badami, Director of Sales at Union Street Media, has seen this differentiation play out in the sales process.
“A lot of realtors will say to us, ‘I don't have the money to compete with Zillow online,’” said Badami. “We tell them we’re using an AI-backed software that gives them an advantage that’s lightyears beyond the competition. They can work with smart people who use smart software that’s always working in the background.”
Badami attributes Fluency’s ability to automate dynamic programmatic ads at scale to help Union Street Media “outmaneuver real estate conglomerates on a local level.”
“With the right team, strategy, and technology, local realtors can absolutely compete with bigger aggregators online,” said Badami. “Fluency helps us find success for our customers where it matters most: in their local market. With us, they can get qualified leads at a much better price.”
Bringing clarity to client conversations with centralized multi-channel reporting
Union Street Media also leans on Fluency’s reporting tools to unify cross-channel performance metrics for client reviews. With thousands of automated changes happening across dozens of accounts each month, streamlined visibility in a centralized interface gives Crisbacher and her team everything they need for concise customer reporting metrics.
“Having performance data from every channel in one place means I can quickly find what I’m looking for, check how things are pacing, and use these insights to guide client conversations,” said Crisbacher. “We’ve even pulled heatmaps from Fluency’s reporting dashboard to show clients exactly where their programmatic ads are running to make our value more tangible.”
The team also uses Fluency’s reporting tools to make data-backed budget recommendations without having to dig into each campaign manually. Muse AI, Fluency’s AI automation agent, can analyze real-time performance data so Crisbacher and her team can make fast and informed decisions.
“If there’s something super specific I’m looking for, I’ve found Muse AI to be really helpful,” said Hālee Bernier, Lead Digital Advisor at Union Street Media. “We want to keep expanding our Muse AI usage and explore how it can continue helping us save time when making data-informed decisions for our clients.”
The result: automation powers operational efficiency, innovative ideation, and time to make it all happen
Automating key functions like campaign management and new account launches gives the team more time for customer conversations and idea generation for future growth.
“Real estate agents are typically relationship-driven people,” said Badami. “Our customers love meeting with Nicole and the strategic members of our digital team. It makes them feel better when they can talk with the person aligning their strategies and who understands their goals.”
Crisbacher credits Fluency’s automation tools with giving her team the capacity to join these customer meetings, plus time to test new ideas.
“If we were physically button-pushing for every client, we would never be able to develop cool new things or talk with clients,” said Crisbacher. “With Fluency, we can take on new things without expanding headcount or lapsing on how well we’re taking care of our customers. We have way more opportunities to say yes to things because we don’t feel constrained by time, money, or headcount.”
Future-proofing with agile tech and innovative ideas
The team’s ability to continuously innovate and deliver results has reinforced their customer relationships, according to Badami.
“A lot of real estate agents don’t understand digital advertising,” said Badami. “But our customers are so confident in the strength of their online presence against major competitors because of us. They trust us implicitly and understand the value. They see the results and they've seen the sales go up.”
What’s next for Union Street Media? Crisbacher jokes that the industry moves so fast that “whatever I'm doing now is not going to be the cool thing to be doing in six months, and the thing I'm going to be doing in six months…I don't know what it is yet.”
“But partnering with a company that is always bringing something new to us, like AI features or advanced automation capabilities, I’m confident we’ll always be able to answer the question, ‘What’s next?’” said Crisbacher.
