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When it comes to measuring success, many real estate agents focus on the cold, hard numbers. But traffic and sales are only one side of the story. To push your business to the next level, you need to understand your customers not just as statistics, but as real people. The best way to do this is through marketing personas.
What Is a Marketing Persona?
In a nutshell, marketing personas are detailed snapshots of your most common customers or prospects. Personas include basic information on age and income, as well as more specific details like hobbies, spending, and online habits.
It’s important to note that marketing personas are not just profiles of generic customers: they’re fictional people with characteristics that are common among your actual customers. By creating an imaginary character with realistic traits, you can delve deeper into your customers’ concerns and desires, understanding not just how they behave, but why they behave that way.
Now that we’ve defined marketing personas, let’s examine how you’ll go about creating them.
Step 1: Analyze Your Customer List
Creating marketing personas begins with a basic understanding of who your customers are and where they come from. Start by analyzing your current customer list for patterns and trends, focusing on characteristics like age and property type. You may find, for example, that roughly half of your customers are under 30 years old (and that a majority of these folks purchased condos) and that the other half are between 40 and 50 years old (and the majority of that group purchased detached homes).
Once you’ve done a full analysis, use the data you’ve found to segment your customers into a few groups based on the most common types and patterns. This will be the foundation of your marketing personas.
Step 2: Fill In the Details
Now that you’ve established your segments, it’s time to fill in the details. To do this, take a sample of your customers that fit best into the segments you’ve created. Create and distribute a survey to gather more specific information about their families, jobs, hobbies, interests, and other topics. (You may also consider interviewing willing customers, either by phone or in person.)
Make sure to ask about your customers’ online habits, including favorite websites and social media activity. This will give you insight into where you should focus your marketing efforts to reach your target audience.
Step 3: Bring Your Personas to Life
Finally, it’s time to use all the data you’ve gathered about your customer segments to create your fictional “characters.” Start by writing detailed profiles for each persona based on the details and preferences you’ve discovered. Add a photo to each persona, along with a name. The photos and names will make each persona more memorable and relatable. For example, your marketing persona that represents the under-30, condo-buying crowd could be named “Condo Chris.”
Once you’ve completed your marketing personas, you can use them to create marketing strategies that address customers’ needs and preferences, providing a better real estate experience for them and more leads and clients for you.
Have you created personas to inform your content marketing strategy? Tell us about them in the comments section below!
