In our online-drive age, buyers are getting inundated with a deluge of content. How can you stand out? You want to ensure your strategy attracts people who are particularly interested in your product.
You only achieve this by knowing and understanding your target market. If you can pinpoint specific groups of people within your target market, you can craft appropriate buyer personas to customise your real estate marketing strategy.
So, what’s a buyer persona? HubSpot describes it as a “...semi-fictional representation of your buyer based on data, interviews, and some educated guesses.” The idea is that it’s “...a definition of your ideal buyer presented in a way that sounds like it’s talking about a specific person.” Having specific insight into personas is exceptionally valuable because it allows you to produce varied content that tailors perfectly to particular people. How do you go about creating those buyer personas? Here are the steps:
How to create a buyer persona for your marketing plan for real estate
1. Research
As an estate agent, you already know that your buyers cover a large number of people with varying contexts. A bachelor has different buying needs to that of a family with three children. As a result, your estate marketing strategy needs to have a few personas that represent these different types of buyers. How can you get the best results? We recommend you conduct the research yourself.
The best way to carry out this research is to interview your past, current, and prospective clients to gain a deep understanding of their needs, wants and priorities. Constructing a well-rounded persona involves knowing why individuals do things, the problems they face daily and what are their goals.
2. Identify Commonalities
As you work your way through the interview process for developing your buyer personas for the marketing plan for your real estate company, you should start to take note of some of the similarities between the different answers you get. For example, you may conclude that many older people reaching retirement age are looking for smaller properties while young couples wanting to start a family are desiring a bigger dwelling. The key to identifying your personas is to extract these common threads from the individual interview answers for their goals, challenges, needs and wants.
As we saw in the way HubSpot described a buyer persona, creating buyer personas is about adding a human element to make your prospects feel like you’re directly appealing to them. You ideally want to use your real estate marketing strategy to connect with them on a human level that touches on, but isn’t limited to the following: How old are they? What do they do for work? What are their goals? What are their hobbies and passions? What are their challenges?
What exactly are we looking for as a final product?
A sample buyer persona of Business Brad could look like this:
Brad is a 40-something-year-old successful salesman looking to buy a family home. He needs a large-enough space to accommodate his elderly mother-in-law. His eldest son is starting secondary school in two years time and his wife runs a business from home. Brad dislikes traffic, worries about his family’s safety and wants to live near a park where can walk his two labradors.
You might think that including these details are excessive but you must create content for each persona based on where they are in the buyer journey. Let’s say Brad knows he needs to move but has yet to decide what neighbourhood. During that first stage of the buyer journey, he may be spending more time reading about the best local secondary schools because his son is going to graduate from primary school. That means the proximity of a potential secondary school will have a direct impact on the location of his new house. You can start by writing content about the region’s best secondary schools and the admissions criteria. Ultimately, the trick to creating successful personas is understanding the buyer’s psychology.
The latest real estate marketing trends and how the buyer persona factors into the equation
Now that you have an understanding of how to craft a buyer persona as part of the marketing plan for your real estate business, how do they fit into your strategy as you seek to adopt the latest real estate marketing trends?
With the COVID-19 pandemic inevitably impacting the economy at large, going digital is imperative for estate agents. Virtual tours using video marketing are also fundamental, given the inability to host traditional in-person open houses.
Naturally, embracing social media is a critical piece of it, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or other platforms to build their brand or acquire more leads. Many have also invested in paid media campaigns. You tailor your social media messaging and assets to your buyer personas, tailoring them to specific stages of the buyer journey addressing questions they may have. You can share a link to the article about the secondary schools on Facebook that Brad could see and pay for an ad promoting the post.
Content marketing is another area where your buyer persona plays a critical role as you develop assets in a variety of formats that seamlessly fit the buyer journey for Brad. Whether a blog, thought leadership videos, or a webinar over Zoom explaining incentives for mortgages, a content strategy could help increase your renown in the sector. Finally, email marketing with targeted segmentation for each of your buyer personas and frequent updates is a tried and true technique that has effective engagement rates when done right.
Buyer Personas are only one part of creating a compelling real estate marketing strategy. If you want to reap the full benefits of innovative digital marketing for real estate, you should review your international property portfolio. Take inspiration by having a look at our picturesque selection of apartments in Calpe.
