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Every person is different — each with their own impulses, interests and inclinations. As an individual, you know this. No one likes to think that they are just the same as everyone else. Yet, when business people approach marketing, it can be all too easy to forget.
Marketing can be confusing, and a one-size-fits-all solution sounds amazing. But it doesn’t work.
There is no point sending the same message to people who are looking for different things, or who are at different stages of the buying cycle. Identifying each customer by persona enables specific and far more relevant messaging.
Too many agencies adopt only marketing basics and then miss the next steps where the real impacts can be seen. Sure, if you go from nothing to periodically sending prospects some one-size-fits-all communications, you’re going to see an increase in engagement and sales. Some contact is better than none. However, if you take that a step further and market to people based on what they actually want at that moment, the results are going to amplify drastically.
What are buyer personas?
If you’ve never heard of a buyer persona before, or aren’t too sure of exactly what it means, a buyer persona is essentially a semi-fictional representation of the prospects in your buyer categories. For real estate, those buyer personas could be prospects likely to be upsizing, downsizing, investors or first home buyers.
Each of these personas will have unique characteristics. It is obvious to state that they will not respond to the same communications. Those looking to downsize aren’t going to respond to your marketing communications about upsizing. First home buyers are likely not going to understand when you’re talking at an investor level.
Defining the different buyer personas that buy from you makes it easier to identify which prospects fit these personas, and therefore, what communications are going to motivate them to purchase.
Segmenting your prospects
As most agents will have an existing CRM, customer segmentation is easier than you may think. With your buyer personas in hand, analysis can be conducted on your CRM to segment your prospects and allocate them to their appropriate persona category.
With these segmented lists and a communication strategy based on the unique drivers of each persona, as well as their stage in the buying cycle, marketers can craft content that speaks to them. Building stronger relationships and moving them more effectively through the customer journey to positive action.
Buyer personas and customer segmentation can drastically increase the efficiency of real estate agents. As in the case of OBrien Real Estate, adopting personas and segmentation allowed their marketing to play a more impactful role in warming up prospects and maintaining relationships, while sales agents could spend more time with personas that were ready to buy.
ActivePipe is instrumental in achieving these results. Our solution works by segmenting the customers in your CRM, by either an online survey or by identifying trends in their behaviour, and taking each user on their own journey through to the sale.
But don’t just take our word for it; see what estate agents across the world have to say about our solutions.
David Young Choi is chief commercial officer at ActivePipe.
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