Client Personas are Critical to the Success of Your Real Estate Farming

Do you know who you are marketing to in your geographic farm area?

WAIT! Before you answer that question, stop and really think about it.

Do you "really" know who you are marketing to? Do you know what the homeowners in your farm do for a living? How much money they make? If they have kids? Are those kids going to college and moving out? Do they like to vacation, or stay home and visit local restaurants and coffee shops? Are they potentially looking for a bigger house, or needing to downsize?

If you can answer these questions, congratulations! Since I'm a betting man though, I'll guess that most of you were unable to answer many, if not every one, of these questions. If you are in that boat, don't feel bad. Week after week, we find that Realtors® are spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per month on a geographic farm with no real grasp on any of these questions.

Why, you may ask, are these questions pertinent to your real estate marketing campaigns? These questions are what define the personas of the people that live in your farm area. If you are unclear on the persona of the person you are marketing to, you cannot guarantee you are going to be touching them with information that is pertinent to where they are in their lives, or something that they deem interesting enough to them that they will stop and actually review it.

A inventory of client personas are the foundation of any marketing campaign. They are the building blocks you will use as the springboard for every message you craft, ad you build, and marketing initiative you undertake.

Crafting a persona can be a little trickier than it seems, but it is certainly not impossible. Today, I thought I would spend a little time explaining:

1. What a persona is and what a persona is not
2. A brief background of the whys and hows of personas