Real estate is an industry of change, but one thing remains constant. The key to success for an agent is in building and maintaining relationships.
But, for time poor agents relationship maintenance can be difficult to do! This is where contact profiling comes in.
Contact profiling, or customer profiling, is simply a way of splitting your contacts into ‘types’. You can then use these types to represent who is typically looking for your services and to tailor your marketing to address their particular set of needs.
There are a number of ways you can categorise your contacts and many agents would already be doing some version of this. Contact profiling takes this categorisation one step further, by crafting detailed messaging guides for your brand per contact type.
Luckily, in the real estate industry, you’re often establishing relationships with contacts through personally meeting them. This means establishing basic contact categories is easier.
Even if you’re not able to speak to every new contact personally, there are other methods of profiling them.
For instance, if a contact is enquiring on a property through your website, you may be able to begin categorising them based purely on the property they’ve enquired about.
Through iRealty you can regularly survey your contacts to build a subscriber profile within the iRealty system itself. These profiles establish market interest, potential ideal properties and market temperature. Profiles in iRealty can also live update through email tracking to give you more accurate information as time passes.
Once you’ve used the systems you already have in place to establish who individual contacts are, you can than dig in to the nitty gritty of contact types. For instance, you could know that you have hundreds of downsizers on your database. Build an avatar of who a typical downsizer is and how you would want to position yourself and your brand to impress that particular avatar.
There are plenty of ways contact profiling can help you communicate with your clients, but let’s talk about specific ways contact profiling betters your marketing.
Contact profiling can help you with:
Automation is a great tool to keep your weekly email campaigns running with minimal work on your part.
To avoid communicating with people who aren’t in property mode (and avoid a high unsubscribe rate in doing so) you should be using your contact profiles to determine who is best to send to and when.
For instance, you could find that your customer profile for downsizers needs support both buying and selling, so you would want to include them in email sequences for information about both buying and selling. Or, you might want to send them regular updates of both local buying opportunities and sales results.
Other customer types may be less active, but still need to be nurtured. Recent home owners with young families might not have any goals in the near future to sell, so automate emails around important anniversaries, check-ins and news about the local community. as a low-pressure way to stay in contact.
Good copywriters know that research into who your contacts are should lead your copy strategy. Certain types of contacts have motivations and triggers that you can lock into in your copywriting that will make them more likely to engage with you.
Before you start writing your copy, use your contact profiling to determine your message. Let’s look at our previous example of a downsizer profile.
If you work regularly with downsizers, you might know that a pain point for them is the overwhelm of juggling two needs on the market – needing both to sell and buy. Your writing would need to address this pain point, triggering the downsizer contact type to act.
Focusing on the psychology behind your contacts’ buying decisions sounds daunting, but it actually makes copywriting easier (and more effective). You can keep your language simple, but get a much more tailored message across: I make selling hassle-free so you can focus on finding your next home. Request a report on your property today.
The key when it comes to quality copywriting is to focus on how what you’re promoting benefits a particular contact type.
This can be helpful when finding new contacts through social media advertising. You should create different ads through iRealtySocial with different imagery and captions for each contact type you would like to target. Tailoring your ad content to different types of contacts will make users more likely to act on your ad.
You can also use your knowledge of your contacts to better pitch yourself to potential clients.
Take walking into a listing presentation. If you know what contact type the person you’re pitching to falls under, you can better pitch to them. Understanding your contact types’ internal motivations means you’ll know:
What would this look like with our example downsizer contact type?
We talked about the particular downsizer paint point of needing to both buy and sell, so we can determine that a huge motivator for this contact type is the speed of a sale and ease of the sales process. You might then expect questions around timeframes – How quickly can you list the property? How quickly can it be marketed out to your contacts? How soon can we get buyers through the property?
Be clear in your time frames from the beginning and be sure to impress this contact type with your understanding of their needs.
You may also be faced with requests for advice around both buying and selling in the current market, about whether to buy first or sell first and, of course, about whether the sales price of their current property will cover costs for buying in future. With contact profiling, you’ll know to prepare yourself with resources and advice on both buying and selling.
Once you’ve worked out your contact types main paint points, sit down and list the potential questions that come with those pain points.
Downsizers will often belong to an older demographic and won’t necessarily be tech-savvy. Knowing this, when it comes to what resources to provide in your pitch, prioritise benefits to your contacts rather than the software and systems you use.
You can still show off your fantastic digital processes, but instead of showing them your social media demographic targeting, show them an example of the final vendor report from a social media advertising campaign. Show them the numbers and the direct enquiries you receive from your digital campaigns, rather than the ins-and-outs of your software.
Similarly, you can use iRealty resources like the property prediction tool to display potential demand for a property from contacts who already exist in your database, rather than showing contacts what your newsletter might look like.
You might have other contact types who want to know the exact systems and software you’re using, how you’re advertising on social media and who you’re marketing to. You would prepare for a pitch to these contact types differently.
A good agent asks questions while they’re pitching. This helps to give you more clues regarding your contacts’ internal motivators as you speak to them (because remember, while contact types help you prepare, individuals still have individual needs you might not be able to guess).
Your downsizer contact type has probably lived in their current home for a number of years and has sentimental attachment to that home. If they feel that you can understand that attachment and are interested in their point of view on the home, that interest could easily nudge them from unsure to ready to list with you.
Ask them their favourite memories of the home or what they think is a potential selling point. Make the process of pitching yourself all about THEM.
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