Think about things from the point of view of your customer
As marketers, we often throw around buzz words like sales funnel and customer journey. Essentially what we’re saying is moving your potential buyer from the point where they’ve never heard of you to the point where they part with their money for your services.
At each point along this often-indirect route, this customer will need different things from you:
- To start with, your prospect may not have heard of you. You’ll need to build brand awareness through consistent use of a well-designed logo and tone of voice in all communications.
- Once your customer is aware of your brand, they’ll need you to help them towards a purchase decision by continuing to stay in touch and providing useful information.
- When your customer has decided they definitely want to buy in Spain, they may just need a little convincing that you’re the right agent for them. If you’ve concentrated on your relationship to date this should be easy.
- When you know your customer intends to buy, but you’re helping them choose between different properties, you can start to put into practice everything you learned in the post How to turn viewing trips into sales.
- Even after the customer has made a purchase, your job is not done. Think about upselling rental management services to those purchasing an investment property and provide plenty of information to help them settle in.
Work out the best channels for marketing your property business
Look back at the various channels or activities you’ve used to generate leads for your business. These could be social media channels, your website, local papers, letterbox drops, or using an international portal such as Kyero.
Which were the most effective and which felt, quite frankly, like a bit of a waste of time. Start to track these activities more carefully. Create a spreadsheet or use your CRM system to capture information from new enquirers so you can gradually start to work out which lead generation activities are worth more investment.
Make sure you get the balance right
If you have several income streams, you’ll need to make sure you get the balance right between where you focus your efforts. In fact, the beauty of having a strategy is that you can shift it around depending on the direction you want to take your business – i.e. if you’ve decided you want to attract more properties onto your portfolio, you can set out your marketing activities accordingly. While if you’re looking to increase the number of leads you get from overseas, you can concentrate more on marketing internationally.
Don’t be tempted to spread yourself too thinly by trying to market to all of the people all of the time. It only results in a diluted message that appeals to no-one.
But make sure you always prioritise hot leads – those that are ready to move immediately.
Set out your content strategy
Content is king as they say. And your content strategy should be about providing your customers with useful information.
If a buyer is only just beginning to consider a move, perhaps draw their attention to the Kyero Buyers Guide which will give them a wealth of useful information, as well as to our podcasts, so they can listen to other people’s experience of buying in Spain – they will gain insights and reassurance from those who have been there and done it already. If your customers want to know more about certain areas of Spain, send through the relevant area guides to give them a real flavour of life in each region.
Try to provide useful content to customers, no matter which stage of the buying process they’re in – even as part of your aftercare to leave them with positive memories of your services to keep you at the forefront of their minds.
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Follow up on enquiries
One of the most crucial parts of your marketing strategy is making sure you actually follow up on enquiries. It’s all very well generating leads in the first place, but you have to put in the work to convert them.
Make sure you put in place a process for replying swiftly to potential buyers, providing any useful information that might be relevant and beginning to move them towards arranging a viewing.
Delegate activities to other members of the team
Marketing is one of the areas of business where you can delegate a good chunk of the tasks as long as adequate training is given to more junior members of staff. Think uploading posts to social media, loading property profiles onto your portal, replying to enquiries using templated responses, keeping track of enquiries and leads in your CRM system and running analysis reports periodically.
Actively seek referrals and testimonials
Finally, customer reviews and testimonials are worth their weight in gold. Make it part of your marketing strategy to ask for them.
And make it part of your after sales process to keep in touch with your previous buyers and, as part of this, ask for referrals.
Having a marketing strategy in place, even if it’s just a series of processes and plans rather than a 50-page document, can make all the difference when it comes to taking a structured approach to reach your business goals.
By making a few small changes you really will see the difference it can make.
