If you’re in the early stages of planning and strategizing a new website, you probably have a lot of ideas about what you want. Maybe you’ve looked at some competitor’s websites to see what they’ve done, or maybe you’ve just found some websites you like the overall look and feel of. There’s no doubt, doing that type of research prior to planning a new website is an important step to take.
But, there’s one vital piece of research that a lot of real estate agents forget about, and that’s really thinking hard about who it is they’re actually building their website for and doing what’s best for them.
Most real estate agents approach this process all wrong by believing that they’re planning a website for themselves, but really, they shouldn’t be.
To build a website that actually works, and converts, you have to remember that you aren’t building a website for yourself: you’re building it for the people that will actually be using the website.
In the end, you may not even be completely in love with how the website looks, but it really doesn’t matter whether you do or not; it only matters if your audience likes using it.
Here’s a hard example: If one agent’s primary audience is 60+ year olds that are downsizing and another agent’s primary audience is early 20 year olds that are buying their first condo, those websites should be drastically different. What they look like, what colours are being used, what the tone of voice is, what the call-to-actions are, all of it should be very different because the audience is so different and they want to do and see different things. In fact, their entire digital marketing strategy should be drastically different depending on the audience and what their goal is.
Every website should be different and built with a specific target audience in mind, and despite what most people think, not every agent has the same target audience, or at least, they shouldn’t anyway.
Start by asking yourself, who do you work best with? What type of person have you worked with in the past that you truly had a great experience with? What type of people have you worked with historically that you’ve done the best work with? Therein lies your target audience, or at least the foundation for it.
By planning your website around who you like to work with the most, or who you do the best work with, you’re likely to attract those types of people to work with you, which can help you build your referral business as well since those people are likely to have a good experience working with you.
Whatever your audience is, they will certainly respond to certain aspects of your website over others, and as a part of planning a website, to make it successful, you need to know what those things are.
In most cases, you are not your audience, so you should not be planning your website around your own likes and dislikes. Your audience is your audience, and you need to plan what you’re doing around their likes and dislikes, and ultimately, what they are most likely to want to do.
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