What's an audience...and why do you need one?

If you want to create a real estate business that will consistently produce ready-to-sell prospects who love you and want to business with you, then you need to be more than a real estate agent.

You need to be a digital marketer who generates and puts out amazing content.

As a digital marketer, it’s key that you know your audience inside and out so that you’re 1) targeting the right group of people and 2) sending them the absolute perfect messages based upon their wants, needs and desires.

The question I have for you, is how well do you know you’re audience? Do you have data on them and understand what makes them tick and what they want to hear from you? If you don’t, any marketing you’re doing may be completely off the mark.

If you remember, the goal isn’t just to have leads, it’s to have an audience of subscribers [insert link to lead vs. subscribers blog post] who want to engage with you and eventually, choose you to help them with their real estate needs.

For the purposes of clarity, your audience is a group of people who you are writing for. If you know who you are writing for, you can make good decisions about what information to include, as well as your tone and language in conveying it.

In fact, without knowing your audience, the messages you craft and send out won’t hit the mark. That means your marketing efforts will be ineffective...netting you poor results.

Be sure that you are clear on who makes up your audience and what they want to learn/get from you so that you can create spot-on content that gets them interested, keeps them engaged and eventually moves them to become a client down the road.

Understanding your audience and what makes them tick

In order to hit the members of your audience between the eyes with your marketing message, you need to first realize that you are not only a real estate agent, you are a marketer as well.

In fact, you may want to consider yourself a content marketer first and an agent second because without being a good content marketer who can generate qualified leads consistently, your job as a real estate can become largely irrelevant because you’ll have nobody with whom you can work.

Content marketing is the strategy of creating meaningful content online and offline for the various consumption channels that exist such as websites or blogs, to bring your message to a particular target audience.

Social media marketing is one of content distribution channels which marketers use to reach users on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

Content marketing through social media is one of the best ways to connect with your audience.

Building an audience online is impossible without understanding the communities on each social media platform separately and across the platforms as a whole.

Social networks are a source of a huge amount of highly specific and detailed audience data — including demographics, personal and professional interests and even education level — that can help direct your content marketing efforts.

Analyze your audience to create a better approach to delivering content

By analyzing your social media audience, you can come to understand which topics and delivery formats are most interesting to your audience. The insights you gain from this research allows you to determine a long-term content strategy and organize your content-production calendar and delivery strategy more effectively.

One of your biggest challenges is going to be moving your digital audience (from social media0 to your company website and CRM so you can engage with them via email drip campaigns, text messages and phone calls.

To make this happen, you need to ensure that every word that you put out there on social media — and any landing page you’re using to drive traffic to your site — is 100% in alignment with your audience's interests and effective in moving them along the pipeline to converting to a real opportunity.

The only way to do this, is to analyze your audience and then created targeted content for each stage of the customer journey.

When boiled down, this means serving users with compelling content at the right time, which helps you to achieve your business objectives whether they are just dipping their toe in the water or serious about making a product purchase.

In addition to helping you craft a solid content strategy, audience analysis can help you make a better use of your resources. The information you gather can give you clues as to whether you should do something like invest in a new video camera, take advantage of a video editing course, or hire someone to help with your design strategies.

The feedback and information you gather can give you endless ideas on how to improve and target what you do.

Audience insights help you meet your business objectives

The only thing as important — and maybe even more important — as planning your content marketing strategy is the consistent publishing of relevant content across all of your online channels.

The folks in your audience will be demanding.

Not only do they want great content, they want it to be personalized, engaging, and extremely informative all at once. If you fail to provide your audiences with value in an entertaining and educational manner, you put yourself at risk of losing followers and the potential for organic growth.

In light of this, it's crucial that each piece of content you publish is not driven by guesswork or gut feeling, but rather through tangible data you culled from your audience analysis. Remember the more relevant your content is to your audience, the more likely it is that your users will make comments, ask questions and engage with you.

The benefits of higher engagement are an improved relevance score, less expensive Facebook ads, more visitors to your website, and ultimately, better conversions. By investing more time into understanding your target audience, amazing results can be yours.

Your target audience wants regular, targeted content

Nothing is static in the world of digital marketing. Your online audiences are constantly changing and as such, so is what they want to learn and hear from you. Keeping current with your audience data allows you to stay on top of what’s relevant to your audience so you can continue providing them with value.

Think about this: let’s say a new group of users begins following your Facebook page. Doing your audience analysis is the strongest way to quickly detect the members of your new group and figure out how similar they are to your existing audience.

When you uncover the differences between the two groups, you’ll discover hints on how you should tweak your content strategy to also appeal to the new followers. Consequently, your posts will be more engaging to a larger number of users with whom you can stay in touch more consistently as you take them down your marketing funnel.

Another plus to knowing your target audience inside and out is that it helps improve your website's SEO ranking. Knowing what’s interesting to the people that follow you allows you to do related keyword research and use the high search keywords as part of your relevant content creation strategy.

A solid SEO strategy is a major key to ranking well in Google and driving even more organic traffic to your website.

In the end, knowing your target audience on your social media outlet plays large part in successfully setting up your content marketing efforts. Analyzing audience data, thoroughly, needs to be the first step in creating a meaningful content strategy that can help you achieve your business objectives.