Key Takeaways
Client Journey Mapping:
- Enhances marketing effectiveness
- Increases client conversion rates
- Increases client retention and referrals
Introduction
A super helpful exercise to use to optimize your real estate marketing efforts, and drive more sales, is Client Journey Mapping. The process involves analyzing all the interactions prospective clients have with your brand. As you move through the process, you’ll learn how clients engage with your marketing along the various stages of the journey, why they engage, and how to convert them more quickly.
There are many ways to use Client Journey Mapping, and here we take a look at how to use this to organize and optimize your sales and marketing to grow your real estate business.
What is the Client Journey?
Prospective real estate clients take a series of actions while deciding to get into the real estate market and choosing an agent. Identifying these pivotal points along their decision-making journey are your opportunities to build brand awareness and lead people to hire you instead of another agent.
The journey covers the entire series of interactions prospective clients have with your brand, from the moment they become aware of you and your services, to the point where they make referrals and become repeat clients.
The Real Estate Client Journey
I think of the prospective client’s journey—aka lead—in six phases, with the first phase starting before clients become aware of your brand:
- Never heard of you: the lead is in the early stages of deciding whether or not to make a real estate transaction and is a stranger to your brand.
- Aware of you: the lead has found your content, and has become a lead by subscribing, or downloading content. The lead enters the lead nurturing process. During this process, the lead gets to know you through your content.
- Now needs your services: the lead has decided to make a real estate transaction and has interacted with your content in a way that leads them to reach out to you, or you to them.
- Appointment phase: It’s likely you are still competing with other real estate agents for this lead’s business, so communication during this phase leads to conversion.
- Brokerage agreement signed: transaction-related communications during this phase reinforce your brand value.
- Raving fan: post-transaction marketing to this client is essential to stay top-of-mind, leading to increased referrals and repeat business.
These phases represent your real estate sales funnel and mapping these phases with marketing channels and content provide amazing insights you can use to optimize your marketing strategy to guide them through the entire customer journey as efficiently as possible.
How to Map the Client Journey
- Start by downloading the Real Estate Client Journey Map Templates I’ve provided.
- Create a version for each target market you have, e.g., first-time homebuyers, luxury buyers, investors, past clients, etc.
- For each phase of the journey, ask yourself these questions and notate the answers under each phase:
- What are they thinking, feeling, or doing at each stage?
- What and where are they researching?
- Where do we interact with them at each stage? Which marketing channels?
- How will we move them along their journey with us in mind?
Now, create a visual representation of the journey to understand the types of content to create along the sales funnel. You might also think of the funnel as a content marketing funnel, where the top-of-funnel content focuses on getting discovered by potential leads. More in-depth educational/valuable content is used to nurture the now-aware lead to conversion, and beyond.
Also use the map to identify touchpoints along the journey where you have gaps in communication or an opportunity to do better, ultimately leading to signing more clients in the most efficient way, i.e., increasing your return on investment.
Final Thoughts
Mapping the client journey is a powerful exercise for optimizing your real estate marketing strategy. By understanding the stages your potential clients go through, you can tailor your marketing efforts to meet their needs at each phase, increasing your chances of converting leads into loyal clients. Start implementing client journey mapping today to enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow a thriving real estate business.
Want to get personalized marketing advice that’s tailored to your real estate business? Book a free consulting call with me today.
