How to get to know your customer better and boost your agency's marketing success

How well do you really know your landlords and tenants?

If you understand who your customer truly is - your ideal landlord or tenant - then crafting a marketing message for those people becomes much easier and, in time, you’ll see more and more of these people engaging with your business.

How do you do this? By building buyer personas. Start by asking questions and identifying the similarities in your customers: Where do they want to live? What’s standing in their way?What do they want your business to help them with? 

Start tailoring your marketing message that are specific to your clients, so you are only delivering messages that they would find valuable. For example, are you talking to accidental landlords who need help finding tenants? Portfolio landlords looking for comprehensive property management so they can be completely hands-off? Or someone somewhere in the middle? What about your tenants? Are they students or young professionals or families? You might have several buyer personas - most businesses have at least three - so make sure you have messaging that’s tailored to each one.

Quality content

Producing content that provides valuable and insightful information to your target audience will bring them back to your website and brand, over and over again.

Always bear in mind that you should be focusing on quality over quantity. Do not write blogs or newsletters just to tick the box, make sure you invest enough of your time that people not only read the content but read the next piece and are excited to do so. Content done right can lead to trust, improved reputation, and new relationships when complemented with a great product or service. 

Another benefit of quality content is that Google really likes it. The more specific the content you create - tailored for your specific audience - the more likely that it will show up  at the top of Google’s search results and be clicked by your target audience when they are searching  for a solution to their problem - for example,  a landlord searches for professional letting agents in Bradford, and because of your well- written content and website, your agency appears at the top of that search. Remember to share your content, blogs and updates on social media too.

Adapt and pivot

Sometimes, things don’t go according to plan or something unexpected happens - such as the Covid-19 pandemic - and it's extremely important that you pivot your marketing message to reflect this. 

At Goodlord, we chose to completely halt our current marketing strategy and changed our focus overnight. The main need within the industry was not to be sold to, but to be supported. To provide agents with the information they needed, we created a page completely dedicated to covid-19 and lettings delivering updates from the government as they came in, stories from our customers and how they were successfully adapting, and publishing our data from our platform to show activity in the market as it dropped and more recently, as it recovered. Make sure you’re flexible enough to change your message when your customers’ needs change.

Extra resources to help you start marketing better

• Optin Monster's Content Marketing Guide 
• 10 Writing Ideas for a Letting Agent
• Hubspot's 'The Growth Show' podcast