Do you ever wish you had a steady stream of inbound leads reaching out to you on social media? The key is understanding the role of the customer journey in real estate.
The Customer Journey In Real Estate
When discussing the customer journey in the context of your real estate business, here’s what I mean.
The customer journey is the various stages your prospect goes through before they eventually buy.
Everything from the awareness stage, where they first become aware of you, all the way up until the end of the journey when they’re ready to hire you.
To turn cold leads into warm inbound clients, you need to guide your audience through the entire customer journey – with tailored messaging for each stage.
But most agents aren’t doing this. Instead, they’re only speaking to the leads who are in the final stage of their customer journey.
Here’s why this is such a big problem, and what to do instead to start having 100s of qualified leads reach out to you each year!
The Mistake: Only Speaking To Leads At The End of the Customer Journey
Did you know that only around 2% of your audience is in “ready to buy” mode at any given time?
What does this mean? You’re missing out on the 98% of qualified prospects who aren’t ready yet but are in the earlier stages of the customer journey!
Not only are you ignoring them, but you also likely lack the strategy to move them along and get them closer to being ready to work with you.
This is where the typical promo real estate posts miss the mark. As I scroll through social media, it’s painful seeing the same stuff from agents over and over again.
You’re asking for business repeatedly without giving value to audiences in different customer journey stages.
So it’s time to ditch the constant “just listed, just sold” posts and start marketing with your buyer’s journey in mind.
The Solution: Segment Your Audience into The Different Stages Of The Customer Journey
Here’s how we fix this—you need a process to speak to audiences in different stages of their real estate journey. You have to be able to activate your entire audience, not just the 2% ready to transact.
There are 3 simple customer journey stages your audience falls into:
- Early: Far from wanting to move
- Middle: Thinking about moving
- Late: Ready to move soon
Anyone following you fits into one of those stages currently. But most agents only market to the last group who’s ready now.
You might think that by hard-pitching people and constantly promoting your services, they’ll realize they’re ready to work with you.
But you can’t rely on brute force to push people along. That’s not how marketing psychology works. Your prospects will just find someone else they resonate with more who respects their timeline.
You need a strategic plan to move people from that first stage, down the funnel, until they reach the ready-to-move stage. This takes time, consistency, and understanding the mindset and motivations of your audience at each customer journey stage.
For those just starting to think about moving, they need education from you. For those getting closer to moving, they need reassurance. Your messaging needs to align with where they are in the customer journey.
How To Guide People Through The Entire Real Estate Customer Journey
Your marketing has to gradually move people through the process. In The Listings Lab, we use a 9-point content system to take people from stranger to client by optimizing messaging for each customer journey stage. You have to move people along or you’ll lose them.
If you’re not building resonance with your audience, you won’t get those inbound messages and requests. That’s what psychology-driven marketing content is all about.
It’s about being helpful and providing value across the customer journey, not demands, offers, and call-to-actions right away.
You have to nurture your audience, build trust, establish your expertise, and educate people before you make offers or pitches.
Remember – while some people might binge your content and be willing you work with you in just a few days, many people will take weeks or months before they trust you enough to reach out.
Once you’ve guided people through this customer journey, they’ll seek you out proactively when they’re ready to move.
Prioritizing The Customer Journey Leads To Create Life-Long Real Estate Clients
When you market only to people at the bottom of your funnel, you get high audience churn.
Why?
Because you’re only making yourself relevant to those 2% of people who are in buying mode.
After people are done buying or selling a home, they’ll likely unfollow you, because you’re only posting your listings and overly sales-y posts.
But when you use the mix of content types we teach in The Listings Lab, you’re relevant to your community no matter what stage of life they’re in.
This is how you build clients that stay with you for life.
You might work with someone and then they’ll keep following you and getting nurtured by your content. In 5 years’ time when they’re ready to move again, you’ll still be top of mind.
Prioritizing the customer journey in your real estate marketing results in more new clients, more referrals from your audience (even if they haven’t worked with you yet), and more brand evangelists for your business.
That’s why our members consistently get 3-10 extra deals per month by optimizing messaging across the customer journey.
Remember, most of your audience isn’t ready yet, but they WILL be eventually. It doesn’t matter what your niche is.
The key is to stop speaking exclusively to the 2% who are ready now. Develop a strategic plan to nurture your audience through an educational journey that turns cold leads into warm inbound clients.
That’s how you’ll master the customer journey and get hundreds of qualified leads reaching out to you each year!
Ready to start signing 3-10 more deals per month through social media?
Apply to The Listings Lab and book a call with our team HERE to see how we can help you achieve your business goals.
