Effective Digital Campaign Building Tip #3: Building Customer Avatars
Who is your audience?
In our effective digital campaign building tips, we’ve already covered the importance of multichannel marketing (read here / watch here), setting up analytics (read here / watch here), and today we’ll talk about how to create a target audience and customer avatars for your marketing segments.
It’s one thing to know what you’re selling (and there are no problems with that – you’ve got a real estate project that takes physical area in a concrete geographical location). The most important thing after that is who you’re selling it to – who are your potential customers?
You might have the greatest property, but if the benefits you chose to highlight in an ad do not match the needs of a person the ad reaches – the advertising campaign will not be successful.
So, how do you identify the needs of different marketing segments for your online and offline campaigns? This is where customer avatars come to play.
You can watch the video or read the article below to learn about that.
Where to get data about your customers?
There is a lot of available and incoming information. It can be submitted directly by the customer or it can be supplied by third-party instruments, but all data is ineffective until you actually find a use for it.
User-Submitted Data
Capturing basic data about your customers is easily done via the contact form on your real estate project’s website. At the very least, you get two things:
- The email address of the person (which means s/he consented to share it with your company)
- The project the visitor was interested in (for example if you have dedicated websites for several ongoing real estate projects).
- Some contact forms also ask for phone numbers.
| A quick note about GDPR guidelines: In May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force. This law applies to all companies located in the EU or that have visitors from the European Union.
It aims to ensure personal data protection and security when people fill out forms. What does it mean for you as a website owner? This means that in the contact form, for example, you have to have the checkbox “By clicking “Submit,” I agree to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.” This checkbox cannot be prefilled, the user has to do it consciously. In the Terms and Agreements section as well as Privacy Policy, you have to describe how the collected data will be used, for what purposes, how long it will be kept, and how it will be protected from outside. |
Okay. Now you have the Email and the project they are interested in – what can you do with that information?
- Based on the email, you can sometimes find out the person’s first and last name.
- Based on the project, you can learn about the location where the person is looking for a property.
- Based on the area code of the phone number, you can understand where the person is currently located.
With the help of Google Analytics, BigQuery, and Data Studio tools, we can supply our data to the submitted information, for example:
- Timestamp (i.e. the time and date when the form was submitted)
- Geolocation (i.e. where the user was located at the moment)
- User Source (organic, referral, direct, etc.)
On their own, these data don’t tell us much, but if you combine it, you can glean useful insights:
- A timestamp that indicates an evening + geolocation = place of residence (since the person would probably be at home in the evening, perusing the real estate properties)
- The user source shows whether the lead is cold or hot. A person who came to your website and left a message by finding you on a real estate portal is much higher on the conversion ladder than a person who just found you in Google search results.
Third-party Data Sources
One thing that we have to say upfront regarding the third-party data: all of it should be publicly available data and consent should be provided. Another note is that it should be duly protected on your side since it is personal information.
What can third-party data provide?
- Company
- Position
- Education
- Work location
- Address of residence
- Contact data
- Photo
How can this information be used to build more precise customer avatars?
- Company + position = income level of the user
- Education + year finished = age group
- Work location + address of residence = necessity to commute or not
All these three sources are collected into a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. At Wild Dots, we use CRM as a base and have found it as a very convenient instrument for us.
Building Segments & Customer Avatars
A marketing segment is a subcategory of the general audience with specific known information about them, which helps to understand how your company can approach them in a better way. A customer avatar – a virtual “image” of the person that fits this segment is created.
Based on the information we’ve talked about above, let’s examine avatars.
| Avatar A | Avatar B | Avatar C | |
| What do we know? | 5.5 rooms house Interested in Renens Works in Geneva C-level position |
2.5-3.5 rooms apartment
Interested in Fribourg 30-39 years old Plans to have another child |
4.5 rooms apartment
Interested in Crissier Works in Lausanne Lives in Zurich |
| What can we assume? | This person is very likely to purchase because of the income level and the requirements of the search. | This person needs guidance. We need to adapt the content to bring the person closer to the conversion and explain how this property can help his/her family. | This person commutes to work, therefore highlighting communing solutions in the benefits would bring him/her closer to the purchase. |
Building Better Avatars: Takeaway
Customer avatars help us to tailor our advertising and messages to what the clients might be looking for, bringing them closer to the purchase.
Here are three takeaways from this article:
- Use internal data analytics to identify prospect needs based on behavior patterns on the website
- Use third-party public data sources to build a prospect’s profile
- Personalize and detail advertising materials upon derived customer segments
Need help setting this all up? Let’s meet for a cup of coffee and talk about your real estate project’s needs and how Wild Dots can help.
