How to determine your best lead generation strategy.

It is impossible to go onto one of the real estate industry groups without seeing some form of the questions, "Is (door knocking, cold calling, Zillow, Realtor.com, SOI, or insert something else) the best way to get clients." or what I think is the worse questions, "How do I get clients". Both of these questions absolutely ignore the most important part of your business, knowing your clients or ideal customer.

Now don't get me wrong, I understand why people are asking these questions. I understand what the intended outcome is. What I don't understand is why is the focus only on you and how you get clients and assuming that all clients are the same.

So let take a look at how to FINALLY answer the questions.

1. Look at the Market Analysis

The goal of developing your market analysis is to understand who is in your market to begin with. If you are focusing on First Time Homebuyers in a Seniors Community you likely have the wrong focus. If you are looking at high-end retail in a blue-collar town, then you likely have the wrong focus.

What your research is going to look at and see where the trends of the market are going, who is going to be in the market, who is staying in the market and most importantly understand why this is the case.

So where do you begin on this? First off, it is being plugged into what is going on in the community and understanding what the focus is of the economic development teams and whom your market has traditionally attracted. Second, take a look at the Shift Share analysis of the industries in your market. If you don't know how to do one, look HERE. With the Shift Share Analysis, you will be able to see, with actual numbers, what the market is doing and what types of employment are coming your way.

2. Understand the Market Segmentation

The market segmentations are the groups that you begin to see from your market analysis. While the first groups you will begin to notice from the Shift Share analysis are going to be related to career fields, you can then dig further and look at what demographic information you have to divide this information up even further. Now I am sure I scared some of you when I mentioned demographics, but to effectively market your services, you much understand the buying decision for each market segmentation.

3. Create Ideal Customer Profile

At this point, you should have a good idea of who is in the market and a handful of traits that go along with them and it is time to start to narrow down who you ideally want to work with. You can do this in several ways.

The first is to sit down and look at your last few years of deals and start to look at who they are. Look at how you acquired them, what marketing worked for them, what demographic data do they fall into, what industry to they work in and anything else you can find that makes them different. By doing this you may quickly start to see some trends of who your current market is.

The second step is to look and see if this trend represents the rest of the market. If you have no closed deals or not a lot of them then look at who what the larger segments are in the market and identify some of the larger segments or some of the more profitable segments. This is also a great opportunity to look at geography as well. If you farm a specific area those trends are going to be easy to find and spot with a few simple tools.

Thirdly, when looking at your closed deals, honestly ask yourself if you enjoyed working with those clients. Are they worth the effort or are they completely a pain in the rear to work with and not worth the money associated with them. Look at the market segments you identified in step two and see if those clients look to be worth the trouble. If none of them are, then you have another problem altogether.

The fourth step is to then see if you feel you are able to relate to these groups. This is not who you want to be best friends with, but if you are looking at doing Farm and Ranch Real Estate and have never seen a cow or the thought of getting dirty turns you off, then you likely are not going to relate well to this market segment.

Lastly, you are going to choose who your Ideal Customer is from the market segments and build a profile for this person. You want to be detailed on who this is. The more detailed the better because you can start to see how best to craft your message to reach the person.

Normally when I ask who a person's ideal customer is, I get something along the lines of "buyers and sellers" or "small businesses" or insert any generic group and nothing more than that. This is where real estate agents completely miss the mark because they are assuming that all buyers, sellers or small business owners are the same, that they have the same needs and can all be reached the same way. This needs to be as specific as looking at age, gender, ethnicity, the industry they work, preferences, geography, marital status and anything else that can affect the way they decided to make a purchase of select a service provider.

4. Develop a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

It is okay to have multiple ideal clients to work at developing business from, but from this point, each ideal client needs to be treated separately and your marketing strategy needs to be focused strictly on that ideal client, their needs, their pain points and what speaks to them. The "what speaks to them" is usually the hardest part to figure out. This takes research, this takes data, and it takes time. So where can you get this information from?

1. Survey your customers that fit the ideal client. Ask questions to understand what was the pain points, what marketing worked for them, what about your brand or abilities spoke to them. This is key data and can be collected in a formal survey or by a conversation and then compiled by a spreadsheet. Once you see some of this data you will start to understand what is effective and what is giving you an ROI.
2. Psychographics or Tapestry studies are invaluable in understanding what your customer's needs are. While generally, this is going to be based on geography, you can figure some of this out by other means as well. One of the easiest ways to get this type of data is through a company call ESRI who has the US broken down into 15 Life Modes and then broker down further into 68 individual segments. You likely already have access to this data and just don't know it. If you are a REALTOR? or a CCIM you have access to this data either through RPR? or Site to do Business.

Once you have some data, you can then look at answering the questions on what form of lead generation will work best for you and your ideal clients.