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The Power of Real Estate Targeting to Boost Conversions

by | Strategies, Targeting & Demographics

Real Estate Targeting

Do you want to achieve the proper message market fit for your real estate lead generation and marketing campaigns?

In that case, you need to look into the power of real estate targeting. Doing it right can boost your conversion rates and, thus, your ROI.

This article serving you as an introductory guide, will therefore cover…

  • What real estate targeting strategies are and why they are important
  • What a real estate target audience is
  • The five types of real estate targeting
  • Real estate targeting tools and technologies

 

What Are Real Estate Targeting Strategies, and Why Are They Important?

Real estate targeting strategies are methods and techniques to identify and reach the most relevant audience for a specific property or real estate service. 

By using these strategies for your real estate marketing and lead generation, you increase your success rate of reaching the right people with the right message, thus increasing your conversion rate and, consequently, your return on investment.

This is related to message-market fit. I already covered this topic a bit in this and this article. 

A real estate targeting strategy is crucial to achieving message market fit.

As a short reminder, message market fit determines how well your marketing message (your sales copy) resonates with your target audience.

When you develop a real estate targeting strategy, you will identify and learn about your target audience’s particular characteristics, needs, and preferences.

Based on this information, you can tailor your message (sales copy) to meet those needs effectively.

Let’s make a short example of bringing this point home. Say you sell a luxury apartment in a trendy neighborhood and target young professionals.

In this case, your message should emphasize the convenience and modern amenities of the apartment (e.g., high-speed internet, easy access to local cafes and restaurants, and a state-of-the-art gym).

This message (real estate sales copy) should significantly change to achieve message market fit when you target retired couples. 

Instead, you want to highlight the apartment’s spaciousness, closeness to museums, theaters, and stunning views.

So, when you use a real estate targeting strategy, it helps you identify your target audience’s demographics, psychographics, and behaviors to create a message that speaks to them in their language.

It will also help you decide which marketing channels to use for your real estate lead generation.

You can imagine how well your lead generation will perform (likely not with a pretty sad conversion rate) when you target retired couples with a TikTok campaign, mentioning the great party scene in the apartment’s neighborhood.

 

What Is a Real Estate Target Audience?

You can’t have a real estate targeting strategy without a target audience. 

To develop a real estate targeting strategy, you will need a target audience to reach and engage specific segments with tailored messages and content.

So a real estate target audience is a specific group of people you aim to reach with suitable marketing and lead generation endeavors as a real estate professional.

You can define a target audience via various characteristics: location, interests, demographics, and behaviors.

For instance, when you want to target first-time homebuyers (I covered them in this article) as a typical characteristic of this audience, you would narrow it down to people between the ages of 25 and 35 interested in buying a starter home in a trendy neighborhood.

So the target audience consists of…

  • Demographics (age, gender, income, etc.)
  • Psychographics (personality traits and values)
  • Behaviors (actions taken)
  • Preferences (likes and dislikes)

All of the above elements of a target audience can be used to target your potential buyers or sellers better and achieve an improved message market fit so you will be more persuasive. In the end, this will help increase your lead conversion rates.

What happens when you ignore all the above?

That’s easy.

You will risk wasting time and resources on your marketing and lead generation efforts, either generating no leads or sales at all or low-quality real estate leads.

You may produce content (in the case of real estate content marketing) or run lead generation campaigns that do not resonate with potential buyers and sellers, thus missing the mark.

This happens when you go about real estate lead generation with a scattergun approach, testing and experimenting with the long lists of tips and tricks you can find on the web without having clarity on your real estate marketing strategy, goals, and constraints beforehand.

 

Diving Deeper Into The 5 Types of Real Estate Targeting

Many of the various real estate targeting types are based on the above target audience characteristics.

So it will come as no surprise that there are the following types:

  • Demographic targeting
  • Psychographic targeting
  • Behavioral targeting
  • Geographic targeting
  • Retargeting

 

1) Demographic Targeting

Suppose you sell a luxury penthouse. Would it make sense to target college students living on a shoestring budget in their twenties? 

No, it wouldn’t make sense (especially for your marketing budget).

So by using demographic targeting, you consider age, gender, income, occupation, education, and marital status so you can tailor your marketing messages to attract a specific type of potential buyer or seller.

 

2) Psychographic Targeting

This type of targeting is obviously more behavior centered.

For example, selling a fixer-upper property, you may want to target people interested in DIY projects and home renovation shows.

To do psychographic targeting successfully, it’s all about understanding the mindset of your target audience so you can tailor your real estate sales copy accordingly to it.

Compared to demographic targeting, it’s more difficult.

Why?

As you may already imagine, to know the behavior of your target audience, you need a good understanding of your target audience’s values, beliefs, lifestyles, interests, and more.

This information is more challenging to come by than demographic information, especially if you start out and haven’t gotten to know past clients better.

 

3) Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is like the little brother of psychographic targeting.

How is that?

Well, beliefs inform actions and actions are behaviors.

So when psychographic targeting is mostly about beliefs, behavioral targeting is about the actions that come from the beliefs.

This type of targeting is most commonly used online because it is easier to implement by technology. It involves tracking and analyzing user behavior on websites and digital platforms, and it can be easier measured online.

But there are also a few offline methods, such as tracking customer purchase histories and behaviors in brick-and-mortar stores.

So based on this behavioral tracking data, you can then target the specific behavior of your potential buyers or sellers.

Examples of behavioral tracking are…

  • Time spent on a website
  • Page views
  • Clicks
  • Items added to a shopping cart
  • Search queries
  • Social media interactions

For instance, if your real estate website has the feature to add properties to favorites, over time, you can analyze this data (e.g., which type of property was added most of the time to the favorites, which price ranges are most popular, etc.). 

Based on this data, you can tailor lead-generation campaigns on various viable marketing channels your target audience uses.

 

4) Geographic Targeting

I bet you are likely most familiar with this type of real estate targeting (geographic targeting).

An example of geographic targeting is if you try to sell a beachfront property to someone living in the middle of a desert thousands of miles away from the actual property you want to sell.

That doesn’t make much sense unless you are in the niche (my article) of international real estate, vacation properties, or second homes.

Geographic targeting helps you reach people actually interested in the location of the property you promote.

So you focus on reaching specific audiences based on their location, which can include potential clients in a particular city, state, region, or specific neighborhood.

It also includes targeting potential buyers or sellers based on their proximity to a specific landmark.

There are several ways to do geographic targeting for your lead generation. You can do it via local media (offline) advertising, targeted direct mail campaigns (my article), and online advertising platforms supporting geo-targeting, such as…

 

5) Retargeting

Retargeting is the “stalking uncle” of all the above real estate targeting types. You could file a restraining order if someone did this to you offline.

So it is only limited to the online world (at least officially).

An example of retargeting is when you look at a pair of shoes online, only to see ads for those same shoes following you around the internet for weeks.

In real estate, an example of retargeting would be a potential seller who makes a home valuation on your website.

Luckily you have a Facebook pixel installed, making it possible to follow up on this website visitor with relevant Facebook ads afterward.

So since the potential seller visits Facebook daily, they now start to see your retargeting ads promoting your real estate services.

Shortly, here are some statistics about the benefits of retargeting:

  • The average CTR (click-through rate) for retargeting is ten times higher than for display ads.
  • It can boost conversion rates by up to 150% and simultaneously have an average CPC (cost per click) of only half of the search ads.

(source)

So you can likely assume that with a higher conversion rate and lower CPC, you will also have a significantly lower cost per lead.

 

Real Estate Targeting Tools and Technologies

Several types of tools and technologies on the market, free and paid, can help you identify and reach your target audiences.

1) Customer Relationship Software (CRM)

As already covered in this and this article in more detail CRMs can help you segment your client database and inspire you in the creation of targeted real estate marketing campaigns. 

Why? 

Because they support you in easier identifying your leads and current or past clients’ behaviors, interests, and needs.

 

2) Data Analytics Software

Data analytics software is a technology that belongs to the vast field of business intelligence.

Different software providers such as Google Analytics (free), Adobe Analytics, Tableau, and Salesforce Analytics can help you make sense of large volumes of data so you can more easily interpret it to gain more knowledge about your target audience’s behavior and with it tweak and optimize your real estate lead generation and marketing strategies.

 

3) Social Media Advertising Platforms

As mentioned earlier, most social media advertising platforms provide detailed targeting options for advertising campaigns.

This allows you to target specific demographics, geographic locations, and behaviors.

 

4) Geolocation Technologies

GPS and Beacon technology are geolocation technologies that can help you target prospects in specific locations.

For instance, you could use it to identify people close to a property that is for sale or rent and then send relevant text messages.

Some of the providers offering this technology are:

 

5) Email Marketing Automation

Most email marketing automation providers (my article) offer different list segmenting options today.

Here you can send emails automatically to leads that behave in a particular way.

You can send tailored emails to a more engaged segment with your content.

The typical indicator used here is the open rate. Or you could send only emails to subscribers that click on the links in your email content.

So regarding targeting, the focus is mostly on behavioral targeting. 

Using a combination of the above tools, you can create and improve real estate marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience and increase your ROI. 

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Tobias Schnellbacher
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