If you made the decision to create your blog for your real estate business, you have the “why” for your blog. The “why” is the reason for which you create your blog, your motivation and this is important as you need to invest time in your blog, and your motivation directly impacts the amount of time you are willing to invest in your blog. Now you have to make sure that your “who” is taken care of. Your “who” will be the audience you intend to read your blog. You have to figure out who is your target audience, meaning that you need to understand your target audience, know who they are, what motivates them and what is more likely to draw them to your blog.
If you haven’t heard of the terms “blog avatar” or “buyer persona”, through this article you will become familiar with them. While they might appear like techy marketing terms, these terms are directly linked with establishing your target audience.
Through this article, we aim to give you the tools necessary to establish your blog’s target audience. At the same time, our goal is to make you understand them and attract them throughout your real estate blog’s content.
What’s a Blog’s Target Audience?
The target audience for your blog is made up of the group of people who are most likely to find the content you provide most useful. Looking at it from this angle makes the spotlight focus on the target audience and not your aim because it often happens that your target audience isn’t the one that you aim for but the one that is at the end of your aim. The two aren’t necessarily the same. You might have people outside of your intended target resonate with the content you provide.
Limiting your target audience to who you intend to reach will harm your blog, because while you target something, getting more than that will only benefit you. Make sure your content isn’t only accessible to 20-year-old women, with a steady job, a child on the way, and ready to spend large sums of money for a home. That kind of “buyer persona” is incredibly tight to fit any mold that you might create. You might only end up with one such individual on your blog and be overwhelmed by people who don’t fit those criteria that you could overlook because of your strict criteria.
The articles you post on your blog need to be created with the reader in mind. That means you need to understand your readers. Make sure any content you post answers the following questions:
- How will your content be useful to them?
- What’s the call-to-action the reader will remain with after reading your content?
- Did the content you provided answer all the questions the audience might have about the topic discussed?
If you want to make sure that your target audience will have access to the content you provide, make sure that those and other questions are answered. Posts that target an audience and provide information that the target audience needs must reach that target audience in the first place. The target audience targeted is more likely to find the targeted content if that content is what they are actually looking for.
Why does it matter to know who your target audience is?
The simplest way to answer that question is as follows: If you know your target audience, you will know the kind of content they are interested in and you will be able to provide it to them. When you know who will read your content you are more capable to create blog articles that they are likely to read and promote. The more you consider your target audience, the more real and relatable it becomes, and you will wind up considering them as a real person with real problems and not an abstract entity that you can not relate to.
If you have an abstract audience profile, your content will suffer as it will be too generalized and you may wind up rambling in your real estate writing, jumping from one subject to the other, from one type of address to another as you try to reach everyone. Your audience is a human being so you need to address your content to a human being who is flawed, imperfect, and real. You need to humanize your reader in order to understand them. Give them personality traits, problems, and interests, and you will know how to better capture their attention. Traits can be addressed, problems can be solved, and interests can be discussed. Without these, it will be like you are addressing a void.
Also, the last thing we want to mention in this section is that, if you know your audience, you will have an easier time finding them through your marketing strategy. Don’t forget, that having a professional blog is only part of the struggle. Once you have it you need to make sure it gets read. Even if you find a niche, reaching your target audience is another story.
Niche vs. Target Audience
When it comes to your niche, some experts say that the narrower the niche the more opportunities for monetization, while others say that a wide niche gives you access to a more variable audience and more profits. The truth of the matter is that they are both correct and incorrect. While yes, both those extremes can help your blog grow, don’t expect profit in the first few months.
For example, you can find blog’s that debate the importance of some type of flooring material and make crazy profits from it, and at the same time, you can find lifestyle blogs that reach incredible numbers of people. However, your target audience is another story. While the niche is responsible for the type of content you provide, the target audience relates to the reader of the content.
When you look at this blog post, you can safely assume that the target audience is the realtors who wants to figure out who their target audience is. There might be other variations and types of readers that are reached, but that is the writer’s target audience. Once you manage to target your audience, it’s a lot easier to adopt the whole blog to target that audience. You can, however, limit your audience targeting to each post and not the whole blog. If your target audience through your blog is more generalized, you can individualize it more effectively through each post.
Design your Blog Avatar Audience
Now, we’re going to embark on a quick creative exercise. We are going to design the avatar of your blog’s target audience. You just have to ask yourself two questions:
- Who are you creating content for?
- What problem experienced by them do you intend to solve?
You need to identify your blog avatar and figuring out the following characteristics for them will make this easy. To make it easier to understand how this works, we’ll complete it with the blog avatar for this post:
- Age – 28-year-old
- Gender – female
- Their location: urban, suburban, rural, city and state – lives in Frisco, Texas.
- Occupation – real estate agent.
- Income – 60k/year.
- Marital status – married.
- Children – no kids.
- Hobbies – socializing with friends, brunch, drinks.
- Online platforms they use – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
- What problem do they have – she wants to grow her online presence for her real estate business.
Conclusion
Figuring out who your target audience is might be something that happens organically or that is strategically organized. The difference between one and the other is like getting into a bidding war without having seen the property or deciding to buy after you oversaw all the inspections, analyzed every corner of the property, and been in the home at the time of the decision.
There are many people who embark on their blogging journey without a strategy that mostly write for themselves, there are those who strategize everything and spend a lot of time on it or those who pay someone to do everything for them. Choose who you are more likely to be and follow the steps above if you fall into the second category.
