Effectively communicating with vendors at the right moment, with the right message can be the difference between a vendor choosing your estate agency over your competitors.
Creating eye-catching well crafted emails, social media posts and beautiful direct mail is one thing, but if you’re not thinking about your audience’s mindset, chances are your campaigns won’t land, you’ll be misplacing effort and wasting your precious marketing budget.
That’s why understanding your vendor’s decision making journey is crucial to your marketing success, maximising instructions and achieving market growth.
Understanding the vendor decision-making journey
The customer (vendor) decision-making journey is a well-established marketing framework that can help estate agents tailor their current strategies.
The widely recognized model, AIDA, stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. More recently, two more stages, Identify and Retain, have been added to this model, making it (I)AIDA(R).
A good marketing strategy will consider all of these stages when crafting a message, meet the customer where they are, and aim to move them along to the next stage of their decision making to ultimately win their business.
By understanding each stage, you'll be able to evaluate your current marketing efforts and identify potential gaps, areas for improvement or elements to double down on.
Let's explore each stage and how you can apply it to your estate agency marketing activities.
Identify: pinpoint your target audience
Before you can influence your vendors, you need to identify who they are. The goal of your campaign will determine your target audience.
For example, if you’re focusing on property reductions, avoid targeting vendors who just listed their property as they are not yet frustrated with the market and reductions won’t be as impactful to them.
Spending time to accurately filter your audience ensures that your marketing efforts are relevant and effective, reducing wasted resources and underperformance.
Attention: capture their interest
Once you have your audience identified, the next step is to grab their attention. Craft messages that speak directly to their needs at that moment. For instance, for a reduction campaign a headline like “Want to Sell Your Property Quicker?” is more likely to catch the eye than a generic message.
Consider using A/B testing to refine your message. Test different variations with smaller groups to see what resonates best before launching your campaign widely.
Interest: maintain their focus
After capturing attention, you need to maintain interest. Highlighting the benefits of your agency and how you can address their specific needs.
Ask yourself, what sets your agency apart from the competition? What does your audience want to see from you?
Desire: create a need
Now, it’s time to convert interest into desire. Build trust through consistent, relevant, and engaging content. Share success stories, statistics, and testimonials to illustrate the value of your services.
This will help turn interested vendors into sales-ready vendors.
Action: encourage them to take the next step
With desire established, guide your engaged audience to take action. Think about what you want the audience to do once they're invested, and make it simple for them to do so, for example by offering Instant Property reports on your website, that can give them value, but also capture their details so you can follow up or nurture their interest.
Retain: keep them coming back
Retention is a crucial yet often overlooked stage. After a vendor has sold through your agency, maintaining a relationship can lead to future business and referrals.
Sending yearly property reports or other valuable information keeps past clients engaged and positions your agency as a trusted resource for their future needs.
Conclusion
By understanding and strategically navigating the (I)AIDA(R) model, estate agents can better influence vendor decisions, ensuring more instructions and sustained market growth.
Tailor your marketing activities to each stage of the decision-making journey to engage, convert, and retain vendors effectively.
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