Real Estate Market Segments

[Max]

I was thinking about all the possibilities to provide necessary information on a real estate site for every market segment. Just think about it - you know who your visitors are, or at least who you're working for and you answer all their possible questions within your website content to satisfy those people search.

Here are the market segments that I can identify in our area:
1. Families
2. Investors
3. First time buyers
4. Mature Adults
5. Hispanics
6. Single Women

The last actually identified by CENTURY 21 and, honestly, I have no clue about that market.

What are your market segments?

[Mr Jody Hudson]

Are you single Max?

[Max]

Nope - selebrating 2nd year in June Are you thinking about Single Men as market segment?

[Mr Jody Hudson]

Just a tease about you saying no clue on single women...

I guess I just don't segment much. We get them all. Actually we live in a very, very, gay area and we get very few of the gay men. We do get some of the gay women.. but mostly we get professional couples and single professional women, then men, then the rest.

Since all of our marketing is on the Web, we just get the market segment that uses the Net to find us.

[Max]

I prefer not to segment by sexual orientation
Why I was curious about segmentation - I think it is much easier to satisfy/target each segment online rather then actually target your audience with printed advertisement.

[Mr Jody Hudson]

Explain please Max???

Do you use separate but linking websites for instance? I do that a bit, but not as well as I would like.

[Max]

Originally Posted by Mr Jody Hudson

Explain please Max???

Well, online, whichever audience you target and whichever methods you use to drive traffic - you always want the highest ROI (return on investment) - conversion rate. Let's say you run an advertisement on open house in Saturday's newspaper and tell everyone to go to your web site to check out all the nice pictures and property details etc. etc. etc. for this particular open house. Well, people come to the home page of your site, find a whole bunch of info and different links, pages blah blah blah.. people might find the info easley.. or not... Now, let's say you created a specific domain name or instead of the general site you directed people to a specific page (a separate domain name can redirect people to any specific internal pages you want) and that exact page will provide all the information on that particular property. Which of the two cases will get highest ROI? I'm pretty sure the second one if set correctly. You're not just driving traffic through - you're targeting your audience and when they come, they expect to see exactly what they thought they would find at this particular place without digging any further and you expect them to contact you because they were interested to see this specific info.

Back to my comment on online targeting. I think setting up specific pages or breaking site into different sections for each of your targeted segment that answer all of their possible questions will increase ROI. We drive massive traffic through hundreds of keyphrases, but majority of the traffic comes directly to the home page. Why do we have menu and different options? One - To organize the information; Two - to give people selections on what they would like to choose. So, basically setting up sections like Investment: Golf Properties, Oceanfront Condos, Pre-Construction etc.; Single Family: Private Communities, 55+ Communities etc. - you're targeting audience, only those that are interested will go and look at that info. Well, by providing useful, high quality information (as much as possible - answer all possible questions customers ask) for each of your targeted segments will increase ROI. I'd like to think about a questionnaire that included all practical questions that majority of the people ask from each of your segments - then try answering all of them for each segment with additional value (if possible) - like extensive info on the neighborhoods with many quality pictures, videos, maps, floor plans, site plans, what kind of things around etc etc etc.

Our Internet traffic is pretty much constant and it is more cost effective to work with it rather then with printed advertisement.

..wow, I think I wrote too much.

[Mr Jody Hudson]

Thanks!

I do a lot of that but I really do need to do it more and better.

I don't use print media at all. But I do make a lot of different pages that are aimed to capture a particular group of searchers... I can do more.