The Brand Blog no.1 : IDENTIFY YOUR CORE SEGMENTS

The Brand Blog no. 1: IDENTIFY YOUR CORE SEGMENTS



Welcome to the first of ten step-by-step guides on building your estate agency or lettings agency brand –although this applies equally to other businesses.

The first step in building a strong brand is to have a really clear understanding of your most desired customers. Of course, your offering might appeal to anyone, but you’ll probably find that you can segment 80% of your customers into three or four groups.


If you can define tightly the make-up these segments, you will find that making decisions on what services you offer, how you differentiate yourself, what media you use, what visual and verbal identity you employ and so on, will all fall into place, enabling you to build a brand and offering that is strong and meaningful to your most desired customers, rather than one that is bland and meaningless to everyone.

Try to appeal to everyone and you won’t be strongly appealing to anyone. You’ll end up in no-man’s-brand.

So imagine you had your last 100 vendors in a room with you. How would you group them together? Maybe 20 are families with young children, 15 are older families, 25 are singles or pre-family couples, ten are developers, five are retirees, five are probate and the other ten are a random mix of others. Your mix might be different, of course, but you get the idea.

Next, try to put as much colour as you can into each group. Take the biggest group first: the young families. Who calls you in, Mr or Mrs? How old are they, and their children? Why are they moving, and where to? What are typical property values for this group? Where do they go locally, where do they shop, what hobbies do they typically have, what media do they come into contact with? What do they like about estate agents, and what irritates them? What problems do they currently experience with moving that you can (help) solve?

Do this for each group and you will have a very clear picture of your target audience, broken down, segment by segment. Compile a separate sheet for each group and even add some pictures relating to each group.

This is a great, and maybe even a fun, exercise to do with your team, perhaps after work with beers and pizzas to lubricate the process (and possibly even led by an external marketing expert!).

So that’s the first step – to distill all your knowledge about your customers into a few core target segments.

Next week, we’ll look at how to differentiate your offering using your target segments as your base.

For a short blog there are some deliberate simplifications, but I’ll happily discuss further if you’d like to get in touch.

Charlie Snell, The Marketing Business 
www.the-marketing-business.co.uk or www.agencyintelligence.co.uk