Creating Personas: Getting your Conveyancing Customers Right

Think about this. When you target everyone - you actually target no one. 

What are Personas? Why are they Important?

You know those little rubber ducks on the conveyor belt at the sideshow alley (see image). If you try to buckshoot all of them you miss even one right?

You have to aim slowly, keep an eye on one of those cute little ducks as he does his thing going back and forward, preempt where he is going to be in 5-4-3-2 seconds, and then pop. If your aim and timing is clinical, you get him. And you get the prize. 

Think of a customer persona a bit like that little duck. He may seem the same as all the others, but he is not. You chose him, just like you need to know, choose and target the right customers for your business. 

Sure, your potential clients are buying or selling a property, but they need to know that you are the right firm for the job, to walk them through the process. You can't show them that if you don't know who they are. Your potential clients are not the same, and you won’t talk to them directly if you don’t know anything about them. The same marketing approach and message is NOT going to be attractive to everyone. 

Personas are the characters or identities that you can create to represent potential clients that have common traits and/or desires in line with your brand base. 

Creating personas will help you target them more effectively. Know your audience, put yourself in their shoes. What drives them, what do they need and want? What are their values and beliefs? You need to know the who, what and why. 

The benefits of having a clear and concise understanding of who your customers are, and their needs, are multiple. It will enable your firm to: 

• Directly offer answers to their questions, and give them what they need and want
• Identify pain points or ‘deal breakers’ in your processes when approaching different client profiles 
• Pinpoint where different potential clients get their information, to adjust your marketing strategy 
• Enable you to cut through the ‘information overload’ to create content that specifically speaks to your potential customers
• Help you stand out from the competition. 
• Customise your sales and marketing tactics to be more effective
• Improve return on investment and reduction of wasted effort. 
• Create simplified training materials for onboarding your new team members. 

How to Create Customer Personas for Your Conveyancing Firm

While we are far from experts on your clients, we do know a little about how to gather your data. Creating your personas for your conveyancing buyers can be as in-depth as you are prepared to go, but you don’t really need sophisticated data analytics or top-notch software to get the information you need. 

We recommend that you initially draw on your experience and knowledge to start sketching out what you know about your clients to start with. To kickstart we recommend you do the following: 

• Get feedback from your teams - anyone that’s front and centre with your existing and past clients will have plenty of insight into the common traits of the different types of people that have worked with you. 
• Look at your testimonials; people often outline the answer to their pain points or offer what you do best in their first-hand accounts of your dealings with them. 
• Look at your analytics data. 
• Undertake market research and look at your competitors for insight, their testimonials and reviews can offer additional data, perhaps in even what NOT to do. 

If you want to go really deep then you can always check out some of the Audience Insights tools available. Mentionlytics offers some information on the best tools on the market. 

What Should Conveyancers Include in their Buyers Persona? 

When we were undertaking our research, we discovered that keeping it simple was the best advice, especially when you only offer one specific service. There isn’t a great need to overcomplicate the contents, and keeping it down to 3 or 4 typical personas is plenty. 

The image below includes the basic contents and questions you should be addressing, as a guide, in your personas. 

If you were going to include anything further you could consider adding some of the following elements to your character data. 

• Audience Segments - if you already have these within your marketing strategy, fitting your personas into them will be useful. 
• Open-Ended Questions - if you have data recorded from previous interviews or surveys with clients through the customer journey, this can relate back to your personas’ needs, wants and deal breakers to assist with your content marketing and sales techniques. 
• Content Preferences - consider how your personas consume content. Online, emails, or hard copy brochures? Tone, style and voice can also be relevant. 
• Keywords - these can vary and align with different personas, and parts of the processes that may be of concern or frustration. 

Personas aren’t set in stone. Start simple and then build them to reflect ongoing data and insights. People change, and so will your targets! 

Final Word

Knowing who your ideal customers are, and why they are or should be engaging your conveyancing services, is the cornerstone of your marketing strategy. It’s one of the best steps you can take to improve your business, processes, marketing and sales goals and your ROI. 

And yes we admit, starting simple is a good place, but employing a data-driven approach to your persona creation will improve your strategy, and targeted marketing efforts in the long run. 

More Information 

• Moz has an in-depth article on Personas: Understanding the Person Behind the Visit that is more technically skewed towards UX Design, but goes into more detail than we could ever offer. 
• Hootsuite has a fantastic blog on How to Create a Buyer Persona for your business 
• Semrush offers further insight into the How, When and Why of your Personas. 
• Hubspot can walk you through your Persona Research 

Skypoynt are Australia's only agency dedicated to working with Conveyancer's for all of your digital marketing and integration needs. We've created extensive resources through our experience and research to show you we are committed to offering you the best partnership for your growth. Check out our FREE articles and blogs covering all aspects of Conveyancer Marketing, and talk to us about getting in front of the conveyancing customers that YOU know will help your firm grow.