Posted by John Lockwood on October 31st, 2007

I’ve been meaning to write another article about how the enthusiastic tail of real estate blogging frequently wags the dog of analyzing and understanding how our web sites attract and convert business.

The Real Estate Tomato finally provided the impetus when they ran a post yesterday with the title:

The 7 Reasons Why Your (Future) Clients Should Care That You Are Real Estate Blogger

I don’t want to appear like I’m picking on the Tomato or the co-authors of this article, most of whom I don’t know.  However, I do think that focusing on what future clients should care about begs a more interesting and potentially profitable question about what past and present clients actually do care about.  To be sure, as they say in the stock market, “past history does not guarantee future results”.  On the other hand, if you’re about to embark on an activity that’s going to consume at least an hour or two per day for years on end, it helps to go into that activity with the attitude that you’ll investigate what actually does happen, as opposed to what should.

My What-Clients-Should-Care-About Wish List

From my perspective, I’d love it if my clients cared that I’m a real estate blogger. In fact, it’d be great if they cared that I was a Honda owner and over six feet tall, because that would further narrow the field down to me. If they all wanted guys with brown hair who originally come from Rhode Island and now live in Cameron Park, then hey presto: I’d be a shoe-in.

What They Should Want versus What They DO Want

It turns out, however, that clients have their own ideas about what they care about.

There, are, moreover, a few reasonably good ways to get at what those things are that your client cares about:

• Ask them, and they may tell you.
• Listen to them when they volunteer information.
• Use web analytics to find out.

I could stand some improvement when it comes to asking my clients what they care about. When I started Elite Properties, I had all sorts of forms and systems in place before I got around to writing my Customer Satisfaction Survey, for example.

By listening to clients, however, I’ve learned that they usually liked a few things about my web sites and my agents:

1. We don’t make them register before letting them search the MLS.
2. The web site is easy to use.
3. We return phone calls and emails quickly.

Adding web analytics gives us more information.  To be sure, web analytics is a little bit of a dull-edged tool in some respects. For example, it tells me that about 35% of the people who reach the home page will click right on through to the basic search page, versus only about 11% for the blog. It also tells me that more than 80% of the people who reach me for the term “Sacramento Real Estate” stay on the site, while only one third of the people searching for “Sacramento Real Estate Blog” make a journey further in.

However, returning again to the listening to clients category, the thing that most makes me a believer in the power of online search tools is the number of people who end up being clients who start a conversation as follows:

“Hi, my name is so and so. I found a listing on your web site…[goes on to give MLS number or address].”

My agents and I have talked to literally hundreds of people who’ve started conversations like that. In that same time, the number of people who’ve mentioned my blog can be counted on one hand.

So What Do Clients Want?

The beauty about my empirical knowledge that clients like to look at houses online is that it fits so well from what I have reasoned about my clients according to Cartesian first principles.

You all remember Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”

Here’s my crack at the real estate version: “I buy and sell real estate, therefore, my clients are interested in real estate.”

This is not just garden variety true.

It’s true by definition.

So Why Should I Care About What My Clients Care About?

Caring about what I think my clients should care about is another way of saying that I care about me — and they already probably guessed that before they ever happened on my blog.

In contrast, caring about what my clients do care about helps me to design a site with a clearer path to the goals that they have for a real estate web site, and it helps me see my writing in light of the things they care about. 

In the end this is all self-interest, of course, and it’s nothing new.  This is classic Zig Ziglar: “You can get anything you want, if you help enough other people get what they want.”

The hang-up is, you have to get other people what they really want. Getting them what you think they should want doesn’t work.

There’s a lesson in that for this blog as well, but one could argue that I haven’t learned it yet.  Stay tuned!