When creating and maintaining your real estate brokerage's website, one important factor that should be driving all of your website decisions is your target market. In order to build a good relationship with your client, you want to have a website that is going to be meeting their needs.

Do you know who your target market is?

Learning who your target market is is one of the first steps to successfully designing a website that will meet all of their needs. Unless you are a national brand, you probably have a good idea about where your target market is located, but what else do you know about them? Do you know your general target market's age group? Are most of them first homebuyers, or are they empty nesters looking to downsize? What type of property is your target market looking for?

If your brokerage has been in business for a while, you probably already have a good idea who your target market is. If you're just starting out, however, you may want to take a good look at the market around you to learn who your potential and current customers are.

How do you discover what your target market wants?

Once you know who exactly your target market is, you'll want to learn what they need from your website. A few ways to discover this include:

• Surveys (online and offline)
• Social media (search certain hastags to learn what they are saying)
• Google analytics (what are your customers coming to your site to do?)

Is your website designed for you or for your target market?

Implementing what your target market wants and needs in a website can often be the hard part of the website design process. We all often forget that we are not necessarily in the target market that we market to. When working on your website, you will need to keep this in mind – what you find useful or appealing may not necessarily be what your target market will find useful or appealing.

Once you know who your target market is, you can more easily develop your website so it focuses on their needs. For example, if you only deal with people looking to purchase a residential property, you wouldn't want to have a large area of your website dedicated solely to commercial real estate.

This is especially important for knowing what type of content to include on your website home page – it will determine what calls to action to focus on, whether you include a property search (and what fields to include in your property search), and what type of imagery you incorporate into your website.

Your website is an essential part of the promotion of your business. Knowing what your target market wants and needs will help with the development of a successful website.

To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.