Getting noticed in a crowded market is hard—and the real estate industry is no different. If you want to attract buyers or sellers as clients, you need to reach them in innovative ways and make it easier for them to find you.
This means you will want to use a variety of marketing methods to connect with potential clients. In addition to traditional marketing methods like direct mail, you will want to utilize the high-ROI tactics that digital marketing is known for, including search engine optimization, PPC and social media ads, and content marketing. Today, I’ll be covering the value of real estate content marketing, why it’s a great tool for real estate agents, and how you can create helpful content that helps you score more clients.
What is Real Estate Content Marketing?
Content marketing is all about driving leads to your site and engaging with potential clients with a variety of content.
When it comes to real estate, this includes:
- Newsletters: Stay connected with weekly or monthly newsletters that detail what’s happening in the market, the industry, or your agency. Share things that matter to your audience for maximum impact and make it easy for clients to contact you.
- Blog Posts: Blog posts are a great way to share news and helpful or fun information with your audience. Plus, by using a keyword strategy, you can help provide your website an SEO boost and make it easier to rank higher on Google and other search engines.
- Social media posts: Promote your blog posts and other content on your social media channels while also sharing original content on Instagram, Facebook, and the other channels that your target audience uses.
- Infographics: Infographics make taking in data easier.
- Ebooks: Have you ever just wanted to give a client a guide to being a first-time home buyer or seller? Imagine what a useful tool it would be to attract individuals looking to purchase or sell their first home! Other useful real estate ebooks could be market-specific, like the benefits of various Tampa neighborhoods or what to consider when purchasing investment properties in Florida.
- Videos: Use easily-digestible videos to walk potential clients through the process of buying or selling a home.
Why Realtors Need Real Estate Content Marketing
When you regularly publish useful content in your industry, you showcase your knowledge and set yourself up as an expert. This helps establish trust with potential clients and makes it more likely that they’ll reach out to you when they’re ready to buy, sell, or lease property.
At the same time, content marketing is a crucial part of a well-rounded SEO strategy. Because Google always wants to provide searchers with relevant results that are authoritative and trustworthy, creating content that illustrates your knowledge of the industry and is centered around particular keywords can help you rank higher on Google. Most people click on the first few Google results, with the top result getting the most clicks. By increasing your Google ranking, you can increase the number of visitors to your site organically (i.e., without paying for ads).
Essentially, real estate content marketing can help Realtors build an online presence, draw in new potential clients, and stay connected with existing and former clients. There are no downsides to content marketing—as long as you have a well-planned strategy, quality content, and regular posts, you can start seeing the benefits.
Creating Real Estate Content People Want to Read
So how do you start reaping the benefits?
Start With a Strategy
When integrating content marketing into your digital marketing plan, you want to create a strategy and note which types of content you want to create and how often. Consider who your audience is so you can focus on topics and channels that are more likely to resonate with them.
For example, if you are a commercial real estate agent, you may want to focus on creating content like:
- How to Find the Perfect Retail Spot for Your Business
- What to Know Before Signing a Commercial Lease
- Do You Need a Real Estate Agent to Get a Commercial Lease?
Basically, you want to get into the minds of your potential clients, and address topics that you know are important to them. If you aren’t sure where to get started, you can:
- Look at forums to discover what types of questions your target audience is asking about real estate or other related topics
- Make a list of the questions you get asked most frequently
- Check out what the competition is doing
- Run a content gap analysis using a tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs
In addition, you’ll also want to consider how frequently you post. The key is to create a consistent schedule. Even if you only post once a month, you should consistently create a new post each month and share it far and wide. For better results, you may want to post twice a month or even weekly. However, you want to make sure that your focus is on quality and not quantity. If you can’t write an insightful post every week, stick to a schedule that will allow you to maintain your quality standards.
Measure!
If you already have a content strategy, then you must regularly monitor the effectiveness of what you’re doing. Otherwise, you may end up wasting time on creating content that just isn’t working for you.
You should measure:
- Organic traffic
- What pages people are visiting on your site
- How long people are staying on your site
- Post or video traffic and views
- Bounce rate
- Comments or shares
- Keyword rankings
You want to see how many new and returning visitors your content brings to your site, how they’re engaging with it, and what they do after they visit. Are they reading your content and then filling out a contact form? Are they subscribing to your newsletter? Are they just bouncing after 30 seconds?
You also want to track whether you’re seeing improvements in your rankings, which can have long-term benefits for driving organic traffic. If you’re consistently posting and sharing your post but not seeing any results, you may need to adjust your topics or strategy.
Make Improvements
And, of course, there’s always room for improvement! Every strategy should be seen as iterative. Run tests to identify growth opportunities and ensure that you’re providing valuable insights to your audience.
You can test:
- Posting frequency: If you don’t see results from your posting schedule, consider whether you’re posting too much or too little. Adjust your schedule to see if it helps.
- Personalization: Not sure whether personalized or segmented newsletters are a good idea with your clientele? Run A/B tests to see which ones get more opens and clicks.
- Content length: Not everyone wants a deep dive into a topic. Some readers prefer easily digestible chunks of content. Try switching up your content length to see whether one performs better than the other or whether one reaches one segment of your audience while the other reaches another segment.
- Newsletter frequency: Dial in the right newsletter cadence by
- Newsletter content and length: With A/B testing, you can test whether a newsletter with photos, more links, or just more content scores more clicks, then make adjustments to your strategy.
- Channel engagement: Check which channels work best for you by measuring engagement on your posts or newsletters and then focus on testing to see if you can bring your numbers up.
Real estate content marketing is a lot of work—which is why a lot of Realtors don’t bother with it, rather than missing out on the leads that content marketing can drive for your business, partner with an agency that can help you reach your goals.
At Digital Neighbor, we have years of experience helping Realtors create unique brand identities, showcase their market knowledge, and build connections with potential clients. Contact us today to learn more about our expert real estate content marketing services and get ready to grow your business.
