I’m excited to let you know that I was recently interviewed on the Real Estate Syndication Show with Whitney Sewell! Content marketing is such a broad term, and in this episode, we flesh out what exactly it entails and what it means for entrepreneurs in the real estate business today.
Content Marketing For Real Estate Investors
Content marketing is a great way to increase the traffic to your website, position you as an expert, and help you build trust with your clients so you can ultimately get more leads. Attracting clients, building relationships, and converting – that’s the foundation (the ABC) of successful real estate marketing.
What Is Content Marketing?
This is one of the best marketing strategies nowadays. Content-based marketing is basically focused on creating, publishing, and sharing content for a targeted audience. The content can be various, from blogs to videos, as long as it’s valuable and helpful to the audience. The key is offering valuable insights to attract potential clients. You can’t get anything if you don’t give, right?
In the real estate business, this means helping buyers and sellers with informative blogs, podcasts, videos, designs, etc. People of all ages are seeking help online, and your website should be the one to give it. Instead of shouting marketing messages, provide content that can resolve the doubts of potential buyers, and you’ll get them on your team.
For example, if you’re selling real estate in California, a topic such as “Things You Should Know Before Moving to California” can be really useful for somebody looking to buy a house in California. You can give this type of information for free on your blog. Or you can make a video or a podcast episode that covers this particular topic. Once potential buyers read your article or hear your show, they’ll get valuable information out of it, and you can convert them to clients more easily.
Get your extensive knowledge and experience out of your head to serve your target audience. Offer free resources such as videos, podcasts, blogs, or ebooks and create a sales funnel. Visualize your clients’ journey and guide them to your services. That’s the essence of real estate marketing online, and this method of marketing can help you whether you’re a small business or a huge real estate agency.
How Can You Get More Leads?
Lead generation is very important for growing your business, and content marketing is the way to make that happen. You want to get potential clients interested in working with you, but they need to go at their own pace. To attract your ideal client, you should, as we mentioned, offer them valuable insights. Once you get their contact information, such as an email address, you can try to convert. After all, conversion is the name of the game.
Knowing your target audience is crucial for creating quality content. Think about your current top five clients. What brought them to you? How did you help them exactly? What makes them your favorite clients – your communication, their personality, or something else? Answer these questions, and you’ll know what to offer potential buyers in the future.
Be a stalker for a day; check out where your target market is. If your potential clients are all on Instagram, there’s no point in investing lots of resources on other social media platforms. Likewise, if they’re more on Facebook or LinkedIn, you should focus on these networks. You can’t be everywhere, and you don’t have to be! Just be there where your peeps are.
It’s best to choose only a few networks for your social media marketing so you have more time to work on improving your video marketing, email marketing, podcasting, or blog content creation. Diversify your methods of lead generation, but always keep a target audience in mind.
Nurture Your Relationships
Building relationships and trust with your clients is essential to real estate marketing. When buyers or sellers are looking for a house, they want to work with someone they trust. They need an expert, so you should position yourself as one.
There are lots of ways to build trust. The best ones include podcasting and email marketing. When people hear you speak on a podcast, they can connect with you more authentically. Sending email newsletters regularly serves the same purpose. You can write a weekly newsletter to inform people on the state of the housing market, offer real estate tips, or chat about newly discovered insights. Share anything you consider valuable to your potential clients. Make sure the newsletter is brief and interesting so most people actually read it.
Also, don’t hesitate to be personal in your real estate marketing. Naturally, you shouldn’t blast people with your private life every day, but it could be great to add some relatable content. People want to feel connected to you. Don’t saturate the social media feeds; just personalize your posts and blog content here and there. You don’t have to be “all business all the time.”
Decide What Type of Content You Should Produce
As said, make sure to produce any type of content you consider valuable to your unique target audience. Look at your client demographics and find out their interests. Naturally, you can always ask them! Respond to the feedback and make the content they enjoy. If some of your videos, podcast episodes, or blog posts have a lot of views, create more similar content.
You should also conduct quality keyword research. This will show what people are searching for the most so you can respond to that demand. First time home buyers are especially using search engines to find buying guides, check out real estate listings, learn about the legalities of homeownership, and overall get useful information. If you want to attract those clients, start producing that information!
Maintain Content Consistency and Scheduling
There isn’t such thing as too much content. Information changes all the time, so you want to regularly post and provide up-to-date insights for clients. Check your old blog posts and see if they still hold up or if you need to update them. Research new topics and changes in the real estate market to get ideas for new content. There’s always something you can write or talk about!
Find the right content balance for your market. Check the data and measure your real estate marketing efforts. See how many people are opening your emails, how many are clicking links, how many are opting-in, etc. This will help you establish the right frequency of content posting. Always respond to demand.
Once you know how much and how often you want to share, make sure to be consistent in this aspect of real estate marketing. You need to have a constant flow of content, no matter how big or small. Your social media pages should be up and running frequently, and your site needs to be updated regularly. Nothing repels a client faster than a neglected Facebook page (or Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) and a slow, barely-functioning site.
Check Out What Other Marketers Are Doing
As a real estate agent, you don’t have to have a website, but it’s hugely beneficial to do so. Mostly this is because many other real estate agents have great websites, so you want to keep up! Above anything, real estate websites are the main source of information for potential clients. An open house event and a billboard rarely sell anything these days since most people are checking the listings online. So, even if you’re a small business, making a website is well worth the time and effort.
To be competitive, create an amazing site for your real estate business. Make sure your site is optimized for search engines and try to regularly update listings, provide correct information, and always be reachable. Home buyers are more likely to hire you if your website provides them with detailed insights on the real estate market.
Real estate photography should also be one of your focuses on your website. No amount of text can help you close a sale like pictures can. Nowadays, virtual tours are also becoming more popular, meaning people have moved from pictures to videos! That’s what other real estate marketers are doing, so you may have a lot of catching up to do. Luckily, it’s never late to start applying real estate marketing strategies and generating more leads.
Final Thoughts
If you want to get more real estate marketing ideas and hear us discuss in detail the tricky world of social media and email marketing, check out this episode.
Using content marketing as your main real estate marketing strategy is an amazing way to bring in more clients and build your brand, and there’s a lot to learn if you want to get your business to come out on top. And implementing these marketing efforts can be complicated. Luckily, we can make it easy for you! Don’t hesitate to reach out to me and schedule a FREE consultation so we can look discuss your unique business needs. Let’s scale up your real estate marketing game!
