Key Takeaways
- Knowing your numbers, as far as content metrics go, is vital to content marketing success.
- Content isn’t just blog posts; it includes audio, video, and even PowerPoint presentations.
- Without a clear and focused goal, your content will have a tough time gaining traction.
If you’ve been in the investing game for any amount of time, you’ve no doubt heard the admonition about using content marketing for real estate purposes. You might even have read up on real estate blogging or brainstormed a few real estate blogging ideas to get your content marketing off the ground. That said, what does real estate content marketing actually look like? How can the best real estate blogging tips around help move the needle in your business?
One strategy is to have a worthwhile goal for your content; another is to ensure you track your metrics and be open to various kinds of content.
Here are some key commandments, when using content marketing for real estate, that you should keep in mind.
How To Use Content Marketing For Real Estate
1. Have a Worthy Goal
In business, it’s vital that each part of your marketing effort and energy have some definable return. Too often, however, many investors will simply create content for their real estate blog because they feel like they should or simply for the sake of doing so.
It’s important that each content marketing piece has at least one worthwhile goal:
- Building credibility with an audience
- Solve a problem for your audience
- Explain a confusing concept
- Highlight the benefits of your company
- Sidestep objections people might have working with you
- Collect leads
- Nurture leads
- Convert leads into clients or customers
- Find strategic partners to work with
- Build your brand
This doesn’t mean your content marketing can’t have more than one goal. However, if a piece of content doesn’t do one of the above mentioned, either re-think it or drop it from your task list.
2. Mix Up Your Types
Just as not every person will respond to every single one of your 1,000-word blog posts, not every person will consume and enjoy every two-minute YouTube video you create. Each individual is different, and has different preferences when it comes to learning and getting to know more about your brand.
For some people, a thoroughly written blog post is exactly what they’re looking for. For others, a photo gallery or slideshow presentation or maybe an infographic is a more apt way for someone to learn visually. Still, others prefer information in audio form, such as through a podcast, so they can learn on the go.
By creating different types of content — not just pigeonholing yourself into a corner with one medium — you’ll not only respect the differing tastes that your audience might have, but you’ll also improve your standings in the Google search engine rankings. Google likes to see a website with some content diversity and will reward you for create different types of content, consistently.
Make a plan to appeal to both text learners and visual learners (and all things in between) when it comes to developing your marketing content.
3. Always Be Measuring
Even though content marketing, when used as a communication vehicle, is a creative, right-brained endeavor, much of its success depends on the impersonal, left-brained realm of data. Without data, and key metrics to see how your content marketing is doing, you’ll not only waste precious time creating content that may or may not help you reach your goals, you’ll miss valuable opportunities to make small tweaks that lead to huge dividends.
Key areas to look at include:
- Shareability: How much is your content being shared, liked, reteweeted, forwarded? Where is it being shared? Are there particular social platforms that your audience spends most of its time?
- Consumption: These include things like page views, video views, time spent on site, # of pages clicked on site, etc.
- Funnel performance: How many new email subscribers are you getting? How many new leads? What’s the conversion rate for those leads? What’s the bounce rate? (Small improvements in this area can prove quite profitable.)
- Bottom-line Sales: How do individual pieces of content lead to both online and offline lead acquisition? Which content is putting more money in your pocket? How could you create more of that?
- Industry leadership: How many requests for guest blog posts are you getting? How many media mentions?
4. Make It Easy to Contact You
This may seem abundantly obvious, but you’d be surprised how many real estate investor websites either neglect to include — or seemingly hide — their contact info on their site. Remember, the main purpose of your website is not to boost your popularity, but to eventually make you money and bring in deals.
If nobody knows exactly how to contact you, all the great content marketing in the world won’t do you much good. This can usually be remedied by:
- Making sure your website is mobile-friendly
- Making sure your contact forms are easy to fill out
- Providing numerous ways to contact you (phone, email, live chat)
- Putting “Contact Us” on every single web page (Good places would include the sidebar and footer)
5. Get Started
If there’s one cardinal rule in business, it’s that nothing will happen unless you get started. All the great content marketing strategies in the world won’t help if you’re not able to motivate yourself to get going and create some consistent content.
One common pitfall many investors fall into is that they wait until they have a great idea or something to say or until they become a better writer/presenter. However, as the old expression goes, done is better than perfect. Waiting until a piece of content is perfect deprives you of the benefit that a less-than-ideal (but profitable) piece of content can offer.
Do you have some strategies you’ve used when content marketing for real estate? Let us know in the comments below.
