Real estate success greatly depends on marketing and content strategies. As an investor, your content reflects who you are and what you do. It’s important to represent yourself appropriately and make a clear strategy for creative real estate marketing.
So how can real estate investors get the most out of their current strategies while representing themselves in a good light? What’s the best way to tell your real estate brand story? And how do you avoid some of the many mistakes that first-time investors make when setting out on a real estate branding strategy and still reach your marketing goals?
Here are some creative real estate marketing ideas to help separate yourself from the rest of the investing pack, and still positively affect the bottom line.
The Art of Branding Your Real Estate Investing Business
The Role of Branding
Branding might sound like a tech start-up buzzword, but it’s actually quite an important concept. Because it’s just as important for your customers, clients, and leads to know what you are — and how you can help them — as it is for you to have a clear idea of what your business venture is all about.
There’s no substitute for hard work in this arena; it simply takes effort to hammer out a clear, cohesive idea of what your brand is. (Usually by using descriptive adjectives.) But take the time to hone in on what your primary brand is — and how it’s different from the competition — and you’ll be ready to create content that represents that brands and boosts lead generation efforts.
The Role of Content
Google has clearly given its opinion on content: It needs to be original, fresh and high-quality. Given the increased velocity and severity of Google updates to its search algorithms, more is to be expected. Of course, with the competition increasing and stepping up their game, generating great content that produces results isn’t always cheap. So how can real estate investors and businesses maximize their resources and content?
One of the best ways to accomplish this, to increase real estate marketing ROI and boost lead generation is to re-purpose content. Here are at least six ways to turn your standard real estate blog or article into powerful lead generating media:
1. Tweets
Real estate investors should be spinning off tweets from all of their content. Multiple tweets can be extracted from a single blog post and sent out over the week or month. Watching the most interactive times for your tweets, using hashtags and including @ mentions can all help increase engagement. Some may even want to use paid Twitter marketing and ‘promoted posts’ or accounts to drive in even more leads.
2. Facebook
Facebook is far under-utilized by most real estate investors and investment companies. An individual Facebook update normally barely reaches a small fraction of followers. So don’t be afraid to repeat links to content. Experiment with breaking up content by images, text links, quotes and creating competitions around it, as each will resonate with different prospects.
3. Podcasts
There have been some extremely successful real estate podcast series launched. Some prospects are simply more auditory or only have time to tune into your message on the go. Converting your text into audio which can be streamed on mobile devices or downloaded as MP3s could be very valuable. Structured well, it could be a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition and keep prospects and past clients coming back again and again.
4. Video
It’s amazing how much video is preferred when surfing the web and seeking information. Even the least geeky consumers seem expertly skilled at finding instructional videos when they want to. Real estate blogs can be turned into simple videos and uploaded on YouTube, while listings can become virtual tours.
5. Info-graphics
Info-graphics have become incredibly popular. Some extremely valuable and important text is simply lost on consumers because it is too drawn out, too time consuming to read, too complex, or simply forgotten too fast. Info-graphics add an incredible new dynamic to real estate blogs and social media; one which is visual, easy to remember and fun to share. Thanks to new technology, info-graphics are becoming even easier and more affordable for real estate investors to create themselves.
6. Press Releases
All of the above can also be turned into press releases for increased visibility, powerful links and increased credibility. When you see the competition dominating the local or even national press, it isn’t just luck, or that they are better. Often it is because they are placing themselves in the headlines. Don’t miss out on the power of press releases for real estate marketing and branding. There are free and paid opportunities everywhere if you know where to look for them.
The Spokes of a Wheel
No one single strategy for creative real estate marketing works in isolation. They all combine into a single, focused strategy that delivers you great results, and makes you the pre-eminent leader in your market.
