This phrase from the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross has turned into the mantra of real estate agents, and has probably helped to close a lot of deals over the years.
Content marketing for real estate agents is a must in 2020. With the intense competition for sales, real estate agents need to use every tool at their disposal to get a piece of the pie.
An expanded digital footprint/presence is now more important than ever before. Aproximately 70% of brokers and sales agents have a website, and 81% of National Association of Realtors members have listings on their websites. About 74% use Facebook for professional purposes, and 20% of members get 1% to 5% of their business from social media. The numbers indicate that going digital is not an option, but rather a necessity, if success is the goal.
What Is Real Estate Content Marketing?
Content marketing is an important aspect of selling properties. Many home buyers use the internet to find homes, with 84% of them eventually inquiring about the properties they find online.
If you’re in the real estate business, content marketing can be a great way to improve your website’s traffic, promote your brand, and generate more leads. By creating online materials such as articles, videos, or infographics, you can educate buyers and sellers, pique their interest in your products and services, and build a stronger relationship with your potential market.
Content marketing is a strategy that allows you to build relationships with your audience and potential customers. As a realtor, you are a walking brand, and customers want to do business with brands they know and trust.
4 Ways Content Marketing Helps You Get Real Estate Leads
Real estate marketing online complements your offline efforts. It can help you generate leads in several ways:
1. Content Marketing Done Right Means Better Visibility Online
If you create good real estate content, it can lead to sales. You can increase your visibility online, which will help you reach a larger audience than just the people in your immediate area. Improving your Search Engine Optimization will make Google and other search engines more likely to show your content to people who are searching for related topics. You can improve your SEO by using unique content, choosing the right keywords, and using linking techniques.
The Facebook Marketplace is a great platform for building trust through visual experiences. You can also create local groups or pages to tap into a specific audience.
2. Establish Your Brand as an Authority
Your primary role as a real estate agent or broker is to match your customers with the properties that will meet their needs and budget. Producing great real estate content marketing will help you to stand out among the others in your field. By providing potential buyers with information, you allow them to see you as an expert who can help them. Some examples of this type of information might be monthly or quarterly market reports that contain local sales statistics.
3. Great Content Converts Leads to Buyers
If you have a content marketing strategy for real estate, you’re more likely to catch the eye of potential home buyers. They might see your website, a social media post, your blog, 3D tours in an interactive digital flipbook, or a promotional video on YouTube. These experiences help build trust and give them a good reason to use your services when they’re ready to buy a home.
4. Generate Free Advertising
Content marketing that is helpful to people who are buying or selling a home, and that addresses their concerns, is more likely to be shared with others by those people.
How Do I Create Content for Real Estate Marketing?
As a real estate professional, you also act as a real estate content creator. The most important part of coming up with ideas for real estate content is understanding what your audience is looking for. Are you targeting home buyers or potential sellers? Keep in mind that different groups of people will have different needs and wants.
Once you have determined what your audience wants, then you can create real estate content they’re likely to consume and share. Below are some of the best types of content that work well for real estate:
5. Optimize Your Website
A website is extremely important for any business, but especially for real estate agents. It is potential customers’ first opportunity to see what you have to offer, so it is important to make sure that your website is professional, easy to navigate, and mobile-friendly. 23% of millennials use their mobile devices to find a real estate agent, so if your website is not mobile-ready, you could be losing out on a lot of business.
You should work with a professional to improve your website speed, publish unique content, use the appropriate keywords, and have the best quality images and videos possible. It is also worth considering adding lead generation channels such as contact forms or chatbots.
6. Write Helpful Blog Posts
Blogging can be an excellent way to share your knowledge with your target audience and keep your customers informed. Your goal when writing real estate content should be to provide useful information that can help potential homebuyers make informed decisions. Publishing articles can help build trust with your potential clients and improve your reputation online.
7. Produce Amazing Videos
Videos are a great way to keep your audience engaged on your website, especially if you use them to showcase the properties you are selling.
Real estate videos that are high quality are important to post on social media. These videos can be shared on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
8. Publish Informative Infographics
An extremely powerful real estate content example is the infographic. By using this data visualization tool, consumers can understand important information quickly and easily. They can be shared on any platform, which generates traffic to your blogs, videos, listings, or website homepage.
Including a good mix of statistics, amazing facts, and other valuable information in your infographics will make them more engaging for your audience. Make sure that the infographics you publish or share are well-designed and branded appropriately. You can post infographics on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms.
What is the Best Content Marketing Strategy for Real Estate?
Producing real estate blogs, YouTube videos, or real estate content for Instagram and other platforms is not enough. Whether you are a beginner or a veteran real estate marketer, you need to remember the following:
9. Come Up with a Coherent Strategy
You shouldn’t use keywords or blog without purpose, as this will not help you achieve your goals. Your content should always have a clear intent, just like in chess, where every move must contribute to the overall strategy.
10. Produce Quality Content
Content marketing can help improve your ranking on search engines and make your audience take notice, but thin articles or subpar videos or infographics can end up doing more harm than good. Keep in mind that content marketing can only help you if it provides value to your audience–always aim to produce the best possible content for the people you’re trying to reach. If necessary, seek out professional help to ensure that your content is of the highest quality.
11. Establish Criteria for Success
You should always aim for the bull’s eye when creating real estate content. By investing time, effort, and money into high-quality content, you will be able to help your audience, generate more traffic, and outrank your competition. Keep in mind that getting more traffic is not your ultimate goal. Your goal is to be at the top of the search results so you can generate more leads and sales.
12. Make the Most of Your Resources
If you want to reach a wider audience with your real estate content, consider repurposing it using Issuu or a similar platform. This will allow you to create a digital magazine, online brochure, or marketing flyers quickly and easily.
You can easily create visually appealing real estate marketing materials with a few clicks. You can then use this content by embedding it on your website, or creating new marketing materials to share on social media, turning it into a video, creating an ebook, or distributing it to your email list.
When content marketing materials give you a better return on investment, invest more in those strategies.
4 content repurposing strategies for real estate professionals
- More Content + Higher Frequency = More views and better engagement, PLUS generating more organic traffic by back-linking to already posted content. One article can be repurposed multiple times across all platforms, and can boost traffic to other content too!
- You don’t have time to spend cranking out original content daily, meaning you can do other things!
- As a real estate pro, you don’t have the capacity to spend your whole day cranking out new content; you’re not a writer!
- It maximizes your ROI on time spent conducting and writing your content. If you spend time doing something that isn’t specifically showing houses, generating leads, or relationship management, you need to ensure you get as much mileage out of that time. Content repurposing means is working smarter, not harder.
#1 Turn Existing Content Into Visually Appealing Slideshows
Think about all the content you have on your real estate website. A great place to share this content is LinkedIn’s SlideShare. You’ll need to create the slideshow in Keynote or Powerpoint, but SlideShare is a great place to showcase your content.
Quick Tips For Creating A Professional Slideshow:
- Use a Title slide with your personal real estate branding
- The last slide of your repurposed slideshow should feature a call to action for potential buyers and sellers looking to hire a real estate professional.
- Go through each segment of your existing blog posts and turn them into bullet points.
- For some segments simply use data visuals to convey the message
- Do not fill your slides with too much text.
The text is saying that Eugene Cheng was successful in getting people to view his slides by repurposing his content, and he was able to get over 10,000 subscribers as a result.
#2 Create Videos (Including Live Content) On The Go To Ramp Up Video Content
It’s clear that video content is very popular and trendy, and it has become much easier for people who are not very good with technology to create videos!
The ability for anyone to reach large audiences is one of the main reasons social media platforms are so popular. This was made even easier when Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram added the ability to broadcast live videos. A good example of this is ‘Chewbacca Mom’.
If you’re thinking about using the live button, you should definitely do it. However, before you start broadcasting, you should have a clear idea of what you want to say and why your audience should care.
2 Strategies To Generate More Video Content
Strategy 1: Start Interviewing Businesses And Local Professionals On Live Video
One of our real estate professionals took his interview skills to a new level recently. He conducted an interview with a local barber while getting a haircut. He conducted the interview live on his phone using a selfie stick. The interview was just as great as it sounds.
BEFORE exploring this option for a local interview, ensure the following:
- BE SURE TO ARRANGE THE INTERVIEW IN ADVANCE. This is so important. Put yourself in the business owner’s shoes; if somebody walks in off the street holding an iPhone in your face saying they’re live on Facebook and want to interview you, you’re setting yourself up for a potentially embarrassing rejection. It’s like getting turned down on the kiss-cam at a ball game, except all of Facebook can watch you get shut down. Not a good look for a closer.
- GIVE THEM THE QUESTIONS IN ADVANCE. Not all business owners are great improvisers, so work with them. Give them at least 24 hours with your questions so they can think on how they’d like to respond when you go live. Professional actors require multiple takes and the odds of you getting good answers increases if the subject is comfortable and knows what’s going on. They’re putting their image in your hands, and that requires trust. Build that trust.
- PROMOTE THE INTERVIEW ON YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA AND HAVE THEM DO THE SAME. The biggest bonus is that this will allow both of your audiences to watch, and the more viewers there are, the better the business owner will feel about making the decision to do this format with you.
Strategy 2: Repurposing Blogs Into Video Content
If you are looking for a video option that doesn’t require any additional set-up or preparation, Lumen 5 is the best option. With Lumen 5, you can create a dynamic slideshow using content you have already created. All you need to do is plug in the URL to the blog content you want to use and you can easily add it to the slideshow. Most blog videos can be completed in 20-30 minutes.
Lumen 5 also has the side benefit of only allowing 140 words per slide. This can be helpful for developing writing skills because it encourages writers to be concise and clear.
You can use your video file on all social media platforms once it is complete.
#3 Repurpose Existing Real Estate Content By Creating Infographics
The most effective and relevant way to get your content noticed by your audience is to focus on an interesting quote or statistic. You can make your content stand out by simplifying it down to the core message that your audience will find interesting. Using visual graphics or infographics is the best way to do this.
If you are not on Instagram, you should create an account now. Instagram is a great way to build an audience quickly. The content is easy to consume and there is a broad range of interests.
Your Go-To Instagram content apps:
- A dedicated photo editor: You NEED a good photo editor so that your visuals are impactful and distinct. If you filter, you fail. Period. The best free basic photo editor is Google Snapseed, but there are others.
- A funky secondary photo editor: This is to add logo overlays/watermarks, and to use some cool photo effects. Two great ones for this are Prisma and LiveCollage.
Another good platform to share infographics is Pinterest.
Bonus: Free Infographic Creation Tool
#4 Reposting Existing Content Strategically On Other Channels
The last option for improving your SEO is to post your article in more places. You should post on both Scoop.it and Medium.com. This will help your article appear higher in Google searches.
You’re also creating new paths that lead back to your neighborhood page, which will bring more people in.
