As a real estate agent, you know that promotional tactics like direct mail and online advertising are often a waste of money and effort. What really brings in new business is nurturing your existing relationships and building new ones.
There is one marketing tactic, however, that can actually enhance your relationship nurturing/building efforts:
Content marketing.
Rather than promoting your business, this marketing tactic is all about creating content that benefits your prospects and clients. It’s about being a trusted advisor, not a salesperson. It runs parallel with providing great service and creating a delightful client experience.
Content marketing encourages people to know, like, and trust you. So when it comes time for them to sell or buy a home, or make a recommendation to a friend, you’ll be the agent who comes to mind.
In today’s blog post, I’ll discuss how you can get started with content marketing.
7 Steps To Get Started With Content Marketing
1) Know your audience
It starts with understanding your client base and developing a persona (or you may have a few personas). Everything you write will be geared toward providing them with useful, valuable information.
Do you work primarily with millennials, families, retirees, or all of the above? Millennials might be more receptive to content shared through social media, while retirees may prefer communication via email. What income levels do you work with? People looking for high value homes might find little value in blog posts on DIY projects, but for first time buyers looking for a fixer-upper, that type of content would be right up their alley.
HubSpot provides a great list of 20 questions to ask yourself when developing personas.
2) Create a list of topics
Once you know who you’re writing too, you can start figuring out what you’ll be writing about. In order for content marketing to work, you must create content that your clientele actually wants to read, and that will provide value by either answering a common question, educating them on need-to-know information, or providing them with inspiration that will get them excited about the home buying/selling process.
3) Determine the format(s) of your content
Content comes in many forms—written articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, and more. Written content requires the least amount of tech-savvy, so that’s always a good place to start. However, tools like Canva make it easy for non-designers to create infographics. Before you start investing a lot of time into producing YouTube videos or podcast episodes, I suggest asking a few of your most loyal clients what format of content they would prefer.
4) Start a blog
You need a platform for publishing the great content you are going to create. It’s easy to start a blog—if your website platform doesn’t already come with blogging functionality, you can create a free blog at Wordpress.com.
5) Set a schedule
Determine how often you will publish to your blog. Once a week is a great place to start, and bi-weekly is fine if you’re doing this all on your own. Focus on quality, not quantity. Don’t just create more noise on the web. There’s already plenty of that.
6) Make a promotion plan
Don’t expect your clients to visit your blog once a week. You need to share it with them. I suggest sending your blog posts via email and sharing them on Facebook.
7) Start creating content!
Now that you have a blogging platform and a strategy in place, it’s time to start publishing! Stay tuned for my next blog post, where I’ll share some blog post ideas that are perfect for real estate agents.
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