In two week’s, I’ll be on a panel with Katie Lance (Director of Social Media for Inman News), Kristin Maynard (Director of Marketing at Avery Hess REALTORS), and Mike Klaas (Co-Founder and CTO of Zite). We’ll be talking about Content Creation and Curation.
With content playing such a pivotal role in your online lead generation efforts, I thought I’d share a quick 3 step content strategy that works…
The simple fact is, you don’t establish your “expert” status and build a following simply by throwing up a blog post and writing a few status updates. Instead, you do so by consistently sharing useful content that attracts an audience, over time.
But where do you start?
A 3 Step Content Strategy That Works
1. Identify Your Target Audience.
First and foremost, you need to identify the type of audience you are trying to reach. Are you trying to reach buyers or sellers? From there, get more specific…
Do you want to work with first-time home-buyers only? Do you specialize in a specific type of property like say, water-front homes?
Is there a specific type of home-seller that you’d like to work with? A certain price range?
Once you’ve answered some of these questions, you can start to paint a picture of the types of questions they’re asking that you can provide the answers to.
Creating these “buyer personas” is essential to your content marketing strategy because it helps you focus on creating the type of content that buyers are naturally going to gravitate to rather than simply writing jargon-filled, hype-based real estate content.
2. Create Content That Helps Them (Not You).
Once you’ve identified your target audience, the next step is to create a list of content that answers everything they could possibly want to know about buying and selling real estate in your market area. So start by creating two lists: 1.) a list of every question your target buyer/seller wants to know about buying or selling real estate, and 2.) a list of everything they could possibly want to know about the area.
Don’t just write hype (e.g. “now is a good time to buy”).
Instead, focus on writing content that your target audience is going to find helpful. Content that educates them on what they want and need to know is content that essentially helps warm up the sale. Your content should attract, engage and convert them (into buyers and sellers).
You can only arrive at that outcome if you write content that’s consistently helpful to them.
3. Be Consistent.
You can’t be successful if you only seem to have the answers every now and then. You have to always be on. Especially in real estate, where the market is always changing.
What’s the average Days on Market for homes in this area? What’s the average sales price? What are interest rates like today? Any new developments in the neighborhood that I should know about?
As the local neighborhood expert, you should always have the answers to these questions. Writing new blog posts, consistently, that addresses each of these areas is how you showcase your knowledge and expertise to new potential buyers?
Remember, you’re warming up the sale so that when they’re ready to buy, they’re going to contact you because you always have the answer(s).
Join Us Wednesday, August 1st from 1:55pm – 2:30pm for More!
It’s no secret that consumers are using the internet to shop and gather information about their buying decisions… Especially when it comes to buying and selling real estate. It’s easy to go online and search for homes and gather information about the local community – schools, best neighborhoods to live in, etc.
In order to be successful and grow your business via the web, you need to match the way your market your listings and your business, to the way consumers go online to search for information.
We’ll talk about that and more at Inman Real Estate Connect in a short couple of weeks…join us!
