What it Takes to Build a Solid Content Marketing Strategy
As part of your inbound real estate marketing strategy, you should have a content marketing strategy in place to help build more reach so more people know about you, your brand, and your business.
That’s because a solid content marketing strategy helps you both build brand awareness and drive leads.
★ Want to learn more about inbound marketing strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why It Works for Agents
- Planning a Real Estate Lead Flow Through Inbound Marketing
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
Because content marketing focuses on helping to solve the problems that the people within your target audience face, it’s really effective at bringing a lot of qualified leads that are already convinced that they want to work with you; so it’s definitely worth the time investment.
While good content marketing can be easy, great content marketing isn’t: it takes a lot of planning, a lot of time, and multiple skillsets to be successful.
First, what is content marketing exactly? Primarily it’s about helping people.
It’s about producing and marketing content that focuses on the information itself, rather than directly promoting your brand (but your brand is still noticeable).
For example, if you were to download an eBook that provides information about a subject you’re interested in, then you’d a) get an answer to the problem you’re trying to solve, and b) you’d discover and remember the brand that helped you solve it and likely see them as knowledgeable about that subject.
Basically, think of it as your marketing plan as it specifically relates to informative, problem-solving content that isn’t directly marketing you or your brand.
But keep in mind, ‘content’ doesn’t just mean blog posts (or even written content for that matter). It can include anything you’re using to promote information that solves a problem for someone, like newsletters, infographics, even videos; all of these can be used as part of your content marketing strategy.
A content marketing strategy is made up of 2 main steps:
- Creation: Creating the content that you’ll be marketing.
- Marketing: Getting that content in front of as many people that are within your target audience.
Sounds simple enough right? Let’s break it down a bit further:
Step 1: Creating the Right Content for Content Marketing
When it comes to producing content specifically for your content marketing strategy, quality is a lot more important than quantity. You need to be producing quality content that your target audience is actually interested in and that solves whatever pain point they’re feeling at that particular moment.
And luckily for real estate agents, there’s no shortage of ideas around problems that you can solve for people. You could create:
- A downloadable guide focusing on everything a first-time homebuyer needs to know as part of going through the process of buying a home.
- A white paper outlining how a seller overcame the problem of deciding if they should buy or sell before selling their existing home.
- A weekly video series outlining property investment opportunities in a specific area.
- A monthly social infographic detailing the continually adjusting sales prices of properties in your market.
- A bi-weekly email newsletter highlighting the types of properties that buyers are looking for in your area.
- Or, it could just be a single, one-time, informative, problem-solving content in a blog post.
No matter the content, as long as you focus on the information and solve a problem for your audience, you’ll have content that’s perfect for rolling out as part of a successful content marketing strategy.
Don’t have any ideas for content? Start by looking at what you’ve already produced as part of your existing content strategy. As mentioned, because of its very nature, there’s a good chance that without even knowing it you’ve already produced some content that will work really well for content marketing.
★ Want to learn more about content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- How to Write Real Estate Content that Attracts and Engages
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
Step 2: Marketing Your Content
Once you have a good piece (or pieces) of content ready, the marketing component is going to be getting it in front of as many of the right people as possible; and there are a lot of different ways you can do that.
But the most effective way is to build it into any or all of the other marketing strategies you probably already have in place, like:
- As part of your SEO strategy, ensure your content ranks in search results for as many related problem-solving keywords as you can.
- As part of your social media strategy, ensure you’re posting and promoting your content on your social media profiles, and using hashtags and other tactics to be found in social search results.
- As part of your advertising strategy, ensure you’re creating advertising campaigns to promote your content to people right when they’re looking for answers.
There are a lot of different ways to ensure that your content is found and discovered by the right people, at the right time, to solve the problem that they’re faced with at that moment.
By producing content that’s less focused on you, and instead, more focused on the needs and problems of the target audience you’re trying to attract, you’re more likely to build a content marketing strategy that builds your brand and brings in leads.
★ Want to learn more about content marketing? Have a look at this post called: Building and Managing a Real Estate Content Lifecycle Plan.
Want to improve your content strategy? Download our Content Strategy Guide for Real Estate Agents. It has practical methods on how to plan, implement, market, and audit a successful real estate content strategy that will deliver results as part of your overall inbound marketing strategy.
