Content Marketing for Real Estate: 7 Tips for Getting Real ROI

A successful real estate brand requires effective content marketing strategies to engage potential clients. How can a brand achieve this? By recognizing the current market trends, identifying pain-points of customers, and providing solutions to clients’ needs through quality content. 40% of real estate potential clients spend most of their time on the web, hence a savvy real estate brand must optimize its content for online viewing. The world is changing and with it, income classes and people’s preferences are changing too. Real estate agents need to factor in these kinds of generational shifts in their marketing strategies.

A business needs to use content to address challenges that clients face and offer solutions. Such content should be convincing, showing data and reports on how effective the given solutions are and whether they are suitable for the customer. This kind of content attracts customers towards the brand and makes your brand trusted. If you want to get real returns on investment using content marketing, here are 7 tips to sharpen your strategy:

1. Visual Media

Research has shown that humans get more captivated by graphics than text content. Our eyes are attuned to recognize pictures faster than text. This is an easy weakness that realtors can use. By providing a lot of visual images in content, people will be more attracted to click on it rather than pure text form content. Get creative with visuals, you can have a range from 2D art forms, 3D graphics, high-resolution images for real estate, aerial views of estates, or even interactive visuals. Infographics are highly revered in the content world due to the high-value data and answers they provide – aim to have some in your content database.

Also, it is prudent to integrate such visual media with all your other marketing channels. You can print them, use them in emails, advertisements, or on your business cards. The more the images the better the engagement you get from your prospective audience. Get creative and entwine visuals with your content for ultimate engagement. Also create a lot of visuals so that you can distribute them to image platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook to attract new clients.

Virtual reality and augmented reality are upcoming technologies that are helpful here. Potential clients can take virtual reality tours of real estate at the comfort of their homes. With augmented reality, they can even touch the houses and experience the comfort and ambiance available.

2. Newsletter/ Email marketing

Some marketers consider email marketing dead, however, that is far from the truth. Email marketing provides the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel. If you want to close a high number of leads, email marketing is the key. How to do it right? Provide quality content that solves pain points to your customers, then use email marketing automation tools such as Mailchimp to schedule delivery. Twice or thrice a week is fine, don’t overdo it or clients will unsubscribe from your mailing list.

Make sure you provide useful newsletters that are more educational than promotional – keep the ratio at 90% and 10% respectively. Give useful information on price guides for the market, data points like rent increases or demand data, blog posts, and infographics. Provide targeted information for your clients such as geo-data on real estate in their region, or price discounts available for them.

You can also embark on educating them on financing options available for them, government programs that can help them own homes, taxes, and any secrets or protocols in the realtor industry. Show them how they can get loans at low interest to afford homes. Advise them on the characteristics of good homes and what they should look for in a good house before making a purchase.

3. SEO

Google provides almost 60% of the traffic to your website, therefore you must optimize your content so that it can rank higher in search engine results. The better the ranking the bigger the audience your content gets exposed to. You also need to optimize for different relevant keywords in your industry. If you write content on financing, you need to optimize for the relevant keywords such as loans, low interest, and low deposit. Continuously optimize until your brand appears on the first page of Google search results. You can augment this by answering questions about your industry on Quora, Reddit, Yelp, Medium, and Yahoo Answers. The more relevant content you put out on the web regarding your brand, the more traffic you get exposed to, and thus the more leads you get.

Better yet, it is wise to open a Google My Business (GMB) profile and make sure you optimize it for every region you are interested in. Provide contact information so that prospects can reach you easily. The same should apply to your website, you should have relevant contacts in your website for easy contact by clients.

Social media platforms are also a very potent market to get leads. Open accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and share optimized quality content to your audiences. Include links and hyperlinks to your website to drive traffic to your website.

4. Fresh Evergreen Quality Content

To engage an audience, you need to captivate them, this only happens when you provide them with content that helps them. Identify the pains your potential clients go through and create content that addresses such problems whilst providing solutions.

Make sure your content is consistent and informative. Show people how to file property taxes, how lending works in the real estate industry, how to be a homeowner using savings, how to get a mortgage or how mortgages work, and how interest rates work. Help your audience make informed choices by giving them professional advice on how to find their way in the real estate industry. Provide tips and tricks that most don’t know about the sector and provide guidelines for signing deals.

Provide fresh content every two days and rewrite any content older than three months to give it a fresh look. Use customer’s queries as ideas for content topics so that you can address common problems people face. Provide comment sections in your blog posts so that potential clients can give you feedback and ask questions. If you are dedicated to producing evergreen content, you will gain huge traffic as people will be interested in your content.

5. Storytelling

Stories capture emotions and emotions drive purchasing decisions. Successful brands such as luxury brands prefer to engage their audience’s emotions as this touches on their primal instincts driving them to purchase products. After all, our emotional being is the most important being, our purpose in life is to enjoy living, otherwise we’d be just like machines – working, eating, and dying.

To engage your audience’s emotions, collect reviews from your former clients and post them to your audience. Document some of the journeys your clients went through to acquire their homes. Take them through the hardships, the joys, and everything in between to give them a realistic story. Let them experience the process of buying a home since this is a significant stage in a person’s life. Be up close and personal with your audience.

Take advantage of user-generated content such as reviews of your sales and feedback on your posts. Let your audience see that content to build trust with them.

Even better, make use of social media influencers and propagate these success stories. You can even help influencers themselves to acquire homes and they will be more than happy to tell their story to their audiences which means more PR for your business. People love to see success stories and they will be even happier if they can join the success train, offer them the chance.

6. Ebooks, Video, and Podcasts

Text for content gets boring sometimes. Audiences need different kinds of content with much more personalized appeal. You should have videos of some nice real estate areas that people can purchase, or videos giving ratings to different homes. Even better you can create videos explaining various ways to get financing, how to select the best home, or even how to bargain for a property. Make sure the videos are accessible on your site and try to share them on your socials.

Offer detailed e-books on real estate topics. You can start with beginner guides, that help the inexperienced individual deal with real estate issues then proceed to complex articles such as financing, closing real estate deals, or selecting the best home. Offer free ebooks but ask for emails so that you can contact the leads later for deals.

Podcasts are another major way to disseminate information in the digital age. You record audio on the topics and offer them for free to your audience. Podcasts are popular since people can listen to them while doing other tasks, unlike videos that require concentration. Make sure your content is of high quality so that it attracts huge traffic.

7. Buyer Persona

Marketers in the digital age have to use new tactics to sift through the millions of internet users to get their potential customers. There are over 5 billion people with access to the worldwide web globally. It is impossible to manually identify who might be your target client in such a large audience. To get accurate hits on potential clients, create a buyer persona. This is an idealized version of the perfect client. So, how do you create the perfect buyer persona? You identify the characteristics that you expect your perfect buyer to possess:

• How old are they?
• Where do they work?
• What is their yearly income range?
• What is their occupation?
• Where did they grow up?
• What education level have they reached?
• What are their preferences? (Colors, sizes, ambiance, etc)

Once you identify all these attributes you can then use persona search tools out there to search for individuals who match your buyer profile or come close enough to match it. You can then proceed to create tailored content just for them so that you can engage them and slowly pull them to your brand.

Try to contact them and offer your deals to them. Buyer personas help you filter out unsuitable candidates to spend your marketing budget on, leaving you with suitable and prime potentials to pursue your campaign. Targeting advertisements using these personas is easier and much more effective.

Conclusion

Real estate content marketing can be difficult but with the right approach, you can reap in bounds. Provide quality, useful content to your audience, engage them and answer their questions, optimize your web content and you will be on the road to success! Remember to understand your potential clients and try to find solutions for their pain points before they even ask. Be determined and you will succeed.

Author Bio

Clarissa Shuman is a writer and journalist who currently works at http://japanese-women.net/ and tries to expand her knowledge in different spheres of life. She has a great love for creativity and prefers to develop her skills and expertise in writing. Now Clarissa is looking for new ways to serve the web community.