Marketing has gone through enormous changes in the last few years. Traditional advertising forms such as television commercials and magazine ads have lost most of their appeal because audiences have moved away from print media and toward commercial-free streaming platforms.
Many real estate marketers have discovered that building a relationship—a fandom, even—of followers is a more effective and affordable way to reach buyers. Ads have been replaced by in-depth blogs, infographics, and personal videos.
There are many ways to use the content you create as a real estate investor. This guide will teach you how and some of the ways that you can do it:
- What is Content Marketing, and Why Does it Matter?
- How to Define your Content Marketing Goal
- How to Choose the Right Platform
- 5 Ways to do Content Marketing for Real Estate
- Blogging
- Videos
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Contests
You’ll learn how to create content marketing campaigns using the listed forms of content in a bit. First, let’s explore what content marketing is, why it matters to real estate investors, and how big choices you need to make before you begin.
What is Content Marketing, and Why Does it Matter?
Content marketing is a type of marketing that uses content such to create interest in products or services without directly promoting them. A typical content marketing plan includes the ways you intend to:
- Distribute content
- Develop a specific audience
- Convince them to perform a certain kind of action
Content marketing matters to real estate investors because homes represent some of the largest purchases that many people will make in their lifetimes. You need to be able to develop trust and to reach people before competitors do.
Now that you understand what content marketing is and what purpose it serves let’s look at some decisions you need to make before you begin. To succeed, you need to define your marketing goal and choose the platform you’ll be using for publishing.
How to Define your Content Marketing Goal
It’s possible to develop content on a very tight budget, especially if you’re writing the content yourself using your own expertise. However, no campaign is affordable if the work being done has no use. That’s why it’s important to define your goals clearly before anything else.
Most content marketing is managed through campaigns. In other words, they’ll involve a plan and then a series of different content pieces that reinforce one another and work toward the same goal.
You don’t need to have just a single goal. You can launch a series of campaigns that each focus on different goals. Here are some examples of goals that might be useful to real estate investors:
- To develop your authority and reputation
- To increase your visits from search engines
- To grow your mailing list
- To expand the number of followers on your social media profiles
- To cultivate a more exclusive audience
When you have decided on your goal, you have a lot of other decisions to make. First, you need to think about what type of content is best to meet the goal you have in mind.
How to Choose the Right Platform
The platform that you choose for your content marketing campaign can be as important as the quality of the content itself. Fortunately, you have a lot of options to choose from, and some of them offer you powerful features.
- Your Website
- Facebook Business Pages
- YouTube
These platforms all have their own advantages and disadvantages. Some of them are superior for posting written content, while others are better for images or video.
How many followers you’ve managed to attract can also be a factor in whether the platform is right for your campaign. Your campaign will always do better when it can reach more people.
Now that you understand the importance of content marketing and the considerations that need to be made before you begin a campaign let’s look at all the options you have for content.
5 Ways to Do Real Estate Content Marketing
There are nearly unlimited ways to develop content for real estate content marketing. The sections below will cover some of the most popular ones. For each one, you’ll learn when it should be used.
Blogging
Blogging remains one of the most popular and affordable ways of communicating information online. Adding blogs to websites is simple with tools like WordPress, and they can be posted to most of the major platforms that are being used.
Even platforms that do not allow long posts will often allow links with a healthy-sized description and preview.
When should it be used for real estate content marketing?
Blogging can be a great choice for real estate content marketing if any of the following conditions apply to you:
- When you have a lot of expertise but no budget for images or video
- When you need to explain complex topics that require minimal images
- When you need content that can easily translate across most major platforms
Videos
Videos are one of the most popular forms of content today. Video has a proven power to attract engagement from people browsing your website or YouTube channel. Video is capable of driving sales directly by providing buyers with a better view of the product involved than they could get from other types of content.
Google has recently started delivering video results first for a variety of different searches. These videos appear in a carousel at the top of the page, above even the top results.
While many platforms allow you to embed videos, YouTube is the largest host of videos online, and Google seems to offer them the top spots in results overwhelmingly.
When should it be used for real estate content marketing?
- When you’re explaining a concept that can’t be described well without video elements
- When you’re performing a step-by-step process involving physical movements (for example, installing flooring in a flipping video)
- When you need to show off something visually, such as a particular feature in a home
Infographics
Infographics are a great way to illustrate a lot of complex data. When they’re created properly, they can attract a lot of shares and spread widely. You can use them to enhance specific types of content, such as case studies.
One downside of infographics that they often require the assistance of a graphic designer from start to finish.
When should it be used for real estate content marketing?
- When you want to create engaging content from data
- When you want to make complex information more digestible
- When you want to illustrate a step-by-step process
Podcasts
Podcasts are an excellent way to deal with conversational content that you aren’t committing to video for whatever reason. Podcasts can attract people who don’t have time to watch videos because they can take them on the go.
One downside of podcasts is that they don’t have much SEO value. The keywords that make them up won’t be scannable to Google unless you have them fully transcribed. That can have a high cost.
When should it be used for real estate content marketing?
- When you want to host interviews with other real estate investors or experts
- When you want to create a second form of content from videos that you’ve already created
Contests
Contests are a type of content that you can use to accomplish a lot of different purposes. They’re most effective when you want to build enthusiasm.
While contests may seem expensive, hosting a contest can be cheaper than producing a lot of different kinds of content. Many platforms, including Instagram, have features that allow you to create contests as posts.
When should it be used for real estate content marketing?
- When you want to attract followers to a new page that doesn’t have many followers
- When you have a large base of followers, and you want to engage them
- When you want to collect data about your current followers
Empower Your Real Estate Promotion with Content Marketing
Content marketing can be a powerful strategy for real estate promotion. Now you what it is, why it matters, and some of the ways that you can make it work. Use what you’ve learned to plan content that meets your most important goals.
