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Real estate agents depend on powerful marketing strategies to engage buyers and close sales. In the age of digital marketing, for sale signs on front lawns are no longer enough to convince sellers to choose a particular agent and attract home buyers. Technology-based marketing strategies like content marketing can set agents apart in a crowded market and help them grow their businesses.
Content marketing in real estate goes far beyond simply presenting properties to potential buyers. As an integral part of an overall marketing strategy, this approach “provides useful and relevant content to your prospects and customers.”
The goal is to establish relationships that will ultimately lead to sales. Content marketing helps build brand awareness, allows leading real estate agents to establish their authority in the industry, and generates leads.
By pursuing content marketing, real estate professionals enhance their reputation and lay the foundation for future sales.
Related: How to Build a Strong Online Real Estate Brand and Increase Trust with Customers
1. Identify your target audience and buyer personas
Before disseminating content, real estate companies must define their target audience and buyer personas. Without this step, information risks being lost and potentially alienating your audience.
For example, a young family looking to buy their first home will be looking for different information than an empty-nester couple looking to downsize once their children leave home. Real estate companies could target both market segments. However, to reach them effectively, they must personalize messages and choose marketing channels wisely.
Determining audiences and personalities goes beyond demographics. The most effective marketers understand their audience’s interests and address their pain points.
Related: Know Your Audience, Capture the Market: The Importance of Buyer Personas in Franchise Marketing
2. Create engaging visual content
The term content marketing is often used synonymously with blogs and social media posts. However, visual content often has a greater impact when it comes to showcasing the property.
High-quality images of an apartment or house are the most basic form of visual content. Virtual tours or drone videos can attract even more attention and capture the imagination of potential buyers.
Both options allow real estate agents to tell a story rather than sell a property. Imagine discovering a property for the first time: put yourself in the viewer’s shoes and tell their journey in a video. Another creative option would be to stage a day in the life of a family in their new home, highlighting how this particular property meets their needs.
3. Leverage video marketing
Over the past few years, video marketing has been one of the major growth areas within content marketing. Explainer video company Wyzowl found in a survey that more than 90% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and just under 90% consider it an important part of their content marketing strategy.
In 2023 In the United States alone, businesses will likely spend nearly $85 billion on video advertising in 2024, a 9.9% increase from 2023. Consumers have also embraced video content.
When it comes to real estate, videos can simply showcase a property better than still images. No matter how many images an agent or photographer takes, there may be something missing to connect those images together. In addition to walkthroughs, neighborhood tours and customer testimonials also make for exciting video content.
Interactive and virtual content is taking these developments one step further. Innovative applications can help real estate professionals create tours that allow viewers to choose which direction to move when viewing a property online.
Related: 3 Emerging Trends Shaping the Future of Real Estate
4. Blogging and thought leadership
So far, this article has focused on visual content, but it would be wrong to exclude written content from a real estate agent’s content marketing strategy. Thought leadership blogs and articles help companies and their key team members establish themselves as experts in their field.
Depending on your target audience, content covering market trends, sharing home buying tips, or offering guides to specific neighborhoods can work very well. The key to successful leadership blogs and articles is understanding what your audience wants. Ask yourself what information your potential buyers can’t find elsewhere, think about their pain points and address them.
5. Social media
Few content marketing strategies would be complete without the inclusion of social media channels. Social media platforms offer real estate agents the ability to connect directly with their clients, distribute content and interact with their audience.
Social media offers excellent opportunities to share visual and written content that would otherwise have remained unknown. To effectively harness the power of social media, real estate agencies must ensure that their platform and content audiences are well-matched. Facebook may be the most popular platform for real estate agents today, but that could change as different generations enter the real estate market. Aside from platform choice, consistency is another key component of a successful social media marketing strategy.
How to measure success and iteration
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing channels over their more traditional counterparts is the ability to measure success.
Start by defining the key performance indicators you want to measure. For videos, this could be the number of views or comments. For blog posts, this could be comments and shares or increased traffic to your website.
Not all content will be highly effective. Regular performance evaluation and measurement allows real estate agents to adapt and iterate their content to make it even more relevant to their audience.
Content marketing is a highly cost-effective part of a real estate agent’s marketing strategy that can help create and increase brand awareness and build relationships with key audiences. Both visual and written content can deliver great results in real estate. To further improve a campaign’s impact, real estate marketers need to measure the performance of their content and refine their approach as needed.