- Effective content marketing uses multiple strategies at the same time.
- Each piece of your strategy moves people from the lead stage to the closed client stage.
- Understanding how different pieces of marketing work together means that you’ll always have content for your clients, wherever they are in your sales pipeline.
Today’s homebuyers place a lot of importance on being able to know, like and trust the people they work with. And there are few better ways to build a trusting relationship with a potential client than with content marketing.
But when you start researching how to implement your own content marketing strategy, you’ll probably quickly get overwhelmed with all the advice out there. Should you focus on optimizing your website, writing blog posts, creating enticing offers, building a strong email list, posting to social media or designing social media ads?
The truth is that a cohesive content marketing strategy involves all these types of content. Each piece helps to move people through their journey from lead to closed client.
By understanding how each type of content leads a client through their real estate journey, you’ll have the tools to craft a strategy that works for your business. You’ll no longer be using the spaghetti approach (just trying something, hoping that it sticks); you’ll be building a solid strategy with pieces that all work together.
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1. Website
A website is the very minimum your business needs in today’s technology-rich world. It’s increasingly more difficult to do business as a real estate agent without one. Period. And it better be a good one!
If you don’t yet have a website (or if it needs some improvement), check out this great infographic for some suggestions to develop a customer-friendly site. And if you’re not sure whether your website is up to snuff or not, read this.
2. Blog posts
Having a website is a good first step, but without content to drive people to it, it’s about as useless as a race car in a garage. SEO and content-rich blog posts and website pages are what you will use to attract people to your website.
You’ll do this through ranking your content on search engines and through the sharing and re-sharing of your content on social media.
It’s critically important to create blog posts and website pages that are both valuable and interesting to your readers. One of the best ways to do this is to tell a story that creates a human connection. Not only does that make your blog more fun to read, but it also helps people connect with you as a real, live person.
3. Lead capture
What’s the point of getting people to your website if you don’t get contact information from them? You need that info so you can continue to nurture and market to those leads.
This is where a download offer or email course comes in. An enticing offer will allow you to capture email addresses and phone numbers. Without an enticing offer, you’re very unlikely to get contact information.
Downloads and email courses can often be longer versions of a blog post or series of blog posts you’ve done, so you shouldn’t always have to start from scratch.
4. Email campaign
Once you’ve got somebody’s email address, you’re going to need to implement some kind of email campaign. Nurturing these prospects over time is how you deepen your relationship with them and build the trust that’s so crucial to a successful client relationship.
They will be so much more likely to transact with you than somebody they’ve only heard from once or twice.
Remember, these emails need to be relevant. This means that if you get someone’s email address because you’re offering information on a certain grant, for example, the emails better be about that grant program and other closely related topics. If you don’t send relevant information, your audience is just going to tune you out (and unsubscribe).
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5. Social media posts
Social media is another great nurturing device. It helps you continue to provide and share valuable content to people who are not yet ready to transact with you. It also helps you be more relatable and memorable to your followers. There are many different strategies you can use, so have fun with it!
You can also use social media posts to stay in touch with past clients. Many of our customers tell us that’s how they’ve stayed in touch with their closed clients over the years (usually by adding them as a friend, not necessarily through a business page).
It’s perfectly acceptable (and could be preferable) for agents to be friends with their clients on Facebook. Staying in touch with your clients in a personal way means that they’re much more likely to connect with and recommend you in the future.
6. Social media ads
Social media ads are a good and fairly inexpensive way to get more exposure for your content, and it gives you the potential to get more leads. You can target a group of people based on demographics or interests.
You can also run retargeting ads, which focus specifically on people who have visited your website or who are part of an email list. These would be people who already know you or know of you in some way.
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If you leave out any one of these six things, your marketing chain will be broken. If you don’t write blog posts, you aren’t going to get people to your website, have content to share or rank on search engines.
If you don’t have an enticing offer, you won’t get email addresses. If you don’t run email campaigns, people will forget about you, and those email addresses you collected will be useless.
If you don’t do social media posts and ads, you give up new leads and a path toward nurturing both current clients and past clients, who are more likely give you referrals when you stay in touch with them.
Each of these pieces is essential to a successful content marketing system. By implementing them all together, you can move people successfully through their real estate journeys. By continuing to nurture these happy closed clients, you’ll get referrals — and start the process all over again.
Sarah Jacquier is a content marketing manager at Top Left Creative. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
