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If you're a real estate professional, you're on the ground, getting the job done for your clients. You're in the homes you sell, trying to make them as appealing as possible to buyers. You work one-on-one with people wanting to enter the market or purchase a new piece of real estate. In doing so, you have to have a strong sense of what each client wants in a real estate transaction and how best to execute it.
So, how do you tell your potential clients that you’re the best real estate agent for the job? Content marketing for real estate engages your clients where they already are. With the right strategy, you can help them find your online content and convince them to choose you to help navigate their next real estate deal.
The Importance of Content Marketing for Real Estate
People thinking of buying a home tend to go online at the start of the process. According to a National Association of Realtors (NAR) study, 47% of recent home buyers started their search by looking on the internet at properties for sale. That’s compared to the fewer than one in five (18%) who contacted a real estate agent at step one. A whopping 96% of buyers used at least some online tools while searching for a home.
Content marketing allows you to capture those buyers — and sellers — early on in their journey. The same NAR survey found that 80% of sellers contacted only one real estate agent who helped them sell their home. People typically stick with the agent they start with, so the right digital content strategy can get you in front of clients before they choose a competitor.
Let’s have a closer look at content marketing for real estate agents and how working with freelance writers can help you reach potential buyers and sellers with each piece of content.
What Are the Best Content Types for Real Estate and Why?
Content marketing for real estate attracts an audience through high-quality content. Each piece should be relevant and engaging, drawing attention through unique insight and easy-to-consume information.
At the same time, real estate marketing content has another purpose: to gain traction with Google so the search engine puts you at the top of search results. Your real estate content creation strategy should therefore focus on appealing to both the search engine and your potential clients. Thankfully, it’s the nature of search engine optimization (SEO) that these interests should be aligned.
Optimized Blog Posts
Blog posts are an excellent way for you to demonstrate your expertise to potential customers. Your knowledge of the local real estate market, renovation tips, and investment prospects might all be topics of interest.
But even if you develop informative and interesting real estate articles to share with clients, there’s still the issue of how potential buyers find them.
That’s where SEO comes in. Your real estate content speaks to search engines by including elements in its code and structure that let the algorithms know your posts are the best match for whatever online readers are searching for.
Without SEO, your best real estate website content could languish far down in Google search results, where few people actually find them and click through to read.
Visually Appealing Infographics
An infographic tells a story with a picture. It combines brief text and images to get across key points or messages. Infographics are a great way to grab your reader’s attention and demonstrate your knowledge of the real estate industry and issues that concern home buyers and sellers.
Think of points you want to highlight in your real estate blogs: statistics about selling prices, length of time on the market, mortgage rates — all of these stand out on the screen and encourage your readers to stay engaged.
Infographics are also easy to share on multiple platforms, so they can be an important part of social media content creation. You might have 1,500 words on recent trends in single-family home listings in your area, but the embedded infographic with a pie chart showing how many listings sold over asking is something you can post on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), or LinkedIn — whichever social media accounts you want to use to attract your clients.
Infographics have another important advantage. As images, they can show up in Google image searches. With the right metadata and tags, it’s another way to make it easier for your target audience to find you online.
Highly Engaging Videos
Video content might seem like a no-brainer for real estate agents. After all, visual content shows your potential clients not only who you are but what you’re trying to sell. You can use videos to show homes for sale or neighborhood tours to attract clients thinking of moving to your area.
Since most people regularly use online tools in their home buying or selling process, it makes sense that video content can be among the most effective marketing for real estate agents. Remember, nearly half of all buyers start by looking online for properties for sale.
Videos are prime content for real estate social media that goes beyond the first-generation platforms like Facebook. TikTok marketing is the latest wave of social media advertising, with influencers and brands using short videos to get their name and products to potential clients. A real estate content creator can use videos to engage and inform while giving people something fun to watch. After all, who doesn’t love a tour of a newly renovated kitchen, even if they’re not currently in the market to buy?
Shareable Social Media Posts
Infographics and videos might be important components of social media posts. But why is that important? Social media marketing allows you to connect with your audience, get out the name of your brokerage or business, and gather data on customers. Of course, you need an audience to share your real estate marketing posts with, and that often happens through organic growth.
By focusing on shareable social media posts, you’re allowing your current followers to pass on your messaging to others who might find it interesting or relevant. That could be anything from multiple posts of a TikTok featuring a dream home for sale to a private message between friends of one of your blog posts about tips for selling in the current economic climate.
It’s important not to discount those private messages; it might seem like you’re reaching fewer people than an open post that gets 1,000 views, but that one message could turn into a valuable lead. The NAR survey found that 38% of home buyers used a real estate agent who had come to them by personal referral.
Insightful Podcasts
Podcasts serve a number of important marketing purposes. They give you a chance to demonstrate your expertise in an easy-to-access format. After all, someone can listen to a podcast almost anywhere, and if they are looking to buy or sell, they might want to spend some time doing research about current market trends and what seems to be on the horizon.
That insight elevates your trustworthiness as a real estate agent. It can also serve as a way to introduce other members of your team. If you run a brokerage with several agents, a podcast allows you to share the content creation for your real estate marketing. Working together, you can get more people through your doors and increase the chances of bringing on new clients.
Podcasts are also easy to transform into other content types that you can use across platforms. A podcast can become the basis of content for your real estate website through a series of blog posts. You can easily turn your audio-only podcast into a video for YouTube by adding a camera. The clips from the video can become shareable sound bites on TikTok or Instagram.
Lead Nurturing Emails
Content creation for real estate includes not only making sure that people find you, but that you're following up with them once they do. You can use website forms and social media opt-ins to develop a list of potential clients.
Once you have that list, the next question is how to use it — specifically, how to reach out to these individuals in a way that makes them feel comfortable choosing you to handle their real estate sale.
Lead nurturing emails are often best when they're short, relevant, and offer value. Remind people to subscribe to your content, follow your social media accounts, or read your latest blog post.
A call to action at the end of every email lets people know that, once they’re ready, they can reach out to you and your team for help buying or selling a home. You can get started with lead nurturing emails by learning about important email marketing best practices.
User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content is any type of content made by a real person instead of a brand. It’s an important part of content for real estate agents because your industry is ultimately about people. Day in and day out, you're helping people navigate one of their life's biggest financial and personal investments.
Hearing from those people can have a big impact on the reputation and trustworthiness of your real estate business. Incorporating user-generated content in the form of testimonials demonstrates your success helping people in the past. Encourage clients to review your services whenever they have the chance.
User-generated content can also show your ability to connect with people and elevate your social media presence. Your ability to respond to questions in a public forum, such as on a social media page, can show you’re responsive to and able to answer people’s concerns.
7 Strategies To Master Real Estate Content Marketing
Apart from the types of realtor content you might want to develop, it’s also essential to nail down some content marketing strategies. The following methods help you properly execute your content ideas for maximum impact.
1. Establish Authority Through E-E-A-T Content
E-E-A-T stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These four categories are what Google considers good content to be.
So when you’re writing your SEO blog posts for your real estate website, demonstrate your trustworthiness by fact-checking each piece and your authority by proving why you've earned your reputation. As for expertise and experience, that also goes along with who you are. Create content around topics you're well-versed in, and consider having a subject matter expert review topics you're less familiar with. And, of course, share your experiences to make it more authentic.
2. Leverage Local SEO Keyword Research
You know that SEO gets you at the top of search results. So what is local SEO? This subset of SEO focuses on your local area.
Anytime you’ve looked up listings for “restaurants near me,” or “grocery store closing times,” Google serves up a local map with a list of businesses in the area that match your keywords. Your content marketing strategy for local SEO aims to get you on the list of businesses so that when someone in your market searches for real estate agents nearby, you appear.
In some markets, this can be exceedingly competitive. After all, Google generally limits these results to five listings. So how do you get your name above the rest?
All of the overall content marketing tips for real estate come into play here. But local SEO has an added element, where you take specific steps to target those near you who you are most likely to help through your real estate services. Performing local SEO keyword research can give you a leg up on this process.
3. Use First-Party Data To Fuel Your Content Strategy
You can probably see the importance of content marketing metrics in developing your strategy. After all, data can tell you more about who you are trying to reach and what they are looking for. But in the age of massive amounts of data, it can be hard to narrow in on what kind of data is most fundamental.
First-party data is the information coming directly from your customers. Sometimes they give it over deliberately, such as when they fill out an online form to subscribe to your podcast. More often, they offer behavioral clues and technical preferences passively, like when they visit your website from a certain browser or click into an advertisement.
You can analyze this information in the aggregate to decide on the next step for your content strategy. For example, perhaps all of your website visitors come from an area of town where you don’t normally advertise. You can leverage this information and focus more on that area, knowing there are potential buyers and sellers there. If you discover some of your blog posts have higher engagement than others, you can focus on that content style and subject matter to keep people interested.
4. Highlight Customer Success Stories
When someone's looking for a great restaurant, they want to hear that the food and service are spectacular. Why take a risk by going to the eatery blind when a person can scan online reviews to see what others experienced?
The same is true when a potential client is looking for a real estate professional. They want reassurance that you'll fairly represent their interests and help them at all stages of the process. You can highlight success stories on your website and social media to share real-life, local examples of happy customers.
5. Become a Thought Leader in Relevant Topics
Thought leadership is a way for you to demonstrate your expertise on a broader scale. By posting evergreen content on professional networking sites like LinkedIn and promoting your content among colleagues in the real estate industry, you elevate your reputation as someone who is trustworthy and knowledgeable in this area.
This helps on the “back end” to elevate the “T” in E-E-A-T. If you're better known, other websites and influencers will talk about you and link back to your website and content. When Google’s algorithms see this activity, it can help boost your ranking as it’s evidence that you're highly regarded within your space.
6. Align Your Brand’s Voice With Your Buyer Personas
It’s important for your real estate content marketing to reflect who you are; after all, that’s how you demonstrate your experience and expertise. But marketing also involves speaking to those you want to sign on as clients.
Be sure that your content creators keep this level of communication in mind. You might be a thought leader in your industry, but if your ideal buyer persona is a first-time home buyer with a single-income household, you want to tailor your brand messaging accordingly.
7. Double Down on Your Most Effective Content Channels and Types
One of the most valuable aspects of having content marketing metrics is knowing where you’re gaining the most traction. Once you know what works, keep doing it. If you’ve done a clean sweep of social media channels — say, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok — and discovered you get the most leads through Instagram, double down on Instagram.
The same is true with content types. If people spend the most time on your site reading how-to blogs, keep it up (and consider marketing those posts more)!
3 Common Mistakes in Real Estate Content Marketing
Here are some common pitfalls real estate marketers encounter and how to avoid them.
1. Using Broad or General Marketing Strategies
A real estate company doesn't fit the mold of the average business. Yes, you're offering a product, but it's likely to be the most expensive product your client will ever purchase. You're offering a service, but that isn't limited to your office, and you're responsible for everything from explaining how inspection works and whether that light fixture comes with the house to poring over spreadsheets and hunting down listings. When it comes to marketing yourself, what works for the average business might not work for you. You can't exactly offer promo codes, sample products, or a free trial, after all.
Instead, give potential customers a glimpse into who you are. Build trust, show that you're an active member of your community, and use visuals to draw in your clients. The best way to do all of this? Quality content.
2. Not Segmenting Audiences
In the same vein, you don't have a single audience. You deal with buyers and sellers, for example, and the concerns of one won’t necessarily line up with those of the other. You also interact with industry colleagues and your clients. There’s not much point in posting your industry-focused analysis on development properties over the next five to 10 years on your blog that’s aimed at clients. It might be perfect for a thought leadership piece on LinkedIn, however.
Failing to segment your marketing lists will lead to wasted spend and can even turn potential clients away. If they signed up for your newsletter to hear about the latest listings in the area but you're sending them thought pieces on how homeowners can stage their properties, they'll stop opening your emails or unsubscribe to future content.
3. Spending Time and Effort in Unprofitable Channels
Are you crafting messaging for every single platform or marketing channel you can think of in the hopes that you'll reach the right person? It sounds like it wouldn't hurt, but unless you're a content-creating fiend or have a whole team of writers to craft the perfect message on each, you're diluting your brand.
Take a good, hard look at where you currently get the biggest return on investment and where your customers are. Focus on these channels and build out content that engages users and brings them to your website.
How To Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Strategy
To master your content marketing strategy, regularly assess the impact of what you’re putting out there to see what needs switching up. Understand and review your content marketing metrics, and decide if you need a new plan or to team up with new people to create great content.
Feed Your Strategy With Compose.ly’s High-Quality SEO Content
Content is central to your marketing strategy as a real estate professional, but writing content shouldn’t be your full-time job. By partnering with a content creation agency like Compose.ly, you can focus on running your business and hire freelance real estate copywriters to build out your content. To learn more about how we can help you, contact us today.
