Content Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents

The process of content marketing entails selecting and delivering useful information to customers to establish credibility. Surprisingly, this general description and other content marketing practices can also be applied to the work of a real estate agent.

Content marketing is a multi-step process, whereby businesses select and publish useful information that helps their customers and prospects make better decisions. Enriching the lives of consumers is a sure pathway to credibility. Engaging your audience helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field - which translates to increased leads and sales. Real estate is a media (content) rich industry that uses photographs, videos, virtual tours and articles. You can tailor all of these types of content to educate and entertain your audience, and create a steady flow of prospects who become loyal customers.

Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy

Successful content marketing requires strategic planning. This means that real estate agents have to plan what to say, as well as how and where to say it. This involves knowing your buyer persona (who you are selling to), and the channels where they are best reached (Internet vs. print). Two basic Internet-based content marketing channels that will help you market your business are social media and blogging.

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Why Choose Social Media?

Education and income are two qualities that are favorable for real estate customers to have, and both groups are available in abundance on social media. According to the Pew Internet: Social Networking study, 71 percent of all social networking users make at least $75,000 yearly, and 72 percent have a least one college degree. Social network users are also more likely to be urban and suburban than rural. These statistics are good news for real estate agents! So making social media a part of your real estate content strategy is a good idea.

Not all social media sites are created equal. Another Pew study, "The Demographics of Social Media Users (2012),"found that Facebook has the lion's share (67 percent) of social media user involvement. Twitter engages 16 percent, followed by Pinterest (15 percent), Instagram (13 percent) and Tumblr (six percent). Each channel has its own demographic mix that will help you to analyze and decide which content channels are best for your business.

Blogging

Blogging is a great platform for sharing in-depth, valuable information. It's also a reliable way to establish your company as an authoritative voice in your real estate market. Blogs help to build relationships that will help you to generate leads especially when you combine engaging writing with specific calls to action and forms that help you to collect information, such as email addresses and phone numbers. Customer information gathered on your blog is transferable to your print marketing efforts.

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Social Media Ideas

Social media is a great way to get short blasts of useful information to your audience. Ask open-ended questions to find out what in which your followers are most interested. Try posting houses of the week, luxury houses, celebrity houses, events and local news. Self-promotion will not serve you well, but education and entertainment will.

Maximize Your Blogging Activity

In addition to posting regularly, having social media and subscription access on your blogs, these are some additional tips for blogging success:

• Identify your customer's pain points and blog about the solutions.
• Try being a guest blogger on local and national real estate sites such as Zillowblog.com and Realestateonline.com.
• Keep up to date with top real estate blogs. According to YouRealty.com, the top five real estate blogs are:Zillowblog, Inman, Redfin, Trulia, and Realtor.com. Realtor.com allows you to sign up for free blogging space on its site.

Additional Resources

Successful blogging requires that you plan your content. A WordPress Editorial Content plug-in will help you to organize your blog posts.

Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger - one of the most well respected content marketing sites - who started off his career as the owner of a successful real estate brokerage firm, has launched AgentPress Library, which contains free case studies, reports and other content to help real estate agents succeed. Registration is free.