Most real estate agents jump into real estate blogging because they read somewhere that it comes with benefits such as:
- Generating traffic
- Establishes you as an expert
- Helps you build trust with potential clients
However, what most agents come to realize after a while of blogging is that it is hard to get these benefits that everyone has been going on about. As a result, they become frustrated and either quit or outsource to professionals.
The reason that they couldn’t get any return on investment (ROI) from their real estate blogging is because they didn’t have a content marketing strategy to guide them.
This article explores five (5) tips through which you can get measurable ROI from your content marketing.
- Become a Go-To Website for Valuable Resources
When others zag, you should zig. What this means is that you should create content that will differentiate you from other real estate agents.
For example, instead of writing articles on topics that relate to buying and selling homes or trends and changes in the real estate industry, you can write on topics that focuses on the experiences and challenges of new home owners (or sellers) and how they can easily solve them.
- Use Tools to Supercharge Content Marketing
As an agent who is hoping to get a sizeable ROI out of content marketing; tools are your best friend.
Tools help you automate and scale your entire content creation, promotion and marketing and lead follow-up and nurturing. It is alright to these things manually when your traffic and leads are trickling in, but you will get to a point where you can’t do it alone and you will need tools to stay on top of everything.
In order to get the most out of your content marketing, the following tools will help put things into perspective:
- Facebook Ads – Use this tool to promote your content to your target audience by using targeted advertising options in the Power Editor.
- Trello – This project management tool will come in handy when you’ve started creating content for your blog. It will also be useful if you have outsourced writers on your team.
- Buzzsumo – This tool will help you come up with real estate blog ideas
- CoSchedule – Use this tool to build and schedule your editorial calendar and social media posts. Very easy to use and will come in handy for you.
- Grammarly – Using this tool will help you write better blog posts and in case you’ve outsource your content marketing to freelancers; help you edit their work to your standard.
- Use High Value Content Resources
Blog posts alone are not enough if you want to get good ROI. Blog posts are good, but if you want to generate high quality leads then you need to spend time, energy and sometimes money in developing additional resources.
These additional resources can be:
- Ebooks (like this one from Placester)
- Videos or slide decks
- Free email courses
- Tools (like this one from Zillow)
These high value content resources work best when offered for free in exchange for email addresses. The email addresses will be used to nurture your leads.
- Promote your Content the right Channels
As an agent, you can get more ROI out of your content by using the right platforms to promote it.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Twitter are good and should be part of your marketing strategy. However, websites such as Quora offers you an opportunity to promote your content in such a way that doesn’t come off as promotional.
It serves the dual purpose of providing valuable content while also driving traffic to your website.
- Set Goals and Track Progress
The final tip you should implement if you want to boost content marketing ROI as a real estate agent is to set clear goals and track your progress along the way.
Goals can either be short term or long term, but regardless, you should have them and you should measure them regularly.
Common content marketing goals are
- Drive website traffic
- Capture email addresses of potential customers
- Generate brand awareness
- Establish thought leadership or real estate expert status
- Convert more blog visitors into clients through engagement
It doesn’t matter what your goals are, the most important thing is to clearly define them and assign metrics that will allow you to track progress along the way.
What else are you doing to boost content marketing ROI and grow your real estate business? Share your thoughts and opinions with us in the comments section.
