7 Content Marketing Tips for Estate and Letting Agents
Some small businesses (including estate and letting agents) have historically been slow to adopt a content marketing strategy as social media use and importance has grown. But as SEO has evolved significantly in recent years, it has become clear that businesses need to look at their content marketing techniques to remain competitive in the rankings and provide great reasons for customers to visit their websites.
Whether the content is created in-house or outsourced to an agency, there will be a time when creative ideas for interesting new content become scarce. Here are seven tips for creating outstanding content for estate and letting agents.
1. Create a Content Marketing Calendar
Having a calendar that documents a content strategy is a great way to ensure timely content creation, but this strategy is too often overlooked. 61% percent of marketers say that their biggest difficulty with content creation is that it takes too much time, but only 44% percent are reported to have a documented content marketing strategy.
Putting together a calendar of content scheduled for the month is a great first step that provides a set amount of time to strategise, brainstorm, create, and publish. Also make sure you’re involving staff members who are speaking regularly to your customers and clients, so that you can build your content around the topics and information they are most interested in, so that you can focus your ideas on those that will generate the most interest.
2. Find Out What Works
Before researching other sites for inspiration, understand the characteristics of past content that you’ve put out, and how it has worked. Make sure you’re using Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to check the most visited pages on your website and search queries to see what content has performed the best and the keywords people have used to find it.
Social statistics can also provide insight into content that has performed well. There are easy-to-use dashboards that provide information on the number of shares, and clickbacks from those shares.
Understanding these trends will help better inform what topics and strategies have worked in the past. When you do your research you may find that only a handful of your competitors are posting blogs and news stories on their site, so use this opportunity to really demonstrate a point-of-difference and show off your agency knowledge and personality!
3. Understand and React to Social Trends and News Stories
Social media is also helpful to provide ideas for topics in real-time. Writing content around trending topics, helps provide valuable content to people actively looking for it. Twitter has had trending topics available for a while, and Facebook introduced trending topics earlier this year.
If there’s a property-related story in the news (and with an election looming housing is a ‘hot topic’ at the moment!), see if you can enhance your content by addressing different sides to a story, or supplement it with different media like videos and photos.
4. Create a Survey
Create news with a simple survey. Understanding views on a topic can provide useful material for articles. This may help with backlinks to your site and help build your reputation as a great source of information in your area. Use it as an opportunity to connect with your current and potential customers and show that you are listening to their feedback.
Creating and conducting surveys have become much easier with products like SurveyMonkey that allow you to create surveys at an affordable price-point (and sometimes free).
5. Utilise Visual Content
While much of SEO focuses on text that search engines can digest, visual content is much more appealing. Audiences are naturally wired to be more engaged with visual content, as 90% of the information that comes to the brain is visual, and content that utilises imagery gets 94% more views than those without.
Keep visitors engaged and scrolling by adding still images or videos to written content where you can, and creating infographics is also becoming an affordable option. You could create infographics with the research that’s already being done, or get one created to include in a blog. It will really help liven up a text-based article and highlight the main points and statistics in a more visual way.
6. Start a Video Blog
Another easy way to create consistently high-quality content is to create videos.78% of people say they watch online video every week, and 55% say they watch every day.
Starting a video blog isn’t expensive or time-consuming. Short videos are the easiest to digest, and simple to shoot with a personal webcam.
Video blogs require minimal editing, if at all, and can be posted immediately to YouTube. You might already be using property videos to bring your property listings to life, and so putting together some short video blogs where you talk about the customer services you offer could offer a nice personal touch and provide that point-of-difference.
7. Repurpose Content
If finding a topic and doing the research for it is too time-consuming, why not research and gather several articles around a certain topic. Gather content with an underlying theme, like “Property Maintenance Tips,” and put them together with an additional blog post. This creates a valuable package of materials for readers to digest.
Another way of repurposing content is to revisit an older story and provide an update, if there are new statistics or information available.
In summary, content marketing is now a main part of building SEO, and it works by engaging new and existing audiences, and encouraging sharing. For small businesses, it can be difficult to stay on course, and ideas are tough to generate on a consistent basis, but with a little forward-planning and structure it can be an easier job.
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