| Marketing Strategy 4 Min Read

Maintaining a healthy blog and consistent social media calendar is a critical component of your brand awareness and online authority. We talk a lot about building authority, and for many real estate agents, it can be an ongoing struggle to come up with great ideas that will engage an audience and meet the intended goal.

The best way to solidify your content strategy, and consistently create content that is exciting, relevant, and converting, is to create a content calendar. Here are some tips and tricks for getting it done:

 

What is a Content Calendar?

Magazines have been using content calendars for decades; only they call them “editorial calendars.” This is the direction and plan for the magazine throughout the year. A good editorial calendar will identify future trends and assess what is needed to execute the plan.

 

Step 1: Identify the Topics and Write it Down

A great way to get started with your content calendar is to plan it out using an actual calendar. You should be able to identify the topics you want to cover and have them coordinate with the months you want to post them.

For example, if you want to do a social media campaign targeting spring buyers, you would plan this to happen in April and May rather than late fall. Or, let’s say you have a big event happening for the holidays, you would start planning to promote it early on in the calendar in order to give time to get things done and drum up excitement in your community.

This is also the step where you would do some research to identify topics that your audience is interested in and find out what you should post to captivate your followers.

Once you have the ideas, you can either write them down on a paper calendar or use an online app to organize the data and create the calendar. Apps like Airtable, KanbanFlow, and Contently are just a few examples of CRMs that will help organize your content calendar.

 

Step 2: Gather the Collateral

Once you have identified the general themes and ideas for each month, you should start hammering out the specifics. This means gathering content, coming up with blog ideas, writing blogs, creating graphics, and more.

Bonus Tip: Use Google Alerts to set keyword alerts relating to your industry. Every day, you can receive interesting articles and links that relate directly to your industry. These articles are great for posting but can also help give you ideas about topics to cover, and more.

 

Step 3: Use a Scheduling App

It’s unlikely that you will have time to post to your blog or social media every day, and, in this case, automation is the best strategy! Content management software like WordPress allows users to schedule blog posts in advance, so it’s always a good idea to stay ahead of the game and schedule a chunk of blogs at one time and schedule them for the future.

It’s also a good idea to take advantage of social media scheduling apps like Hootsuite, AgoraPulse, Buffer, and more. These programs will let you schedule posts in advance, monitor their activity, and even reply to comments all from one handy dashboard. This means you won’t have to log into multiple accounts or have numerous apps on your phone.

 

Step 4: Measure, Tweak, and Repeat

Not every post is going to get the traction you would hope. However, if you have done considerable research into your audience, you should have a good idea of what they want to see. However, if you notice that some posts are not performing as well as you would have hoped, you can always revise your calendar and change it as you see fit.

You should also leave some room for flexibility when it comes to posting urgent or time-sensitive content on your blog or social media channels. Pre-planning with a content calendar is best only for evergreen content that will always stay relevant.


Want to drive traffic, build your brand, and engage your target audience? Download our eBook: ‘The Ultimate Guide to Real Estate Marketing’. It’s a collection of some of our best marketing articles, tips, and tricks that we’ve collected over the years.
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