If you’ve ever sat down, put together a general content strategy, and written content for your real estate website, then you already know that writing content is a lot of hard work; and writing high-quality, successful real estate content that converts is an even more difficult task.
But well-written, high-quality content is worth the time investment in many different ways, especially if one of your marketing goals is to build an inbound marketing strategy.
And that’s because having a strong content strategy in place is key to having a strong inbound marketing strategy in place; the two are closely interconnected.
But the first thing to ask yourself, before you even begin writing any content, is: how do I measure the success of the content I’m writing? What makes my content successful?
While most people will have different definitions of their idea of success, there are really 3 main ones to have in mind when it comes to measuring the success of your content:
★ Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
- Planning a Real Estate Lead Flow Through Inbound Marketing
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
- Download our Inbound Marketing Guide for Real Estate Agents
Goal 1: The Reader Can Actually Find Your Content
We already know that writing high-quality content is difficult to do, so if you put in the time to write content, and no one can find it or knows that it exists, there isn’t much point in writing it to begin with.
When you write content, you obviously want people to find it; and the way to do that is through your content marketing strategy.
Content marketing is the plan you have in place to get your content in front of the right people, at the right time, for the right reasons.
A well-rounded content marketing plan would include people finding your content through multiple channels, including SEO, social media, email marketing, advertising, and many more.
★ Want to learn more about content marketing? Have a look at these posts:
- Building and Managing a Real Estate Content Lifecycle Plan
- Metrics to Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Strategy
- Building a Marketing Discoverability Strategy
Goal 2: The Reader Sees You as An Authority
When you have a strong content strategy in place, a lot of people will be discovering you for the first time through that content, probably in a Google search result; and that’s most likely because they were looking for an answer to a question.
And, if you answer those questions for them, especially if it’s multiple times for the same types of questions, those people will begin see you as an authority.
For example, if someone is researching “selling their home when getting divorced”, and you have multiple pieces of content written around that subject, and when they search for related topics, they continually find you, your brand, and your business, they’re going to reach out to you, period.
Even better, there’s a really good chance they won’t reach out to anyone else because you’ve already earned their trust by solving a problem for them, and they now see you as an authority on the subject.
★ Want to learn more about building authority? Have a look at these posts:
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- Building a Lead Generation Strategy Through Education
- Building a Real Estate Solutions-Based Marketing Messaging Strategy
Goal 3: The Reader Took an Action
While writing content that’s informative and helps the person that’s reading it is certainly an important part of making your content successful having them take an action during or after reading it is even better.
Of course, most agents are going to say the action they want someone to take is to contact them about buying or selling a home, but that’s not very likely the first time they discover you.
Because it’s such a big, important transaction, it’s just not that likely someone is going to read a blog post that you wrote, and then contact you to sell their house (but it’s not impossible). First, you need to build trust.
Through the philosophy of inbound marketing, we know that a more likely scenario is that they’d interact with your brand multiple times over a longer span of time, and then reach out for something as big as a real estate transaction.
But to get there, we still want them to do something as part of interacting with your content, in addition to you building trust and authority with them; we want them to take an action with your content, and in a well-planned digital strategy, there are plenty of them to take:
- They could sign up for your email marketing newsletter.
- They could download one of your eBooks or digital guides.
- And most importantly, they can click through to read additional, related content (this last point helps with SEO, important website metrics, and goes toward building trust and authority).
Ultimately, you always want to write content that convinces the user to take an additional step that provides them with value.
★ Want to learn more about actionable content? Have a look at these posts:
- How to Plan Content that Attracts and Engages
- How ‘Dwell Time’ and Quality Content Work Together to Improve SEO
- Building Downloadable Resources Into Your Marketing Strategy
Start By Defining Success
For a lot of agents, writing high-quality content is a lot of hard work; but by starting with planning out the way you define the success of that content, you can lay the foundation for a successful content strategy that actively contributes to a successful inbound marketing strategy.
Want to get better, more qualified leads and build your authority? Our Inbound Marketing Guide is a walkthrough of the overall philosophy of inbound marketing, why it’s effective, and how you can build it into your own real estate marketing strategy to get better marketing results.
