Building Awareness & Audience Through the Power of Content Marketing

How does your message rise above the rest?

To be potential clients’ first thought, you must position yourself as a leader on today’s real estate market. This means that you should be a provider of resources and information regarding trending topics impacting the industry.

Creating content is a powerful marketing tool for your company if you can consistently provide your audience with valuable information that answers frequently asked questions or assists with task-oriented needs ¹. Whether you are at the forefront of industry design trends or state building laws, think about what your target audience needs help with or to learn.

Next, consider what format would best suit the information you are trying to produce and communicate. There are a variety of content types to create however, writing articles/blogs or crafting short videos are great ways to engage your audience. Most often, these formats require the least amount of resources to create and are easily shared.

Blogging is beneficial because it helps build a reputable content library for your company’s website that can assist with your efforts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ². The blogs that you write can also be repurposed into articles that can be published on partner websites (more below).

Video is another powerful format that is becoming the preferred method of content consumption. According to a study from Cisco, video will represent approximately 82% of all internet traffic by 2020 ³. Most importantly, video is being used as a research tool that can lead to business growth. According to this recent study, 65% of executives are found to visit a company’s website after watching video. The study suggests that 39% of these executives will follow-up with a phone call to a company because of video ⁴.

Once you decide on what content you want to create, build out a calendar for the year so that you or your marketing team can maintain consistency with releasing fresh, valuable content. If your internal resources are lacking, you can find partners who will assist you in content creation. This can save you valuable time and help you produce high quality articles or video that will have the greatest impact.

You should then consider how to best share your content so that it reaches the biggest audience. Partnering with established and trusted media brands, oftentimes referred to as “premium publishers”, is one way to maximize the number of people seeing your message. MediaPost reports that approximately 41% of consumers are getting more news coverage today than they were just a couple of years ago because they are interested in what is going on within their communities ⁵. Consumers turn to premium publishers because they generally feel that their time spent on these sites is productive ⁶.

In the long run, businesses find that their partnership with a premium publisher often translates into an increase in interactions with their brand due to the influence of the “Halo Effect”. The shared trust and positive impression a consumer may feel about a premium publisher and their content can extend to all those associated with it. But what could such partnership look like?

Most premium publishers have the means to distribute your content directly on their website to a large audience.
Consider re-purposing your blog posts for content marketing opportunities that take on the same look and feel of standard news stories on the site. Often, a publisher will have their team write content or edit provided content so that it blends in seamlessly with other stories on the site.

Or, if you like the idea of creating and sharing a video, there are often a variety of solutions and tools offered by premium publishers. Videos may be found on article pages and immersed within the publisher’s content throughout the site. Should you not have the capability of producing a video, inquire about production services. Premium publishers may have dedicated teams to help you with this task.

As with any other business plan, to be successful with content marketing, you need a long-term strategy and consistent visibility to build a loyal audience. The reward for your efforts may mean finding an audience who will turn to you first for their future real estate needs.