Real estate agents depend on powerful marketing strategies to engage buyers and close sales. At the age of digital marketing, for-sale signs on front lawns are no longer enough to convince sellers to choose a particular agent and attract homebuyers. Technology-based marketing strategies like content marketing can set agents apart in a crowded marketplace and help them grow their businesses.

Content marketing in the real estate sector is about more than offering properties to potential buyers. As an integral part of a comprehensive marketing strategy, this approach “delivers useful and relevant content to your prospects and customers.”

The goal is to create relationships that will eventually lead to sales. Content marketing helps build brand awarenessallows leading real estate agents to establish their authority within the sector and generates leads.

By pursuing content marketing, real estate professionals enhance their reputation and lay the foundation for future sales.

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1. Identify target audiences and buyer personas

Before distributing content, real estate businesses must define their target audiences and persons of buyers. Without this step, the information risks being lost and potentially alienating its audience.

For example, a young family looking to buy their first home will require different information than some empty nesters looking to downsize after their children have left home. Real estate firms can target both market segments. However, to reach them effectively, they need to tailor their messages and choose their marketing channels wisely.

Defining audiences and personas goes beyond demographics. The most effective marketers understand their audience's interests and address their pain points.

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2. Create compelling visual content

The term content marketing is often used synonymously with blogs and posts on social networks. However, visual content often has a bigger impact when it comes to displaying the property.

High-quality images of an apartment or house are the most basic form of visual content. Virtual tours or drone videos can attract even more attention and capture the imagination of potential buyers.

Both options allow real estate agents to tell a story rather than sell a property. Imagine discovering a property for the first time: put yourself in the viewer's shoes and tell the story of their journey in a video. Another creative option would be to stage a day in the life of a family in their new home, highlighting how this particular property meets their needs.

3. Use video marketing

In recent years, video marketing has been one of the main growth areas within content marketing. Explainer video company Wyzowl found in a survey that more than 90% of businesses used video as a marketing tool, and just under 90% considered it an important part of their content marketing strategy.

In 2023, in the United States alone, businesses are likely to spend approx $85 billion in video advertising in 2024, a 9.9% increase over 2023. Consumers have also embraced video content.

When it comes to real estate, videos can simply showcase a property better than images. No matter how many images an agent or photographer takes, they may be missing an element of connecting those images. In addition to how-tos, neighborhood tours and customer testimonials also make for exciting video content.

Interactive and virtual content are taking these developments a step further. Innovative apps can help real estate professionals create tours that allow viewers to choose the direction in which they move when viewing a property online.

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4. Blogging and thought leadership

So far, this article has focused on visual content, but it would be wrong to discount written content for a real estate agent's content marketing strategy. Blogs and thought leadership pieces allow companies and their key team members to establish themselves as experts in their field.

Depending on your target audience, content covering market trends, sharing home buying tips, or providing guides to specific neighborhoods can work very well. The key to successful blogs and leadership pieces is understanding what your audience wants. Ask yourself what information your potential buyers can't find elsewhere, think about it pain pointsand address them.

5. Social media

Few content marketing strategies would be complete without the inclusion of social media channels. Social media platforms offer estate agents a chance to connect directly with their clients, share content and engage with their audience.

Social media offers great opportunities to share visual and written content that might otherwise have gone undiscovered. To harness the power of social media effectively, real estate agencies must ensure that the platform and content audiences are well matched. Facebook can be the most popular platform for real estate agents now, but this could change as different generations enter the property market. In addition to platform selection, consistency is another critical component of a successful social media marketing strategy.

How to measure success and repeatability

One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing channels over their more traditional counterparts is the ability to measure success.

Start by defining the key performance indicators you want to measure. For videos, this can be the number of views or comments. For blog posts, it could be comments and shares or an increase in traffic to your website.

Not every piece of content will be very effective. Regular performance appraisal and measurement allows real estate agents to tailor and iterate their content to make it even more relevant to their audience.

Content marketing is a very cost-effective part of a real estate agent's marketing strategy that can help create and increase brand awareness and build relationships with key audiences. Both visual and written content can deliver great results in the real estate sector. To further improve the impact of a campaign, real estate marketers should measure the performance of their content and adjust their approach as needed.