Raise your hand if content marketing for real estate developers is one of those business items that you really, really want to shrug off and say, “that doesn’t apply to me.”
Because, as a real estate developer or architect, you might say that you sell property and homes. And beyond writing a description of your community or development and your property or model home listings, what other content could you really need to market?
Answer: A lot.
We know it may not be what you want to hear, but content marketing is essential to real estate development and architecture. Because at the end of the day, you’re not selling a property or a house; you’re selling a lifestyle and a home.
Content marketing not only illustrates that lifestyle and creates the warm feeling of home, but also sells the heck out of both.
Why is Content Marketing for Real Estate Developers So Effective?
Consider what content marketing can do for you:
✔️ It Builds Trust, Brand Reputation & Engagement
The reputation-building qualities of exceptional content are almost magical.
When you’re trying to go from raw land to an unforgettable brand, content marketing develops the imagery, the words, the video, and all the other kinds of content that help buyers engage with your brand.
The more content that you create, the more you communicate your promised lifestyle, reinforce your message, and build trust in your development.
✔️ It Creates Warm Leads to Nurture
This cannot be emphasized enough: If you want to create interest in your development, you must create content.
Good, honest, and inspirational content marketing for real estate developers will build enough trust to net you the most important thing in real estate: the warm lead – that buyer who volunteers their email, their phone number, their socials, their anything because they like you. They really like you.
Welcome to your successful real estate marketing funnel. It just got fuller and narrower.
✔️ It Builds SEO. Serious SEO.
The search engines love well-optimized content marketing. A good content marketing campaign produces content across media, from video and blog posts to social media posts and free downloads.
Most of this will be well-optimized SEO content. (We like to think of real estate SEO content as high-quality content that humans love and appreciate, while also having the required elements to tick the search engine checklists so said humans can actually find the content.)
And SEO-optimized content will slowly – yes, it often takes months to gain momentum – but surely begin to drive traffic to your website. Optimized video titles will get eyes on your videos. Well-written social posts and link headlines will garner clicks. Etc. etc., ad infinitum until suddenly, the search engines take notice and real people start visiting your site, interacting with your brand, and seeking out more information.
By the time they do, you’ll already have a good catalog of content that you add to regularly. And the search engines just love that. People do, too.
✔️ It’s Cost-Effective
Dollar for dollar, content marketing is one of the best ways to spend your marketing budget.
It’s hard to put hard numbers on a soft concept – that is, “cost-effectiveness,” without a specific case study (and they’re all so different) – but marketers around the world and across industries all agree that great content marketing is top value. (Note: great content marketing. You can’t phone it in and then expect wildly valuable results.)
Two of the big reasons for this cost-effectiveness are:
- Organic search traffic: As you build your catalog of content, you’ll have more and more content that pulls free traffic. Those 1,000 clicks this month grow to 10,000 clicks in the next six months, and to 50,000 net clicks in a year. And imagine the cost of 50,000 clicks, if you were pulling them in via PPC ads.
- Cost per lead: Content marketing has been benchmarked at 62% less expensive than traditional marketing while generating 3x the leads of traditional marketing. That makes for a significantly less expensive cost-per-lead.
✔️ And It’s Scalable & Can Be Repurposed
Scalability, as far as content marketing for real estate developers is concerned, is the ability to expand, multiply, and repurpose your content into different packages and deliverables.
This is an excellent way to maximize the value of one piece of content, by turning it into many: A well-written blog post can become the script for a YouTube video, a chapter of a free relocation eBook, and part of a lead magnet for your email list. And we mean not just one, but all three. One piece of content becomes four.
5 Content Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Developers
Ready to get started? Begin here:
☐ Optimize Your Onsite Experience
You don’t have any control over how YouTube displays your videos or how Instagram lays out its feed, but you can optimize your website and blog experience. Make sure:
- You have great navigation. Your menus should be clear and your fonts readable (and large enough). It should be easy for site visitors to find what they’re looking for.
- You tell people what to do next. Also known as a call-to-action, a CTA points people in the right direction. Note that you’re strong-arming people or forcing them into action, but rather leading them in a direction they’re already looking. It’s important not only to make that direction/CTA clear but to call it out clearly and specifically: “Click here to download” or “Get in touch” are simple examples.
- Work to generate leads. Speaking of CTAs, one of the most important is a lead-generation CTA. This could be an invitation to download a free relocation guide (in exchange for joining your email list) or getting free updates via email. However your structure it, be sure you’re encouraging site visitors to join your funnel (just don’t call it that).
- Create internal links. Internal links are links from your website to your website. You can create internal links to provide additional information, direct visitors to other content that might interest them, or usher them through a specific process. Whatever you do, make sure to link to your content, whenever it makes sense.
☐ Diversify Your Content Marketing Efforts
Content marketing for real estate developers comes in many forms and iterations, from your images and video to your blog posts and free downloads.
Start by brainstorming the content you’d like to create, then map that content to its best media/format. For example, a property or model home tour is best done via video or images, while detail-rich relocation information is most useful as written content (often with a video partner component).
☐ Start Building Your Media Libraries
Trust us – you want to build a photo and video library before you need them. The last thing you want to do is run out 24 hours before a blog post needs to go live, to take illustrative photos. What if it’s overcast or raining or the wrong season? What if your highlighted businesses are closed? What if your camera equipment fails?
You don’t need to take photos of everything and anything, though. As you did in the step above, once you’ve brainstormed the content you’d like to create, you’ll have an idea of what kinds of photos and video you need. And that brings us to…
☐ Create a Marketing Guide & Content Calendar
This is going to be your best friend when it comes to your content marketing.
A marketing guide and content calendar (they go hand-in-hand) help you visualize all your content marketing goals, from brainstorming through to fruition and social sharing, for the next 3-6 months.
For example, your marketing guide could contain tabs for your blog calendar and video content calendar. Once you’ve brainstormed your topics for each, you can mix and match to minimize your research time (if you’re writing & videoing similar topics during this timeframe), map out what media you’ll need, and optimize cross-linking.
The beauty is that you can add and subtract elements from your guide and calendar, thus customizing it to your needs. At Peak Integrated Marketing, we’re constantly tweaking our client calendars and marketing guides to account for everything from blog posts and email marketing topics to company updates (to be shared far and wide) and social posts.
☐ Be Consistent
One of the biggest challenges to content marketing for real estate developers is consistency. Not just this week or this month, but over years of solid content creation.
Because content marketing is, above all, a long-term strategy. You get out what you put in. So, put in a good effort!
That doesn’t mean you have to become a content creation agency. Your job, after all, is to develop real estate and design homes. But, do set yourself a schedule and then, stick to it. For example, you can commit to writing just 2 blog posts a month, creating 1 video a month, sending 1 newsletter a month, and posting across your socials once a week. Something is better than nothing at all.
The key is in being consistent from month 1 to month 36. Because even small-scale goals can be long-term effective, if you have the mettle to stick to them.
Overwhelmed with the “Musts” of Content Marketing for Real Estate Developers? We’re Here to Help.
Admittedly, this is just the start to any effective content marketing strategy. After all, there’s an entire industry devoted to just this topic – professionals, experts, and companies that dedicate their 40-hour work weeks to creating content.
If this isn’t your passion or your wheelhouse – if you struggle with the hows and the whats and the whys and whens – then you don’t have to go it alone. Because, ultimately, you should love what you do and do what you love. Farm the rest of it out.
At Peak Integrated Marketing, we take our clients’ content marketing seriously. In fact, our team includes dedicated content writers, social media marketers, SEO professionals, and other experts whose aforementioned 40-hour work weeks are dedicated to all of the above.
Not just so you don’t have to, but so that your website and your blog and your videos and all your content benefit from the expertise, the search engine love, and the lead-nurturing they truly deserve. So please, get in touch and let’s talk. We look forward to it!
