Content marketing is an essential part of growing any estate agency business, helping you attract and convert new vendors and landlords, drive traffic to your website and social feeds and encourage people to sign up for your newsletters.

Good content marketing doesn’t just happen by chance, however. You need to take a strategic approach, which means setting goals, understanding your audience and ensuring that your content is planned around their needs, wants and interests.

To help you develop a content marketing strategy that puts you ahead of the competition, we look at the seven crucial steps to success.

How to create a content marketing strategy for your estate agency

Step 1 – set your goal

All strategies need to have goals. What they are will depend on the nature of your business and where you are on your content marketing journey.

Your goal could be growing your business. It might be signing up more landlords or getting more names on your newsletter distribution list. You might be keen to attract more traffic to your website from search engines. Or you might be looking to boost your status as a local property expert.

Your goal is the cornerstone to your strategy so it needs to be clear, specific and achievable. If you’re looking to increase the number of vendors who book a market appraisal, for example, include the percentage growth you’re aiming at.

Step 2 – get to know your audience 

You need to be clear about the people your strategy will target as this will define the subjects you focus on, the type of content you produce and the platforms you use to promote it.

Be more specific than just buyers or vendors. Think about your ideal customer – where they live, how old they are, if they have children … Think too about the issues that preoccupy them. If a landlord, do they worry about finding a tenant or is it the ever-changing tranche of regulations that keeps them awake at night?

Step 3 – pick your content type

When thinking about content, written blogs are probably what springs to mind – but they aren’t the only thing to focus on. Video posted on YouTube is crucial too and continues to grow in popularity.

These are your two main tools but there are many different ways to use them. Video is good for demonstrating how something is done or getting the most from a strong presenter, while written content can be repurposed in different ways to catch the reader’s attention – a Q&A, list or interview, for example.

Other content types to consider include infographics, which are great for grabbing attention and getting your content shared. Ever-popular, podcasts are also worth thinking about.

Step 4 – think up topic ideas

Start with your goals and audience. What sort of topic areas interest your target group most? Remember, the best content is about adding value – telling people things they don’t already know will boost your brand credibility and keep you in mind.

If you’re struggling to come up with enough content ideas, Google searches are a great way of pulling up the questions most people are asking about certain topics. Don’t forget to check out your competitors’ websites too or invest in a professional tool such as SEMrush.

Step 5 – draw up your content calendar

Once you have your list of ideas, you need to be focused about planning. Think about what will work for the season or other key dates in the calendar as well as getting a good spread of topics.

You don’t need any fancy software for this, a basic spreadsheet will do. It just needs to record the subject, deadline and publication date, current status and who is responsible for writing, approving and uploading the content. Plan several months ahead and make sure your calendar is the go-to place for recording all progress.

Step 6 – get your content out there

There isn’t much point in creating great content without planning the channels you will use to promote it to your audience. The ones you prioritise will depend on what your research tells you about your audience and the platforms they use.

It is likely to include your organic social media feeds, so Facebook, Instagram and also LinkedIn, as well as paid social advertising and boosted posts. Your own email newsletters are important too, making sure you personalise them to each audience group. You will also need to optimise your content for search engines.

Step 7 – test, monitor and evaluate

Finally, no strategy ends with the publication of a blog or video. Monitoring and evaluations are vital and easy to do with the wealth of free analytics tools available. These include Google and YouTube Analytics but there are others too. You’re not just looking for vague indications of positivity. You want to know which pieces of content actually drive landlord or valuation enquiries, for example.

It is often worth trying A/B testing – where you see how one content approach fairs against a different method. And remember, it is always worth changing things up if evaluation reveals something isn’t working.

Got a question? Need help with your marketing strategy? Book a call with Nelly at www.artdivision.co.uk