Agents are engaging with more vendors, landlords, buyers, tenants – for good reason. Content marketing was known for its lower up-front costs and diverse long-term benefits. Now it is used by 90 per cent of B2C brands. This steady growth is bringing forward several challenges:
- Content creation is exceeding content demand. There’s a lot of content ready to answer every question.
- Consumers have access to free content making it harder to engage them.
- It’s harder to compete with bigger content marketing budgets, especially for a small independent. The more content the industry generates, the higher the content standard – and expectations.
However, content marketing is worth investing in and that’s because digital marketing ingenuity and creativity can beat big marketing budgets. Three content marketing trends and how to use them:
Content collaboration
Many agents and developers successfully collaborate, it’s one of the most welcome marketing trends – working with other people (inside/outside your company) on creating and marketing your content asset.
Many developers and agents successfully collaborate, it’s one of the most welcome marketing trends.
It allows you to save on content creation and marketing while producing something authentic and interesting. If you focus on the relationship building aspect, you’ll find content collaborators happy to help you.
Examples:
Engage your staff in content brainstorming and marketing. They quickly create video content onsite or in a specific area.
Including influencers – interview respected property experts on topics of interest to your segment. Remember, this is your unique content that’s also highly trusted, since it came from notable experts in the industry.
Including suppliers or partners – if you work with developers, you can collaborate with them. Equally, you can collaborate with experts in finance, tax and wealth planning.
Context rather than keyword
Back in the day writers were forced to build content around ‘keywords’ or set phrases the agents wanted to rank. Those needed to be included in copy a certain number of times to please the Google algorithm.
Thankfully those days are gone, because this approach to content creation killed creativity, it also de-humanised writing. It was more important to rank than to bring value to the reader’s search.
Google’s algorithm has evolved since, ending this keyword stuffing tactic. Google now evaluates each query’s context and intent and so we move away from keyword-matching content; learning to build more in-depth content that adds more value to the reader.
Question optimisation
There are many important reasons to build content that answers niche questions that are closer to natural language than keywords, and with devices such as Alexa and Google Home they make your content much more optimised for voice search.
Google understands and features questions. Notice all those ‘People Also Ask’ and ‘Featured Snippets’ search elements where Google features pages that do the best job answering search queries.
Questions are easier to relate to a specific problem your target customer is facing. You can provide the solution in your content and build your reputation as the go-to agent.
Content personalisation
Dynamic personalisation is another trend making its way into the property marketing industry, despite all the growing privacy concerns.
Marketing personalisation means customising the web experience for each user. These days, personalisation is expected from your brand. It also helps brands catch their customers’ attention in this era of information overload.
When it comes to content, dynamic personalisation is easier than you may think. You can easily personalise your content now:
- Personalise in-content calls-to-action. Personalised CTAs can increase on-page interactions by 202 per cent.
- Utilise dynamic remarketing. Banner ads, dynamically including the exact properties your prospects have looked at on your website, will increase your conversions by at least 20 per cent.
- Finally, if you want your personalisation tactics to succeed, you need to closely monitor how your audience is reacts to the personalised experience.
Moving forward – how to prepare
These are not all of the content marketing trends that are happening now, because content marketing keeps evolving.
Evolution, however, is good, there’s no need to be intimidated by change. Technology is evolving, our audience is changing, competitors are moving forward too. These are challenges we have to deal with, but they also bring new opportunities.
To adapt to change and get ahead of your competition, be ready to explore new ways to attract more vendors and landlords.
Do you want to learn how to quickly produce great share worthy content that gets you traffic and converts that traffic into sales? Click here to find out more about Art Division’s Content Engine Execution Plan
Please note: This is a site for professional discussion. Comments will carry your full name and company.