I’m sure you’ve heard it before… (especially if you’ve been following me for any length of time) You need to create great content geared towards your farm. You need to have a solid marketing plan! The days of sending out “Just Listed” postcards and only promoting yourself are over. In today’s market consumers are much more educated than they ever have been. Sending out basic marketing pieces used to work. And it worked well. But as consumers have become savvy, the old-school marketing strategies just don’t cut it like they used to.
The great thing for you is that many agents haven’t adapted their strategies this creates a tremendous opportunity. Plus, you will benefit from a number of the other benefits that creating a more well-rounded marketing plan can bring you. High-quality online content can not only help you rank online and drive more traffic, but it also helps build more trust with your audience.
The right content should educate, attract, and help build your authority in your farm. And when done correctly, you can reach your potential customers much more efficiently while at the same time reach a broader audience. But to do this, you will need to spend a little time planning, researching, and being very purposeful about executing your plan.
The following are some of the steps you need to take to ensure you create a well-balanced content marketing plan.
Set Your Goals
It sounds simple, right? But you’d be amazed how many agents don’t have any formal goals or a plan for their marketing. Your goals must be clear. They must be specific. I’m sure you’ve heard of SMART Goals? If your marketing plan can’t pass the SMART Goal test, set aside some time and lay out your goals. This will help keep you accountable to your overall plan and help ensure you accomplish the things you want.
When it comes to setting goals, its important to think long term AND short term. Having your plan well thought out will save a ton of time, money and stress.
Create Engaging Content
One strategy that works really well to help create content is to think about questions people may be asking. Here are some ideas to get you started:
What are they asking about the community?
What are they asking about the real estate market?
What are they asking about local businesses?
What are they asking about schools and parks?
What are they asking about things to do in the area?
What are they asking about events in the area?
Did you notice that most of those questions aren’t about real estate? Why? Because most people aren’t thinking about real estate. Most people don’t care about the market or how great you are as an agent. They care that you care about the community. They care that you know what’s happening in the area. They care that you are well connected and can help them with day-to-day things. Don’t just focus on them when they are ready to buy or sell.
For some agents, this is hard to wrap their heads around. Tthis paradigm shift can be the difference between success and failure in your community. Your marketing shouldn’t just be about real estate and the transaction. When you become the community expert, you need to become the community ambassador as well.
Once you’ve written out an exhaustive list of questions you can start creating content to answer those questions. Depending on your approach your available time, you should aim to create at least one good content piece a week. You may decide to create content like videos, blogs, emails, flyers, social media posts etc. The more balanced the approach, the better.
To ensure you stay on track, it’s best to create a marketing calendar that can help you stick to your plan. I like to plan at least 2-3 months in advance, but you may even decide to plan your entire year out. If you plan for less than a few months, you run the risk of getting busy and not posting regularly.
Figure Out What Your Clients Are Looking For
In order to create content that resonates with your audience, you have to figure out what resonates with them and what they are actually searching for. Creating content that no one wants or doesn’t get them to reach out will be a waste of time and money. Start by doing some keyword research to find out what topics people are searching for. You can use programs designed specifically for this but a great place to start is by using Google Keyword Planner (You will need a google account to use this successfully) which you can find here: https://ads.google.com/aw/keywordplanner
Take some time to come up with some local search terms and topics that would resonate with your audience and then search for similar keywords and phrases to see how relevant they are. This will give you the ability to reverse engineer your content to match with what your farm may be searching for.
Beef Up Your Content
If you want to increase your engagement and effectiveness, learning to optimize your content will be invaluable, especially if you are creating online content. You need to learn to create content that is “search engine friendly” and original. You will want to learn how to create engaging headlines that convert, but also make sure your content is optimized. By combining the questions your farm may be asking and your keyword research, you can create content that achieves this.
Another way to increase engagement and rank higher is to link to local businesses, amenities, and things to do in the community. These organic links to other people’s sites will help you build credibility, build relationships and increase your rankings. And you will want to get others to link back to your site as well! (But that’s a whole other blog topic for another day.)
Promote It
Once you have created your content and made it available to the world, you need to promote it and get it out to your audience. Social media can be an excellent way to get your message out to the masses. One thing to consider when using social media is to not make it all about self-promotion. If you have created a balanced marketing plan, you can appeal to more people and not just hound them with real estate information nonstop. Depending on the social platforms you are using will dictate the strategies you use. Whether that’s keywords, hashtags, top tags, tagging influencers, etc., you need to create native content for each platform you are working with.
Another way to promote your content is to create an active email subscriber list. Some people think email marketing is dead, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Great email marketing is alive and well. Crappy spam email is dead. By building an active list of people who CHOOSE to get your information and by sending them valuable content you will increase your chances of success greatly. And since the idea is to create a more well-rounded marketing plan, you will have much more valuable content to send them and will be able to add more value this way.
Conclusion
The one thing you will quickly realize is that an effective marketing plan takes work. And as I mentioned earlier, the great thing is that most agents aren’t willing to put in the work, take the risk or think outside the box so it creates a huge opportunity for you to fill that void. Combine that with your hyper focused attention in a geographic farm and you can compound your efforts. So, if you haven’t started creating your marketing plan yet… get started!
Happy Farming!
Ryan Smith – Founder/Creator
Launch Your Farm
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