Posts Tagged "blog"
5 Benefits of a Real Estate Blog
Having a real estate blog is a cost-effective and efficient way to grow your brand. Here are 5 benefits of maintaining an informative, valuable blog.
Highlights:
- Blogs provide real estate brands the opportunity to educate, inform, and even entertain readers through content.
- 81% of U.S. online consumers trust information and advice from blogs
- 80% of our website traffic comes from blog posts that are over six months old.
We get asked all the time, “Do I really need a real estate blog?” And the answer is: yes! The follow up question is “Why?” And the answer is simple: it works!
On a basic level, blogs provide brands the opportunity to educate, inform, and even entertain readers through content. They are an effective and relatively cheap tool to help grow your real estate brand. Search engines even consider blogs—and blogging frequency—when ranking pages.
I often tell our real estate clients to think of blog posts as opportunities. Every time you post, you create a chance to be found, to be liked, to be shared, and to be linked to other sites.
Still not convinced? Here are 5 of the top benefits of having a real estate blog.
5 benefits of a real estate blog
1. Get more traffic to your website
According to HubSpot, companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website than non-blogging companies. Not only that, but 81% of U.S. online consumers trust information and advice from blogs. These stats highlight how a blog can help your brand become a trusted resource for your audience—resulting in more website traffic and increased leads.
2. More visibility in search results
Search engine algorithms are getting more and more sophisticated. As they do, your site’s content becomes increasingly important.
Your content helps inform search engines about your site, improving your rank in relevant search queries (people who are searching for properties or real estate companies like yours). As you choose content for your blog posts, be mindful of the search topics for which you want to rank highly. Every time you publish a post, you create a new chance to reach someone looking for a property like yours.
3. More engagement on social media
Blog content is ideal to share (and link to) social media marketing campaigns. It can help undecided leads learn about your properties and sway them in a positive direction. Sharing your blog posts on your social media accounts helps give validity and authority to your company, as you disseminate content you created yourself.
4. Establishesyour industry expertise
When you blog about topics you are confident and knowledgeable about, it shows. You set yourself up as an industry expert. Create posts about the latest real estate trends, best practices, and neighborhood and community events to showcase your market knowledge. Your posts will be helping inform readers, while also establishing your brand as an industry expert.
5. Works even when you aren’t
Did you know that is takes up to two years for a blog post to see 99% of its impressions. In fact, we find that 80% of our website traffic comes from blog posts that are over six months old.
Why is that? Because, as with many things, blog posts improve with age and continue working even when you aren’t. Search engines give value to older content that has had more time to accumulate social shares, likes, and referrals from other web pages. The more relevant a blog post proves itself to be to readers over time, the higher it will rank in search engine results.
You hardly need more convincing, right?
Related posts:
- 4 Ways a Blog Can Help You Sell Real Estate
- Drive More Traffic and Generate More Leads with Your Real Estate Blog with our Editorial Calendar Template
- 5 Ways to Generate Real Estate Blog Ideas
Posts Tagged "blog"
5 Real Estate Marketing Strategies for 2019
Keeping up with the constant changes can be incredibly tough on real estate marketers — these 5 strategies for real estate marketing are what you need to be doing right now.
Highlights:
- Make sure your website is optimized; it’s the center of your digital assets.
- Today’s market is increasingly visual: invest in virtual tours and professional photography to make your properties stand out.
- Content marketing, such as blogging, is the most effective tool at your disposal.
Real estate marketers, we know your job isn’t easy. With today’s fiercely competitive market, not to mention the seemingly constant changes brought about by technology, it’s easy to be left breathless. But to set your business apart from the pack, it’s crucial to stay on top of the changes taking place and hone a robust marketing strategy.
We’ve put together these five failsafe strategies that real estate marketers should be adopting right now.
Five real estate marketing strategies that are bound to work in 2019
1. Build an excellent website
Some things are timeless. While content marketing trends will continue to shift and evolve, the need for a quality, strategically designed website is here to stay. Your website is the nexus of your digital assets and is on the frontlines when it comes to capturing leads. Having a website that’s visually appealing, easily navigable, and content– and information-rich means better SEO, higher quality leads, and overall success.
Writing for Forbes, software engineer R.L. Adams suggests not to “bombard visitors with too many ads all over the place and ensure that it’s a site that people want to continue to check back on with fresh content and properties added regularly.”
2. Create virtual tours
Creating virtual tours for your properties is an investment, but it’s never been more worthwhile than it is now. In our increasingly visual culture (recent research indicates that the millennial demographic overwhelmingly favors visual content online), giving potential buyers and renters a detailed, interactive look at your properties is a no-brainer.
Looking for tips on creating virtual tours? Check out this post.
3. Invest in professional real estate photography
These days, everyone with a smartphone is a would-be photographer. With the ease and convenience of snapping high-quality photos with your phone, hiring a professional photographer can seem like a questionable investment. It isn’t. Again, in this highly visual culture, photos of your properties have never been more important. A professional photographer who specializes in real estate and who is also well-versed in editing will go a long way.
4. Blog
We’ve said it before, and we’ll certainly say it again: A blog helps you sell real estate. Among the many benefits of adding a blog to your site are increased search engine visibility, enhanced customer and industry relationships, better lead nurturing, and a boosted reputation. With a blog, you’re offering value to your customers separate and outside of your properties — in turn, you’ll see your sales boosted.
5. Start digital marketing
Inbound marketing, like digital marketing, is about prioritizing the needs of your audience over a sales pitch. When it comes to real estate, digital marketing has proven time and again to be far more effective than overt sales pitches. A robust digital marketing strategy includes a blog, social media presence, informational guides and case studies, email marketing, and more.
Even as technology and trends shift, your expertise and ideas are at least as valuable as your properties. At the end of the day, people want to hire trustworthy and knowledgeable real estate experts. If you can answer the needs and questions of your potential buyers and renters, you cultivate lasting and fruitful relationships with them.
Related posts:
- Using Online Virtual Tours to Sell and Lease Property
- Infographic: Statistics that Prove Why Your Real Estate Marketing Needs to Include a Blog
- Drive More Traffic and Generate More Leads with Your Real Estate Blog with our Editorial Calendar Template
Posts Tagged "blog"
10 Quick Ways to Grow Brand Awareness
If you want to grow brand awareness, or ensure potential buyers know your property exists, try these strategies.
If you’re building a new property, or just rebranding an old one with a bad reputation, you want to get the word out quickly about what your project is all about. It’s called brand awareness.
For real estate developers and property management companies, brand awareness means that your target buyers (or tenants) know that your property exists. They understand the lifestyle that the property offers.
To grow brand awareness requires a proactive approach. Some companies turn to traditional methods, such as billboards. But it’s important to think about your digital strategy, as well, since the vast majority of real estate research occurs online.
Check out these 10 ways to use content marketing to grow brand awareness quickly.
10 ways to grow brand awareness — fast
1) Establish your brand.
To grow brand awareness, you must first have a brand. This, generally, is the message of your property describing the kind of lifestyle it affords people who live there.
You need concrete creative assets, like a logo and images, and other non-tangibles, like taglines and a defined look and feel. You also need a consistent brand message, which you should develop based on detailed buyer personas laid out as part of the brand-creation process. If you’re selling luxury condos, for example, all of these assets, the tone and voice of your marketing collateral, and even the platforms you decide to participate in should reflect a sense of sophistication and elegance.
Take the time to develop your full brand story, so that you have something (a lifestyle that transcends brick and mortar) to sell to prospective buyers and renters.
2) Start a blog.
You might think that it seems silly to keep up a blog for your property. Who would even want to read it? But a blog can actually help you sell real estate by increasing the amount of traffic search engines send to your website.
The more you publish, the higher you’ll rank with search engines. And every time you publish a blog post, you increase the chances that a user searching the internet for real estate will find your website.
Blogs also help tell your brand story. They help buyers imagine themselves in your space. They nurture leads and build trust among potential buyers. In a recent audit of a client’s website, we found that people who read the blog converted at an almost 30% higher rate than other web traffic. That’s significant.
3) Become a resource.
Bear with me on this one. But I’ve seen this work many, many times.
Content marketing is all about being a trusted resource for your audience. Ditch the blatant sales pitch in your content and think about how you can help your target buyers instead.
Offer guidance on purchasing a home, information about your property’s neighborhood, or tips on upcoming events in the area. You’ll build trust with your current audience and provide them with content they’re more likely to share with their friends and followers. And that is how you grow brand awareness.
4) Make sharing easy.
This is a great way to let your successes go to work for you. Make it easy for your audience and followers to share your content with their networks. Give them sharing options for email, social media — heck, put share links on anything and everything. Social media is a powerful tool in selling real estate. Don’t underuse it.
5) Start content partnerships.
Again, this is all about leveraging other people’s audiences to spread the word about your property and brand.
Reach out to local real estate media sites and blogs to see if you can author a post for them. See if a local interior designer or financial planning professional would like to write a guest-post series for your blog, and ask them to share it on their social media accounts. Basically, create two-way content partnerships where you will ensure that your brand’s name will come across the screens of an influencer’s audiences.
6) Partner with local businesses.
By its nature, real estate is a location-oriented industry. You can partner with businesses in your area to hold seminars or festivals, sponsor sports teams, and donate to charity events.
This works in the digital world as well. On social media, promote the opening of new neighborhood restaurants, and congratulate nearby businesses when they win local best-of awards. Join online charity challenges to support local causes. Build your digital network of local businesses and organizations so that your brand becomes synonymous with the neighborhood wherever locals browse online.
7) Hold social media contests.
Everybody loves to win a contest. Use your social media platforms to create contests in which followers submit a photo or video, and let other users vote for their favorites. Contestants will share the link with their networks, and your brand awareness grows exponentially.
8) Try paid social advertising.
Facebook and Twitter ads are relatively cheap, and both platforms do a great job of making sure your content gets to your target audience. You can set metrics, and customize your preferences for targeted audience in a huge variety of ways.
9) Leverage influencer marketing.
Think beyond buyers themselves. Who influences them when it comes to making major purchases? Beyond family, financial professionals, interior designers, and, of course, brokers represent strong spheres of influence in the real estate space.
Create targeted campaigns to reach these influencers via email, social media, and digital advertising. Getting your name in front of them is one step in the direction of getting your brand on potential buyers’ minds.
10) Get visual with your content.
I mentioned blogging before as an excellent way to drive traffic to your website. But don’t stop with just words.
Virtual tours, infographics, videos, and other highly visual media are not only great for engaging your current audience. They’re also more likely to be shared by your followers with their networks. Again, when people share your content, you grow brand awareness.
How do you grow brand awareness for your properties?
Related posts:
- 4 Ways a Blog Can Help You Sell Real Estate
- Social Media Trends for 2018 Real Estate Marketers Need to Know
- What Metrics Should You Track in Real Estate Marketing?
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