Marketing For Real Estate

Experimenting

After getting my feet wet by meeting people face to face, I made the push to get our online presence up and running. We used an awesome company based nearby to get the actual new website built. That positive start really set the tone going forward.

Leading up to it all I had been doing my thing, and I read almost every blog I could find on content marketing for real estate. I soaked in as much as I could and then the time came to launch.

First Try

In our area there are weekly “broker tours,” where new listings are held open by their agents on a weekday morning. Realtors tour them on behalf of clients, or even just as general local market knowledge. I would take photos or little video clips at listings that were visually stunning (in this area, that’s a lot), and I would post a blog article to our site about what we saw each week.

This actually helped our SEO right out of the gate. It was making us an authority to google on these various addresses. And when looking at it, we were coming up at the top of results for just putting the street and town into google. I was ecstatic because we were getting traffic, and had a low bounce rate. People were reading the write up of homes we toured, and then clicking through to look at listings that are on the MLS.

BUT… conversions were low. There weren’t as many people jumping into “the funnel,” as I had hoped. There were some positive results yes, but we needed to generate more contacts to start our drip campaign with and more that we could follow up with.

Let’s Try This

I wanted to keep up the practice of writing about local listings. Highlighting great homes in the area and their neighborhoods.

So articles like, “Million Dollar Listings in Walnut Creek,” were born. Since listings are time sensitive, I developed a cadence of doing this for the various communities in our area. And it started to work really well. One reason this is surprising is because real estate content is BORING. (It took a bit of time to figure that out). But maybe we were lucky that conversions were starting to pick up thanks to home buyers looking for homes in those price ranges. The conversion to client rate was fantastic. And those transactions further led to referrals.

Community Driven Content

This is where we put a lot of focus, and I still wish we had put even more focus to it. I started trying out articles/video content about “The best parks for kids in Walnut Creek,” or “best date night spots,” and so on. I wanted to feature more of the community, all the while creating content based on what people would actually be searching in Google.

This got more engagement from our sphere. What I really liked is that it kept us more top of mind since the content was more interesting. And it was more shareable. For me, that was key. It couldn’t have come at a better time, because like I said…real estate content is BORING.

Where I Wanted To Take This

In the next post I will talk about the things I wanted to do, but ended up never doing. I might have not had the time, or procrastinated, or was just scared to jump into them.

Did I entice you to go to the next post with that? 😜