The Best Real Estate Content Marketing Strategy for Generating Leads

May 9, 2023May 25, 2023 Brandon Cornett

This article explains the concept of real estate content marketing and how it can help you attract potential clients to your website. This is where you publish high-quality content on a regular basis, to attract visitors and generate leads. Blogging is one of the best ways to go about it.

Pop quiz. Do you have 30 – 50 pages of original, high-quality content on your real estate website? If not, you’re missing an opportunity to generate dozens of leads and inquiries per month.

You can improve this situation — and make your real estate website much more useful in the process — by implementing a content-based marketing strategy. And blogging is a great way to do that.

Real Estate Content Marketing Explained

Many real estate agents and brokers rely on other providers for generating leads. They obtain them from referral partners, including mortgage brokers, or by purchasing them from lead-generation websites (such as the big home-search websites).

In many cases, these third-party leads are “non-exclusive,” which means they are being farmed out to multiple agents who then have to compete for the person’s attention.

This is a form of “dependent marketing.” With this model, you will always be dependent on other providers for your leads. You will never generate your own.

With real estate content marketing, you can develop your own lead channel on your own real estate website. You can generate exclusive leads from buyers or sellers in your local area. You can encourage people to contact you, personally and directly.

Over time, real estate content marketing will reduce your dependency on other lead sources. It could also save you a lot of money by reducing your marketing outlay (since blogging is free). Additionally, this strategy can turn an “ordinary” real estate website into a valuable resource for local buyers and sellers. And this could transform your business for the better.

Definition: Content marketing is a strategy that focuses on creating and sharing valuable content, in order to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. In a real estate context, the “audience” consists of local home buyers or sellers. The “content” in this case can include real estate articles, tutorials, housing market news, and other information geared toward the intended audience.

The idea is to create an ever-growing volume of content that helps to attract an ever-growing audience of potential clients. Each article adds cumulative value in the form of long-term lead generation, while delivering useful and timely content to your readers as well.

Common Types of Content Marketing Strategies

The term “content marketing” is a broad term that includes many different techniques and strategies. But they all have one thing in common. They center around the concept of creating useful and valuable content geared toward a specific audience, in order to generate a specific response.

When it comes to real estate content marketing, in particular, the desired response usually involves generating leads from potential clients. And there are many ways to do that.

Here are some examples of real estate content marketing strategies and techniques:

Blogging is a great way to share your expertise and knowledge with potential clients. You can blog about your local real estate market, home buying and selling, local events, neighborhoods and communities, and many more topics.
E-books allow you to deliver valuable information to your target audience, in a format they can download and keep. You could create e-books about home buying and selling, home improvement, or local resources.
Email newsletters give you a way to keep in touch with past and potential clients, via their inbox. You can grow a list of subscribers over time, by providing valuable insights on the market and related information.
Infographics are a great way to present complex information in a visually appealing way. You could create infographics about the real estate market, local neighborhoods, or home improvement projects.
Videos shared on YouTube and other channels can help you increase your visibility while sharing valuable insights with your target audience. You can create videos that showcase your listings, educate viewers on local market conditions, or simply share your personality.

Of course, these are not the only forms of real estate content marketing. But they are some of the most common strategies used by real estate agents, brokers and companies.

For the rest of this article, we will explore one content marketing strategy in particular, and how you can use it to generate leads and grow your business.

So … let’s talk about blogging!

Blogging as a Lead Generation Strategy

It’s called “real estate content marketing” for a reason. With all of these strategies, you have to create useful and insightful content that helps your target audience (A) accomplish a specific goal, (B) understand a specific topic, or (C) a combination of these things. This is the foundation upon which you will build.

Blogging makes all of this easier.

With a blogging program like WordPress, you can publish more content with less time and effort. If you’re serious about real estate content marketing, website visibility, and lead generation, you need to use some kind of content-management system. And WordPress is arguably the best choice for this purpose.

Real estate blogging offers many important benefits. But for now, let’s focus on the lead-generating potential of this content marketing strategy.

Blogging on a regular basis can help you generate leads in several ways:

When people are motivated to contact you directly (most common method)
When people inquire about a particular property you’ve shared
When people leave comments or questions on your blog
When people subscribe to an email newsletter featured on your blog

On its own, your blog will not turn strangers into clients. But it will help you generate leads from people who, with a proper amount of follow up, could become clients.

Here’s the typical path to lead generation on a real estate website:

Visibility >> Traffic >> Conversion >> Leads >> Follow Up >> Clients

Blogging addresses the first two items in this sequence. It helps you increase your website visibility and traffic, setting the stage for an effective lead-generation program. This makes it one of the most useful types of real estate content marketing.

And there’s no limit to how far you can go with it…

Unlimited Potential and Benefits

Another great thing about blogging — and real estate content marketing in general — has to do with its unlimited potential. It’s scalable, to borrow a buzzword from the corporate world.

Here’s a fun little exercise you can do right now…

Get out some paper and a pen. Draw a small box about half the size of a matchbook. Next, write the numbers “20 / 1” inside the box. The box represents one individual real estate blog post. Maybe it’s an article about home-price trends in your local area (great topic), or new neighborhoods being built (another great topic). One box, one blog post.

Here’s what the “20 / 1” numbers mean:

The first number, 20, represents the number of people who visit this particular page every day. (If you live in a large metro area, it could very well be 30, 40 or 50 visitors per day, depending on your search engine visibility and other factors. But let’s stick with 20.)
The second number, 1, represents the daily number of inquiries or leads that come as a direct result of this article. These are people who find the blog post through search engines or other means, and then go on to contact the agent.

So this particular blog post / article generates 20 visitors and 1 inquiry per day, on average.

Now draw more squares. You don’t need to fill them with numbers this time. Just make more squares. Lots of squares. Dozens of them. Squeeze as many onto the page as possible. Each one represents a particular real estate topic that can be developed into a full-blown article, through blogging.

Now let’s assume that, over time, each of those squares (or blog posts) generates an average of 20 visitors per day — and one lead per day. That’s a lot of leads. More than a single real estate agent could handle, and probably enough to fuel a medium-sized brokerage or company.

This is not some pie-in-the-sky scenario I’ve cooked up. These are the kinds of results I’ve seen from past clients, with a well-executed real estate content marketing strategy that includes blogging.

The search engine visibility and traffic components are a bit more complicated. Your search engine rankings will depend on a wide variety of factors or “signals.” So your overall success with this strategy will partly depend on the strength of your website.

A Time Commitment With Lasting Benefits

Real estate blogging is not easy. Sure, a content management program like WordPress can handle the technical aspects for you, transforming your written text into actual web pages. But the content creation process requires a significant investment of time and energy.

To succeed with this kind of real estate content marketing strategy, you have to produce articles or news reports that surpass everything else that’s already online. You have to go above and beyond to create useful and informative content geared toward your target audience.

And that takes time.

This is why a lot of real estate agents shy away from blogging as a content marketing strategy. They don’t have the time or the desire to embrace a strategy that involves intensive research and writing. If this sounds familiar, real estate blogging is probably not for you.

But for those who are willing to set aside time each week to create high-quality content, real estate blogging can deliver tremendous long-term benefits.

I know this from experience. One of my previous clients has advanced to the point that she now publishes all of her own blog content, two or three times per week. “It’s my only form of marketing these days,” she tells me.

Here’s the bottom line. For some agents and brokers, blogging can be one of the most effective forms of real estate content marketing. Over time, it can help you elevate your business to the proverbial “next level.” But you have to be committed to producing high-quality content on a regular basis.

There’s no easy button with this real estate content marketing strategy.