With competitive forces like Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, and Trulia, (plus all the other real estate agents in your market) how can you possibly cut through the clutter online and slice your piece of the real estate pie?
You do it through real estate content marketing.
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In this post, that’s what we’re going to teach you how to:
- Use content marketing to build authority in your market
- Pick your content marketing niche
- Use location-specific content in your strategy
- Create your own content marketing publishing schedule
1. Tell People Who You Are and What You Believe In
The first step in your content marketing for real estate journey is to write down your mission and/or values if you never have before.
Why?
Because when people are deciding on a product to buy (whether it be a restaurant to eat at, a new computer, or a piece of real estate), they don’t buy because of what you do, they buy because of why you do what you do.
Cue clip of Simon Sinek’s TED Talk:
And that isn’t just the case with Apple, it’s the case with your business and even with Carrot. Consider this testimonial that just came through our company’s #General Slack channel earlier today…
“Hello Trevor,
I want to thank you for being so honest. Your character is very impressive, and for that reason I am going to join Carrot later today…
A person’s character is very important to me, and seeing yours I know I will be connecting with a company that will grow and succeed.
Thank you for your character.”
– Rob Mundras
If you need help determining what your mission/values are, then ask yourself these questions.
- Why do you do what you do? Because you love helping other people? Or is there a deeper belief that drives why you do what you do?
- What’s your motivation for being in real estate?
For inspiration, here are our core values at Carrot…
- Be a Beacon of Positivity and Possibility
- Have Fun and Be Different
- Take Initiative and Show You Care
- Craft Amazing Experiences
- Adapt, Evolve, & Always Improve
Feel free to borrow any of those values for your own business.
Then, record 1 or 2 videos about why you do what you do. Just talk honestly about the mission and values you came up with and how those apply to your real estate business.
Try to keep each video to between 5 and 8 minutes. Post those videos to Facebook and YouTube once you’re finished recording them.
2. Pick Your Content Marketing Niche
Now, one of the best ways that you can really crack through the clutter is to niche down. And we’ve done the same thing here at Carrot as well with our software company.
It’s in universal principle that whenever you’re able to narrow down the focus of who you serve, and you can narrow down your messaging, it’s going to resonate more and more and more with the person you’re looking after. On the flip side of it, the more generic your message, the harder it is to have someone kind of raise their hand and go, yeah, that’s me, I resonate with that.
So we’re going to help you niche down in this video. So, earlier in a separate video, I laid out our entire content marketing framework with this pyramid, so go check out that video. It’s probably linked up somewhere.
This video is specifically on the niche part of it.
What Are Niches?
So what are niches?
I was talking with a real estate agent the other day, a brand new agent and, not really a brand new one, but she’d done several transactions. I said, “Hey, what are your niches?” And she said, “Well, I don’t really have any,” and then we sort of walked through the process of how to discover a niche.
On the flip side, I talked to another real estate agent, a brand new one, hadn’t done a transaction yet in California in a really competitive market and I said the same thing. I said, “Who is it that you can really serve and who is it that you can niche down in your messaging to really serve?” He said, “Man, I don’t know.” I said, “Well, who would you want to focus on?”
He said, “Anyone who wants to buy a house in x city in Carmel, California.” I said, “That’s amazing, but that’s not a niche. That’s something that every single one of the agents in your market is also going after that.”
So I asked him a couple of questions, and they’re all based around who are the people that you can serve, what locations might they live in, and are there certain situations that you can better help serve people than others.
On the people side of it, in this example with that gentlemen, I said, “Okay, what is it that you like, how old are you, what’s your life look like?”
And he said, “I have two kids, in mid-thirties.” And he started to talk about things he really loves to do. He loves cars and all kinds of cool things like that.
So one thing that you could really do a niche down on, is helping families in Carmel, California, find the home of their dreams to fit their family and their lifestyle. So that’s the same thing that you probably would have been doing before you niche down anyway, but now we’re at least niching down some of our messaging.
So he wrote down: Helping young families in Carmel, California, find the homes to fit their lifestyle.
That’s a niche because then every time he’s communicating, or doing a video, he’s doing it from that framework.
“Hey, this is Mark here in Carmel. I’m actually at a soccer match with my kids…” whatever it is. So then you’re talking about things that other people in that market might be talking about.
Locations
Locations. One of the agents here locally in Roseburg, Oregon, the G-team, the number one or at least top, one of the top Century 21 teams, the whole northwest. They’re amazing in a few things. They are really, really good at river homes of this one particular river called the North Umpqua River here in town.
They’re really good at high-end kind of lifestyle homes, really nice homes that maybe aren’t on the river, but they’ve got a great view and they’re also good to income properties.
So when I was talking through with Ricky, about what their niches would be, he never thought about it before, but he listed those three things off because I’m not really sure if I should put the income property thing down like rental properties because it’s kind of unrelated. I said it’s actually not. It’s actually the same prospect because if I’m looking for a luxury home on the North Umpqua River or a lifestyle home up on a mountain with a great view, I probably have some sort of discretionary income that I want to invest in rental properties.
Therefore I’d want to also work with you to buy those rental properties. So there, he’s serving the same person just in different situations.
Write down the different types of people that you would want to work with and the way that I like to do that is, who is the “most fun to work with?” Which transactions do you make the most money that really helps you reach the goals that you’re looking for?
Scenarios and Situations
Start to write down those scenarios and those situations, and you’ll start to hone in who you want to work with the most.
If you’re a brand new real estate agent, a lot of real estate agents kind of tend to go for a first time home buyer because that first time home buyer’s kind of like you, you’re new and it’s all new to you, but I would also challenge you. I would challenge you to focus on something else.
If you’ve been a nurse and you’re leaving the nursing profession to come over and be a real estate agent. Awesome. That’s a niche right there waiting, waiting for you to grab is, helping medical professionals find amazing homes that them and their families can live and thrive in, in your area.
Then you can start to use that messaging. You start to put up videos and updates to the medical community. You can start to find homes that are perfect for that. You can start to find medical practices that are recruiting medical professionals and talk to them and help show them around.
Find Niches
So find niches, hone your message down, start to record videos of those niches, and then start. Just like we teach here, you’re going to record seven to 10 videos as your base initial content in that niche, showing you as the expert.
Those videos will go on Facebook, YouTube, and your website. Then, you’re going to really build that amazing stockpile of content that’s going to resonate with your market.
On a weekly basis or whenever you’re out there, find opportunities to take out your cell phone and record some quick content. Three to five minutes in that niche, in those locations, showing your expertise.
Share the information out there and go deep on your niche.
3. How to Pick Your Niche Locations
We’re going to be talking about locations now. So by this time you’ve already discovered what your core values are. Why are you in business? You’ve written those down. You’ve done a simple video about why you’re in business and why you love to work with buyers and sellers.
That’s going to help people resonate.
You’ve also picked between one and three niches. Things that you can really drill down on where you can tailor your message and your videos and your content, the way that you speak to people.
First, you can tailor your audience to that message, because now you’re going to resonate with those people that are in those niches. It’s going to help you target your marketing down the same way we’ve grown here at Carrot.
That’s because this solution is universal. We could sell our solution to plumbers, and to real estate agents, and real estate investors and financial planners. The solution solves all of it. But when we can niche our product and niche marketing down, we can better serve you and better make sure our content resonates with you so you notice it.
Real Estate Niche Location
The next step is locations. A lot of people think locations are just cities, towns, things like that. But what I would like to challenge you on is that locations are any particular spot or type of property that you can really focus a certain message on.
Here are some examples. It could be towns. It could be here in Roseburg, Oregon. You create a page for that, that has the Roseburg properties for sale on there from your IDX listings from Carrot.
Then Sutherland, and then Winston and Reedsport and all those are different towns around Roseburg. We would definitely want all of those towns that have a page on the website with a title that’s something like a Homes for Sale In (insert city). Then probably a video.
I’m really going out there with something that my competition can’t, they can’t put a video of me on their website. So put a video of yourself on your website explaining that location. Then put your IDX property listings after maybe a few paragraphs of content.
Now other types of locations can be neighborhoods. So if you’re in a bigger city or even small town like Roseburg, there are certain neighborhoods that people really, really want to buy and sell houses in. Hucrest is one, even in the town of 30,000 people.
If you go to Google and start to type up homes for sale in Roseburg, you’re also going to see other suggested searches after that for neighborhoods in there, which is kinda cool.
Hucrest is a neighborhood, Melrose is a neighborhood that is pretty sought after in here. If people are searching for them, I want to create a locations page that ranks well in Google for those. I also want to create that video and get it up into YouTube and get on Facebook too. So I could turn those into ads if I want it to.
There are other types of things that are property types. So if you’re a specialist, if one of your niches is river homes in a particular river or a country club or whatever it is, and that’s one of your niches, then you should create a locations page for that niche.
Here’s an example, G Team, they’re a Century 21 brokerage here in Roseburg. They’ve done amazingly well, and they focus in on a few niches. On North Umpqua River homes, on lifestyle properties with great views, and income properties. They all happen to be about the same type of Avatar. The same type of person who probably has some income, looking to get an amazing house and also looking to grow their income with rental properties. So you can also create a page for property types like river homes.
So here on Carrot we launched a page. It’s homes for sale on the North Umpqua, Roseburg, Oregon.
Image Source: G Team Real Estate
Then we create a video talking about homes for sale in North Umpqua River, and how they can help you. How they actually own a home in the river, and her parents own a home on the river, and they’ve sold tons of homes on the river. All in a short little video. You can do the same thing.
Then below the video, we’ve actually put up a custom search through the IDX that only shows river homes for sale in that area. We’ve drawn a little boundary around there and it’s river homes for sale, so now they can drive people to a page that’s specifically for North Umpqua River homes for sale in the Roseburg area.
They can drive traffic from Facebook, or from YouTube or when they’re talking with someone locally, they can say, “Hey, go to Xyz.com, forward slash river, and you can see all the updated properties.”
Here’s proof that this style of real estate content marketing works. We shot a quick video for The G Team, had it transcribed using our VideoPost tool, and the now beat Zillow in Google with their Carrot real estate agent website.
Attracting New Buyers and Sellers With Niched Down Content
When you’re going through and doing this, leverage our tutorials here at Carrot to walk you through how to create those pages, or we do have services that can do it for you.
If you’re not a Carrot customer, no big deal. It’s just going to be a little bit harder for you to set them up yourself to get them ranked well and Google on a different platform. But you can still launch locations pages for all these locations you do business in and don’t forget creating neighborhood ones or niche down property types if those are within your niche.
Those are going to help you get better rankings in Google, attract new prospects, get people on your retargeting list for Facebook and it’s going to give you more content you can continually drive people back to in your content.
Here’s one idea for you.
Let’s say you’ve got your niches down and you’ve got your locations down and you’re taking out your cell phone and doing a piece of content on a river home today. Take it out and give your three to five-minute talk about a tip or something like that about river homes and then you can give a call to action to drive to this page for them or landing page.
You could say, “Hey, just go to Xyz.com forward slash river to get an updated list of all of the North Umpqua River property homes for sale in this area, and you’re gonna be the first one to get notified of them. Go check it out. Xyz Dot com, forward slash river.”
It’s going to continually drive leads, build you up as the expert for that type of property, and you’re going to cut through that clutter and really, really grow your business.
You’re not going to be stuck with whatever Zillow is going to be giving you. You’re not even going to care if there are a million other agents in the market because you’re the only one claiming the space for that niche.
4. Find A Content Marketing Cadence
To get the best content marketing results, increase brand awareness, and drive high-quality website traffic, you’ll want to continue to create content in the foreseeable future.
The easiest way to make that happen is by determining how often you’ll create new content – will you do it once per week, two times per week, once per month?
How often you create content matters less than doing it. Just set a commitment and stick to it.
By now you’ve picked your niches, you’ve nailed your core values and your mission, you know which locations you’re helping serve your buyers and your sellers. Now here’s the fun part, we’ve already created those initial videos, now you get to go out there and do our business and document some of the things that you’re doing.
One reason that reality shows on TLC and HDTV, have really blown up over the past decade is that people are interested in what people do for work, and your business is no different. People are really interested in what you do for business. People love to see homes, people love to explore their area and they would love to follow you doing that.
Here are a few tips on what you can do on a daily and weekly basis, just with your cell phone, to continually stay in front of your prospects and your community to add value and build relationships and authority. Just through regular content, showing them what you’re already doing in business.
Creating Weekly and Monthly Content Pillars
There are a couple of different things I want you to do. I want you to write down on a piece of paper right now, weekly and then monthly and I want you to create these weekly and monthly content pillars.
This isn’t hard, this is literally less than 30 minutes a week is all it’s going to take you and less than 30 minutes a month for the monthly. So this isn’t hard. It’s a couple of hours a month is all.
Every single person has a couple of hours a month and if you don’t, you’re going to have a lot more time in two years to do whatever you want to do because you’re probably going to be out of business.
At Carrot, we make creating content easy for our members. We offer 12-24 monthly content articles (already written – ready to publish) as well as our videopost feature. All you’ll need to do is shoot a video and we’ll transcribe it directly into a blog post.
Weekly Content
So, on a weekly basis, that cadence is what I call on the job content. That’s the stuff where you’re answering questions that people commonly have about that type of property or that area.
You’re addressing objections that you see come up quite a bit, you might be showing some interesting stuff because people like to see fun interesting stuff when they’re scrolling down Facebook or looking on Instagram, or YouTube.
You need to show some action. People want to see interesting things that are moving and I’m not just talking about you moving around the camera, I’m talking about one time you’re in the car doing it, another time you’re out there at a property with the client, another time you’re sitting in your office.
So move locations because it’s interesting and people are going to start to really look forward to your videos and look forward to your content coming out.
On a weekly basis, once again, it’s on the job stuff. I’m out at a river home and I keep on using this example because it’s such a good on. What are the questions or objections that pop up with someone who’s looking to buy a home on the river? It’s probably not going to be a cheap house, so there’s a big financial stake there.
So you have to look at, “Well shoot, I know river homes so well,” the water situation’s always something that trips people up. Most people who’ve never bought a river home never know what to do.
So I’m going to do a few videos on what you need to do with water and water rights and how do I get my drinking water and are you going to use a filtration system or is there a well?
All those are critical things, if you’re the one doing that content, I’m going to work with you because you’re the expert and I don’t want to lose a ton of money buying a river home with Aunt Betty who just became a real estate agent last week.
There could be an amazing home on the river that’s got this killer pool, or it has this way cool retaining wall or something like that. Take out the camera and say, “Hey this is Mark, I’m out at a river home on the North Umpqua River. I just want to show you this pool, it’s an amazing pool, look at the view that it has. Look at all the possibilities you could have with a home on the river.”
What that’s doing, is building desire for that type of property that they’re already wanting, but they’re building desire for and you’re the person that’s helping them build that. Or there’s action, once again. You can be taking them on a little tour of different homes on the river and put all those little things out in little three, five, 10 minutes max, videos.
Monthly Content
Then on the monthly side, stand in front of a camera, or take out your phone, or whatever you want to do, and do some sort of a report because reports are something that builds expertise.
The other content types are fun, they build expertise as well, but the report is something they can look forward to the same content piece each month.
Every single month, I get an email from this company that’s a real estate investment company and it shows the market snapshot and the market report and what’s happening right now. I open that one every single month because I want to know what’s going on.
I want to get ahead of the curve, I want to get ahead of what’s happening and your buyers and sellers are no different. If there’s a seller out there who are looking to sell, they want to know, “Should I be selling right now? Is it too late to sell? Is it too soon to sell? Is it a good time to sell?” Whatever it is, your monthly report should be addressing that.
If I’m a buyer, I want to know is right now the time to buy? “Should I be buying a property, should I wait to get a better deal? Are there good deals coming up? It’s the right time to buy? Are financing programs drying up? Could new ones be added?” This is where you can really do that with your monthly reports.
What is a Real Estate Market Report?
What is a monthly report? It should be an under 10-minute video ideally. The reason I’m saying a video is because anyone can do a written report. Anyone can just send an email that says, “Here’s a bunch of market stats.” All the other real estate agents in your market are already doing that.
Here’s an example from one of our Carrot members:
“June 2020 Market Update – Unemployment Rates”
You don’t win the market by doing what everyone else is doing. You win the market by being you and going out there and building brand, building trust, and building credibility. Showing them you’re the expert.
You could send out an with a bunch of words, but I would send out a video, put it on your Carrot website as a video post, so you take your YouTube video, you put in that URL, our system goes out and yanks out all the words, makes up blog posts for you.
For example, Krista utilized the above video as a VideoPost: “June 2020 Market Update – Unemployment Rates“
Now you can send people to that from Facebook and from YouTube to the actual full official monthly report with your video, with the written words below it and a call to action to connect with you.
Some other things you can do:
- Get market stats.
- Ups and downs of the market.
- Is it the right time to sell?
- Is it the right time to buy?
- What’s happening with loan programs?
- What events are coming up in the community?
So if part of your niches are based on families or certain segments of the community, let’s say you’re focused on retirees. In my monthly report, I’m going to go through the report with the frame, with the lens of how a retiree would be looking at the real estate market and what they would care about and then at the end I’m going to say,
“Hey, here’s some really cool events happening this next month in Roseburg. Here are these six things, these cool concerts and acts. If you want to check out more events, just go to our website forward slack events. There’s a whole list of events for retirees and for groups of people who love wine and who love wine country, just like me.”
So now I’m not only delivering information, but I’m also delivering things to do and they’re going to love you for that.
Go figure out your weekly cadence and your monthly report. This is a total of a couple of hours a month. All you have to do is put in a couple of hours a month, that’s less than one full day a year. One full day a year to stay in front of your prospects, to build trust, to build honesty, to build credibility.
People are going to notice you in town. They’re going to say, “Hey, you’re the guy, you’re the gal that keeps on putting out that great stuff. Thank you for doing that.”
They’re going to tell other people about you and your business is going to grow and get momentum in the next six, 12, 18 months. So go execute the full plan, don’t get lazy.
Execute the full plan and then be diligent with it. You’re going to see some really good momentum happening after that.
Last Tip
Make sure every video you do, you upload to YouTube, you upload to Facebook and then you upload it to video posts on your Carrot website to turn that into written words, so now you not only have Facebook, YouTube, you’re also going to have Google organic results as another thing to help you get more traffic, build more credibility and to build your business.