Don’t let your content marketing efforts go to waste
Setting up a blog to promote your luxury real estate business can go a long way in bringing in new leads and elevating your brand. However, aimlessly posting content will more likely turn into a large time requirement without converting new leads to grow your business. The setup behind your blog and the way you promote each post plays a large role in how many conversions you’ll see as a result of your blogging efforts. With a few strategic choices, you can set up your blog to bring you maximum conversions and become a powerful tool in your marketing framework.
1. Provide value
Above all else, providing an excellent user experience will set you apart from other real estate personalities on the web and help you to gain the trust and respect of your audience. When you set up a blog that truly answers the questions your audience is seeking, they’ll be more likely to continue visiting and to eventually reach out to you and convert when their real estate questions become more specific or when they’re ready to move forward with buying or selling their home.
While the rest of the elements are important, nothing should be prioritized above providing value and facilitating a positive experience for your blog visitors. For example, while SEO for realtors is an important piece of the marketing puzzle, writing a blog post with the sole purpose of stuffing it full of SEO keywords will likely not satisfy or help your audience. Ironically, this will generally end up hurting your SEO instead of helping it when audiences bounce quickly off of your page when they can’t find the answers they came for.
As a real estate professional, gaining and keeping the trust of your leads and your audience is absolutely crucial — no one wants to partner with someone they don’t quite trust on one of the largest purchases or sales of their life. Lead with the intention of educating and helping your audience, and the conversions will fall into place with a few strategic choices.
2. Incorporate a clear call to action
In many cases, while a blog works well as a trust-building tool and a means of establishing expertise, real estate professionals do not trace many conversions back to their blog. This is usually a result of one common mistake: failing to include a clear call to action.
On a real estate website, conversions can come in various different forms. Unlike an ecommerce site where conversions are extremely cut and dry (either someone buys something from the online store, or they don’t), real estate processes are clearly much more complex and in-depth than that. There’s no one-click sale to aim for. However, you can measure conversions based on how many people contact you directly or set up a call from your website. Once someone has set up a call or a meeting with you, you’ve begun your journey of becoming their buyer’s or seller’s agent. From there, your relationship likely pivots away from the online space and over to in-person or virtual meetings.
Each and every blog post should include a clear and straightforward call to action. Keep it relevant by working it into your content in a logical way. For example, if your blog post is about how to price a home listing, your call to action might look something like, “For specific advice about pricing your home to list, set up a free seller’s consultation here.” Include a link to your calendar or scheduling software, and you’ll ideally see a steady stream of meetings come across your desk! Without including that call to action, you may leave room for confusion when users finish reading your blog. If there isn’t a clear next step set out for them, they’re much less likely to convert as desired.
3. Consider SEO
While it shouldn’t be prioritized above the user experience, SEO should be a large consideration as you set up your blog and craft your posts. Optimizing each blog post for SEO will help you grow your audience and get in front of brand new leads. As long as you’re providing value, these leads can become key players in your business later on!
Conducting keyword research around the topics that are relevant to your audience will allow you to incorporate common search terms into your blog post and appear in searches when people need your expertise most! Keyword research can also help give you ideas for future posts and facilitate drilling down on specific questions or search terms that might be more common than you’d expected.
In crafting your blog, stick to simple language and layman’s terms. When audiences feel confused, they generally lose interest, and especially on the internet, attention spans can move on quickly. When you need to incorporate technical real estate terms, include a quick explanation with helpful context so that your audience doesn’t get lost.
In addition to incorporating keywords within your content itself, the way you set up your blog post will play a role in the SEO performance of the post. Including a compelling title, plenty of keyword-driven headings and subheadings, and skimmable content with bullet points and helpful organization can all help boost your content in the rankings. Incorporating links to other trustworthy sources as well as linking to your other blog posts can give your page extra credibility, increasing your success within search engines.
4. Cross-promote
In striving to build your audience and increase the warm leads and referral sources within it, use each of your online communities to promote one another. For example, if you’ve put effort into growing your Facebook page and interacting in groups, utilize your new blog posts to create new content for Facebook posts, and work to drive traffic from your Facebook to your blog.
You can also use each blog post to promote other top posts you’ve produced in the past through a “Related Articles” section at the end of each post. This will not only reflect well on your SEO but will also help audiences build their understanding of you as an expert and ideally continue to return to you with questions they have in the future.
While cross-promoting across your social channels, you can also leverage social media tools like Instagram story polls to tune into your audience more closely. This way, you can build awareness around your helpful blog posts while also gaining helpful insights from the very people you’re setting out to help! For example, you could create a series of questions in your Instagram stories with multiple choice style selections or fill in the blank questions in order to generate ideas for future blog posts. Then, you can include a link to your latest blogs when your audience asks about topics you’ve already covered!
Your audience across various online platforms will likely be made up of a variety of different contact types: past clients, personal connections or former coworkers, people who have found you through ads or groups, and others who are simply watching your content to learn more about real estate. Realistically, the majority of your audience will not be ready to purchase or sell a home at any given moment — they won’t all convert right away. However, when they feel heard and can continue learning from you through your social media activity and blogs, you’ll be the first person they think of when it does come time for them to dive into the process.
5. Leverage pop-ups and chatbots
Aside from creating high-value, helpful content and incorporating various strategies for engaging your audience, a useful way to drive conversions is to leverage the capabilities of the web page itself in order to push users toward booking meetings or reaching out personally. Pop-ups, chatbots, sidebars and contact forms are all simple tools that can go a long way in putting you in touch with your audience and initiating a deeper client relationship.
Layer the use of these tools throughout your website and on varying blog posts in a thoughtful way. There’s a delicate balance between bombarding your users with interruptions on your web page and incorporating just enough opportunities for them to reach out. A pop-up on one blog post might encourage users to sign up for your email list so they can be notified of your future posts, or a sidebar might prompt visitors to book a call with you to learn more about the process of buying a luxury property. Overall, these are additional opportunities to incorporate targeted and relevant calls to action within your blog posts.
Overall, your blog is an opportunity for you to let your personality shine through while also providing helpful content for the people you most hope to work with in the future. By being strategic about your content, leaning on SEO basics, and including consistent and clear calls to action, you can turn users into audience members and audience members into warm leads with each and every high-quality post.
Work With Us
Luxury Presence is one of the fastest-growing digital platforms for real estate professionals. Our team specializes in the type of strategic, thoughtful content marketing that will help you build your brand, close more deals, and expand your network. Get in touch with us today!
