Content writing is a critical part of your real estate marketing strategy. As a real estate agent or company, you want your brand to get noticed: to stand out from the competition, to provide useful and relevant information to your target market, and to create a sense of confidence in you and your business. Real estate content writing is a key part of that. Through your real estate content writing, you can improve your search engine ranking, make it easier for interested buyers to find content on your website, and add value to customers interested in buying or selling their homes.
An effective content marketing strategy includes several elements, from property descriptions that provide more information to customers interested in specific listings to blogs and newsletters that share information with clients interested in what you can provide.
Find It Fast
Understand the basics of real estate content writing
Your online presence is one of your most powerful tools. Today’s buyers and sellers turn to the internet when they’re ready to learn more about a new topic or explore new options. Through effective content writing, you can showcase who you are and what you bring to the table for your buyers.
The purpose of real estate content
Real estate content serves several key purposes. It:
- Helps raise your search ranking and improve organic search positioning.
- Increases confidence in your brand by showcasing your knowledge about your industry.
- Adds value to your clients since they have the information they need at their fingertips.
As your real estate content library grows, you will find that it enhances your reputation and provides you with a valuable tool to share with your clients when they have questions or concerns about the real estate buying or selling process.
Different types of real estate content
Real estate content writing comes in multiple forms, which are an important part of establishing yourself online.
Property descriptions
Property descriptions are one of the first pieces of content many real estate agents produce. Your property descriptions share information about your listed properties and why buyers might want to consider them. While many people focus on the images in those listings, your property descriptions can help highlight the property’s best attributes and draw in potential buyers.
Blogs
Real estate blogging allows you to provide more information to your target market. Through your blogs, you can focus on real estate keywords that might not otherwise appear on your website, share more localized content, and offer more information to buyers or sellers. Blogs can help answer frequently asked questions or better prepare your clients for real estate transactions. This essential form of real estate content writing is vital to advancing your brand and showcasing your knowledge.
Social media posts
Your social media account is a great way to draw attention to available properties or to make connections within the community. To get noticed, however, you will need to post regularly, which will help build engagement and encourage more community members to connect with your brand. Social media posts can highlight upcoming events, share community information, or provide teasers that link back to your blog or website, in addition to showing top listings.
Email newsletters
As your contact list grows, you may want to start sending out email newsletters, which will help keep you in touch with clients who may have expressed interest in moving to the area or selling their homes in the past. You can use them to share information about the latest trends in the local real estate market, changes in home technology, or local community events.
Through your newsletters, you can become an important part of the community. Email newsletters are essential to your real estate content writing strategy and can help you achieve your overall goals.
Real estate market reports
Real estate market reports provide comprehensive insights into the current trends, values, and conditions of the local property market. They include data like pricing, inventory, demand, and neighborhood growth, all of which are valuable for buyers, sellers, and investors. A well-crafted market report allows you to position yourself as an authoritative figure in the industry.
By providing accurate and current market information, you can attract potential clients, help them make informed decisions, and facilitate successful transactions. The depth and accuracy of market reports are not only pivotal for branding but are also instrumental in building trust and credibility with prospective clients, showcasing your knowledge and expertise in the real estate industry.
Best practices for writing engaging real estate content
Whether writing real estate content for the first time or hoping to expand what you can offer your clients, you should keep several best practices in mind.
Understand your target audience
Your target audience is the people you are trying to reach with your content. Your audience may depend on what type of properties you market: for example, if you specialize in luxury properties, you may have a very different approach than an agent who focuses on commercial real estate. The deeper your understanding of your target audience, the more you can craft your content to focus on their needs.
Create buyer personas
Crafting buyer personas is essential to determining who you are marketing to as you create your real estate content. As a real estate professional, you may have multiple buyer personas in mind, depending on the extent of your target audience. Consider things like:
- Age
- Family size
- Income and available budget
- Education
- Future goals
In addition, your buyer personas should include a look at specific challenges or pain points those specific buyers might face. For example, families with young children may want to make sure they choose a home in the best school district in the area, while elderly individuals might be more focused on an accessible home.
Audience research techniques
There are several strategies you can use to get to know your target audience and develop key buyer personas.
- Social listening: Listen to the clients who connect with you on social media, engage with them, and use the information they provide to learn more about their pain points
- Analyze past clients: Consider the clients you have worked with in the past and their similarities
- Use focus groups: Work with people who are willing to help you develop your target audience, asking them key questions and developing your strategy according to their answers
- Talk to other agents: Discuss target audiences with other real estate agents in your company or in your local area
As you work with your clients, you can refine your buyer personas and get to know those buyers better.
Create a unique brand voice and personality
As a real estate agent, you need to stand out. Your brand voice is your professional personality: the thing that makes you stand out from the crowd and gives your audience a better idea of why they should work with you, given all their available choices. Your brand voice should remain consistent across all your platforms: your blog, your social media, and your face-to-face encounters with your clients. Think about who you are professionally and how you want to display that for your target audience. Then, let your personality shine across all your content.
Focus on storytelling
With any type of content, it’s critical to focus on storytelling. Your buyers should be able to picture themselves going through the actions you describe and, ultimately, moving into the property of their dreams. Tie together all your content with that big-picture story in mind.
Incorporate SEO best practices
For your real estate content writing to be effective, you must take real estate SEO best practices into account.
Keyword research
One of the first steps in optimizing your site for SEO is conducting keyword research for your real estate content writing strategy. You need to know what potential clients are actually searching for. What is important to them? What do they want to know? Platforms like SEMRush will allow you to quickly and effectively conduct keyword research and learn more about your client’s needs.
On-page SEO techniques
When optimizing your site for search engine marketing, there are several vital things to keep in mind. First, use your target keywords regularly, naturally, and organically throughout the content (aim for 1-1.5% keyword density). Do not keyword stuff! Google recognizes keyword-stuffing efforts and often penalizes sites that use it. Also:
- Use the keyword in your URL
- Update alt tags
- Use the keyword in your meta description
- Use the keyword in your SEO title
- Use the keyword at the beginning of your content
Always focus on providing quality content for your readers as you develop your real estate content writing strategy and your ongoing efforts. Ultimately, high-quality content will help raise your search ranking. However, working with a company specializing in digital marketing can also help ensure that you have included your keywords appropriately and optimized your site for the best results.
Local SEO
As a real estate agent, you likely work within a highly specific geographic region, and your content should reflect it. Focusing on local SEO, including using local keywords as part of your content, can ensure that when interested clients look for information about real estate in your area, they can find your brand. You should also make sure you claim your Google Business Profile listing and your listings on other search engines.
Use high-quality images and videos
Videos and images are a critical part of engaging with your audience. Pictures can showcase more of the property and give buyers a better idea of what they’re viewing than words alone. Use original images, not stock images, whenever possible. Use video to take clients on a walk through an available property or to connect with them. Include plenty of videos and images alongside your real estate content writing pieces.
Use data to back up your claims
“Trust, but verify” is more than just a popular proverb. It’s also the way many people approach what they read online. When you provide information on your website, from basic facts to more in-depth knowledge, use trusted links and data to back it up. As a real estate agent, you’re on the front lines of the home market, which means you may have inside information about shifting trends. Find ways to showcase that data for your clients.
Update content regularly
You must update your content regularly if you want to use it as a marketing tool. Search engines reward websites that are fresh and new. Not only that, you need to keep creating new content to help draw in new clients and continue to provide value to your existing ones. Design a content calendar that will allow you to continue to produce new posts for your readers.
Study examples of blog posts and what you can learn from them
As you create a quality real estate content marketing plan, looking at what other industry experts have created can give you a better idea of what type of content you want to create and how to develop your own content strategy.
Successful blog posts and what we can learn from them
Blog posts can cover a variety of topics and provide substantial information to the members of your target market. Examining successful real estate content writing can help you determine what others have done and how you can borrow from it to develop your own strategies and content.
For example, take a look at 5 Qualities of a Great Real Estate Agent. This blog provides key details about how to select a real estate agent, which can help many buyers feel that they have made the right decision in choosing you.
Likewise, blog posts like West Palm Beach for Retirees: What to Look for in a Retirement Community offer a highly localized look at specific elements people might want to look for in a hyper-localized area.
These two different types of blog posts show the difference between marketing to a generalized audience and marketing to a specific target demographic and buyer persona — both of which are key parts of your overall marketing strategy.
Property descriptions that sell
Effective property descriptions contain a number of essential elements. They are short, with maximum information presented within a relatively short-form piece of content. However, they also offer a great deal of insight into the property. Your property descriptions may need to include:
- Standout features of the property, including anything that specifically sets it apart from the crowd
- Descriptive language that draws the buyer in and allows them to picture themselves in the property
- Information about living in a specific neighborhood or near a specific location
Keep in mind that great property descriptions compel readers to learn more about the property, whether that means clicking through photos, visiting the property in person, or, in a best-case scenario, contacting you for a tour.
Engaging real estate social media posts
Crafting engaging social media posts can help you generate more interest in your brand, from the properties you have to sell to your marketing expertise when they have a property of their own to sell. Engaging social media posts encourage interaction and share beneficial information with your followers. They may include elements like:
- Highlights of local events
- Real estate news
- Changes in your local market
- Properties on the market
- Polls and quizzes to help you learn more about your audience
- Tips for sellers
- Tips for buyers
- Links to your blog posts
Effective social media posts aren’t just about posting content. They’re also about continuing the discussion with your audience, including responding to their questions or engaging with their comments directly.
Effective email newsletters
An email newsletter is a great way to reach out to people who have bought or sold with you in the past and keep them informed about the latest changes in the industry or the latest information about the properties you have on the market.
Not only do you need templates that can help you send responses to regular events you encounter, like notifications about new properties or follow-ups to showings, but you also need a newsletter that will showcase new listings and share new information about the area.
To improve open rates, offer genuinely beneficial information in each email. For example, you might highlight the latest events in your city or share information about properties that might be of interest to individuals who have bought from you in the past or who are in the market currently.
Tips to overcome common challenges in real estate content writing
Real estate content writing is an incredibly powerful tool, but it does bring with it several unique challenges. To overcome those challenges, try these strategies.
Challenge #1: Overcome writer’s block
You want to build a powerful blog and engaging social media presence, but you aren’t sure what to write. When you sit down at the keyboard, it seems as though nothing comes out. Writer’s block can be challenging. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to overcome writer’s block and move forward with your real estate content writing efforts.
Start with a comprehensive content calendar
Evaluate what content you want to provide your readers, then generate a list of topics you need to produce and when you need to finish them. When you’re ready to write, you can simply flesh out the posts. A content calendar can also help keep you on track and generate content so you can experience more of the benefits of real estate content writing.
Hire a professional to take care of your content
Working with a professional content creator or marketing professional can make it easier to keep generating the real estate content writing you need. You can provide the topics and the expertise, and your writer will create that content for you. Outsourcing your writing can also help ensure you maintain the professional tone of voice your content needs.
Use a comprehensive list of topics
Start with a list of blog post topics to help you get started. These topics might not cover everything that you want to include in your real estate blog, but they will certainly provide you with a starting place that will allow you to generate ideas even when you might otherwise be unsure of what comes next.
Challenge #2: Stay current with industry trends
As a real estate agent, you’re likely aware of current industry trends. Continuing education is a vital part of your brand and may allow you to get a better idea of what your readers are most likely to need from you. However, translating those to your blog or other content can look quite different, especially when massive changes sweep the industry. Again, a professional content writer can help ensure that your real estate content remains current and that your website, blog, and social media pages aren’t missing anything.
Challenge #3: Make technical real estate information accessible
As a real estate agent, you understand a great deal about the real estate industry that the average buyer or seller may not need to understand. However, when investing in real estate or selling a property, those individuals need access to that information. Look for ways to simplify that information to make it more accessible to them. You may want to:
- Break complex topics down into shorter snippets of information so that others can more easily access precisely what they’re looking for
- Use simplified language that clearly explains even complex topics
- Provide answers to the questions you hear most often from your clients
If you’re struggling to break down those concepts into language that is easy for someone not part of the real estate industry to understand, working with an experienced content writer can allow you to provide the information your clients need in a way that makes more sense to them.
Challenge #4: Balance promotional and informative content
As a real estate agent, you want to regularly promote your available properties and encourage clients to come to you when they’re ready to buy or sell property. On the other hand, you also want to provide a library of informative content that will showcase your expertise in the real estate industry and show potential clients that they can trust you.
Create a content calendar
Your content calendar can help ensure that you maintain your balance. It may include things like how often you can promote content on social media or when you want to post information beneficial to your readers.
Watch your trends
Keep an eye on audience engagement trends. What types of content are your followers most likely to engage with? What kind of content gets likes and shares? What about comments? Keep an eye on those trends as you develop a feel for how followers respond to your content.
Listen to your clients
As you work with your clients, engage with them and listen to their feedback. Ask them what type of content brought them to you and what they would like to see more of. You likely work closely with your clients regularly, which means that you can directly ask for feedback throughout the process.
Get help creating content for your website and social media pages
Real estate content writing is key to promoting your brand and showing why customers should trust you, whether looking for their dream property or getting ready to put a home on the market. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to take care of all your content creation needs on your own.
At Luxury Presence, we offer a variety of solutions that can help with your content creation, including help with SEO, content marketing, social media, and website creation. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help create the content that sets you apart.