As a real estate agent, providing answers to industry-specific questions is a big part of your job. You must present yourself as an authority in key areas, such as local market knowledge, price trends, interest rates and so forth. But how …
By creating content that’s re-readable and relevant for a very long time.
Information that maintains its relevancy over time, and is leveraged in a marketing capacity, is known as evergreen content. This is the opposite of time-sensitive, or newsworthy content, which decreases in value over time. Helpful information about the consistent facts of the real estate world can be used again and again to attract customers every week, every month and every year.
All of this makes an evergreen marketing strategy a sustainable approach to gaining new clientele, because it establishes authority, builds reciprocal momentum and can be repurposed for other marketing media.
Of course, this is not to say that newsworthy and time-sensitive content is not important. Staying abreast of changes in the market is vital, and this kind of content plays a crucial role in your content marketing strategy. However, its value is temporary.
Building credibility
Evergreen content created with a focus on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) directs the right users to your website. The content should be configured to reach users when they search for specific real estate-based keywords and phrases.
You need to know who you are aiming the content at, and utilise keywords accordingly. Home sellers will be searching for different terms to investors, and will require a different type of content. Matching the right content with the correct keywords will provide the user with the answers they need, and will hold their attention for a longer time, reducing the bounce rate of the page.
A low bounce rate is critical, as it lets search engines know that the copy on your site has value and is being organically optimised, which in turn leads to a better page ranking.
Once a reader is engaged in your website’s content, you can keep them reading by linking to other pages on your site that offer relevant information. Over time, this builds trust and inspires users to contact you and initiate business.
Long-term value
When your website’s evergreen content is visited often, it can become an authoritative reference that other publishers use to support statements within their own posts, or even point their own users towards, directly. When they do this, they insert a link to a specific page of your website that offers helpful information. Search engine crawlers than pick this link up, and recognise it as evidence that the content is authoritative.
Backlink building in this way is instrumental in escalating internet traffic to your business. Time-sensitive real estate content quickly runs out of relevancy, whereas evergreen content continually works for you, by attracting new readers and building page rank, even years down the line.
Digital recycling
Evergreen information that is proven to drive traffic to your site and generate new clientele can be repackaged to work for you in other ways. For example, an effective blog post about local history can easily be re-worked into an engaging script for an informative video. The information in a popular article about real estate value fluctuation can be applied to a helpful infographic that appeals to the visual learner who isn’t necessarily fond of reading.
Small segments of copy from a property buyer’s checklist that are particularly valuable can be used in social media. A simple copy and paste procedure can take information from your website and inject it into your social media pages such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the like. The followers who become interested in the posting can then enter your lead nurturing funnel, and hopefully end up as a client.
Don’t overlook the changing tides
Remember that newsworthy content plays a key role in marketing your real estate business. Yet, due to the temporary nature of metrics such as market reports, RBA rate fluctuations and supply and demand for property – cultivating the delivery of this information is not as crucial as that of evergreen content. Topics like auction clearance rates and market updates change quickly, so broadcasting them should be done with the understanding that they will soon be replaced.
The creation of quality long-term content takes time. Since you are busy running your business, consider hiring a professional to do it for you. Make the most of evergreen content by reaching out to the industry leaders who help professionals like you succeed in the real estate world, and keep on developing a long-lasting library of great, permanently-valuable content.