Expose yourself! Increase brand awareness with content marketing

When used to its maximum potential, content marketing can mean big benefits for brand recognition. Providing free advice to local homeowners helps your real estate business stay front-of-mind and gain more vendor enquiries.

For real estate agents and agencies, content marketing takes you beyond the traditional hard sell that many people – mistakenly or not – associate with the real estate profession. Instead, content marketing means creating and sharing useful, compelling, relevant information that’s of value to your audience: your vendors and potential vendors.

Content marketing builds trust and attracts vendors

By developing a strong content marketing plan, you’re benefiting both your clients and your business. For clients, you’re giving them a reason to engage with your brand – and to keep engaging with your brand. It provides them with an opportunity to get to know you, to trust you, and to eventually rely on you as their go-to source for valuable insights and information.

For you and your business, a content marketing program allows you to showcase your expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader. It means increased brand awareness, improved visibility on that ever-important Google search results page, and more leads.

Simeon Manners: a content marketing case in point

Take, for example, our client, Simeon Manners. Simeon Manners is a Mosman-based boutique agency on Sydney’s Lower North Shore that caters to a mostly high-end clientele. Recognising the value of content marketing but, like so many others, unsure of where to start, the agency engaged us to develop and execute a content marketing strategy.

Obviously, content marketing programs will vary greatly, depending on the communities you serve and the demographics within those communities. In Simeon Manners’ case, this meant creating a brand lexicon and tone of voice for its discerning audience and highlighting the Simeon Manners unique selling point as a cohesive team of real estate advisors. This would also resonate best with the lawyers, bankers, and financial professionals that call the Mosman area home.

Our content plan involved:

• topic generation targeting vendors (not buyers, as the objective was to generate vendor leads)
• content creation in the form of blog posts professionally written and edited by content specialists and corporate writers with real estate industry backgrounds
• publishing to the ‘Advice’ section of the Simeon Manners website as well as across its social media channels, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter
• social media advertising on both Facebook and LinkedIn to reach a broader audience
• email campaigns to the individuals in Simeon Manners’ own database
• optimisation of Simeon Manners’ employee profiles across all social media sites.

In addition to delivering exceptional value to its customers, Simeon Manners is reaping the rewards of content marketing across the business, from the owners and principals to the individual agents and the agency’s management and operations teams.

Advantages for principals

For principal and director Richard Simeon and director Mark Manners, the content strategy has increased their agency’s brand presence locally, with 19,000 people reached on Facebook over the first six months and over 42,000 impressions on LinkedIn to Sydney executives. It has allowed them to highlight their agency’s points of difference over the local competition and thereby out market that competition. With content as their driving force, they have successfully moved away from the individual-agent approach in favour of the collective-expertise team approach they so strongly champion. This positioning, in turn, has empowered them to attract, engage, and retain top-performing staff.

Advantages for individual agents

These top performers enjoy the benefits of Simeon Manners’ new content marketing activities, too. Fresh content gives the agents (and agent teams) relevant and timely articles and information they can share with clients, and potential clients, across their own professional and social networks.

What’s more, their refreshed employee profiles on the Simeon Manners website and across social media emphasise their personalities, strengths, specialities, and unique selling points to their audiences. The content marketing program has enabled them to build and strengthen their own personal brands – in addition to the agency brand – and put them front of mind with potential vendors when they’re thinking of selling their homes.

Advantages for the business

Managing director Wade Gilmore recognised that a program such as the one we offer presented him with a cost-effective alternative to the added overhead of employing full-time creative or marketing staff. Simeon Manners gains access to digital marketing strategists, writers, editors, web developers, visual designers, and social media publishers at a fraction of the cost of having these staff in-house. Plus, our team trains his staff on social-media-marketing best practices.

Time is of the essence

By embracing content marketing now, just like Simeon Manners, any individual agent or agency can become the digital marketing leader in their region. Time is of the essence, and the first mover can still gain an advantage as this important trend makes its way across the real estate industry.

Written by Melanie Hoole

My team and I specialise in helping real estate and property professionals perfect their personal brand, build a first-class digital profile and implement inbound marketing activities to attract leads. If you are unsure which direction to take with your digital marketing contact me for help.