So you’ve launched your IDX website with all kinds of property search options, featured listings, community pages and more. Now the leads should start coming, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy but an IDX website that also has a content strategy will help you attract and convert more leads.
Many agents and brokers stop their online marketing efforts with their website and email listing alerts. With a content strategy, you have more ways of attracting leads than just your website and email alerts. And you’ll nurture leads with content that’s purposefully chosen to build trust and loyalty so leads ultimately reward you with their business.
Let’s look at what content marketing is and how it’s used to compliment your IDX website.
What is Content Marketing?
Marketing in the digital age has come a long way from websites and emails asking you to “act now!”. To effectively compete online today, you must build relationships and add value to consumers’ lives in order for them to pay attention to you.
Here’s how content marketing is defined by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI):
“Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
“In short, instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.”
Done properly, content marketing contributes to new lead acquisition and delivers ongoing valuable information that leads to business and loyalty. Remember that it’s also used to keep past clients engaged and informed for repeat business.
A study by Demand Metric discovered that content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing.
#Contentmarketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing & generates 3x as many leads, says
@demandmetric.
Using Content in Your Marketing Strategy
A content strategy feeds different forms of marketing that will grow your business. Here are a few of the most common forms of marketing that benefit from your content strategy:
Social Media
Content marketing feeds your social media strategy. You can’t have a social media strategy without first having content.
For a great primer on building your social media strategy, check out this article from CMI: First Things First – Content Strategy Before Social Strategy.
PPC
PPC/Paid search advertising needs great content to support your ad propositions. For example, think about the interest you could generate from ads that offer to educate buyers or sellers. Think about how you can help them with their next transaction or provide insights on your local market. This content is enticing because you’re offering to educate and provide value through your content. In turn, your target audience will be more interested in receiving future communication from you, including your listing promotions. Before you know it, you’ll be growing your subscriber list and your lead funnel.
While we’re talking about paid search, it’s worth noting that properly executed content marketing can actually be more cost effective than paid search as found in a study by Kapost (in collaboration with Eloqua). Paid search requires constant cash to keep running, while content marketing builds it’s own momentum.
#Contentmarketing has lower up-front costs & deeper long-term benefits than paid search, says
@JuliaEMcCoy.
SEO
It’s a fact that you need fresh, unique, quality content published on a regular basis in order to improve your ranking and visibility in search engines. Your ranking also improves when your content shows signs that people are engaging with it. With tools like Marketing Automation, you can drive traffic to your content from your automated email campaigns.
Inbound Marketing
Each piece of fresh unique content provides another opportunity for you to be found. More search terms can be targeted in your content to catch the attention of buyers and sellers to bring more traffic to your site.
Getting Started
So how can you start taking advantage of content marketing if you don’t have the time to create a lot of content? A great first step is to publish new articles to your blog on a regular basis. You can share links to your blog articles in your social media channels to broaden your reach and contribute to your social media strategy.
If you’re going to create content yourself without the help of a service or agency, here’s a great checklist from CMI for producing effective content.
Including IDX Listings in Your Content
With an IDX website, it’s easy to link to listings and market data available elsewhere on your site through your IDX service. With P2 Realty Solutions IDX accounts, you even embed dynamic IDX listing content in your blog posts and web pages. Most agents and brokers have listings, saved search results or market data they’d like to promote. Using this feature, you can create blog posts with an introduction that educates readers, embed the IDX content in the posts, then share the posts on your social media channels.
Getting Content Help
Most agents and brokers don’t have the time to invest in producing content and need help with this effort from “ghostwriting” services. Here at P2 Realty Solutions, we offer a content service, Express Content, that works hand-in-hand with our IDX plugin for WordPress and our hosted IDX websites. Additionally, our Marketing Automation can promote your collection of content to all your leads through automated emails.
Contact us to get a tour!