Create Content that Captures Attention, Connects & Converts
As a real estate agent, building a strong relationship with your geo farm is crucial to the success of your business. Ideally, you want to have a personal relationship with members of your community as well as a professional one. You want them to like and trust you, but you also want them to see you as an industry expert. Put another way, you want to become a local leader. One strategy that can help you accomplish this is developing a thoughtful and diverse content strategy to share with your community. This article explains the DOs and DON’Ts of an effective real estate content strategy. Keep reading to find out what you absolutely must include in order to capture attention, build trust, and generate leads.
Reminder: What Is Geo Farming Anyways?
Simply put, geo farming or geographic farming is a real estate marketing strategy that targets a particular neighborhood or community. As with all real estate marketing, the goal is to generate leads and close deals. However, with geo farming you get there differently than you would with other strategies. In geo farming your MO is to build relationships first and ask for business second. This is a time-tested, recession-proof strategy that is at the core of every successful real estate business. As such, we believe every real estate agent needs master this art for their business. Learn more about geo farming and discover the best tactics for 2023 in this article.
To explore how to develop the best real estate content strategy, keep reading this article.
Identifying Your Real Estate Content Strategy Goals
When developing a real estate content strategy, it’s important to keep your big picture goals top of mind. Many agents create content ad hoc because they simply want to get out there and don’t know a better way. However, if you don’t know exactly what you were aiming at, you won’t know if you achieved success. For example, if your goal is to grow your audience, getting a lot of social media likes is nice but not necessarily a measure of success. And while an ad hoc strategy is better than not putting out content at all, it lacks consistency. Wouldn’t it be great if you could follow and repeat a recipe time and time again? Turns out you can, and it starts with identifying what you are trying to accomplish.
Since geo farming presupposes relationship building within your local community, your top goal should be in service of those relationships. Therefore, your content strategy should be locally relevant and centered around the people who matter. Here’s how it works: If the content is relevant to them, they will engage with it. If they engage with it, that means you’re adding value. And if you consistently add value, they will grow to trust you. Do that consistently and you will become the name and face they are happy to work with and to refer to others.
Know Your Neighborhood
Take the time to really get to know your neighborhood. You need to know who you’re speaking to before you can be relevant. So, here are some basic questions that you can ask yourself to get you started.
- Who are the people in my geo farm?
- What problems do they have?
- What do they care about?
- Who are some community organizers and local influencers?
- What are some neighborhood trends you see emerging?
- What are the local events?
- What are the neighborhood hotspots?
The more you know, the easier it will be to identify what to talk about and how to share it. For example, you could discover that your community has a lot of new dog owners. Well, with our post-pandemic season, a lot of those people are heading back to the office. Remember that doggy daycare you connected with last week? Guess who else would benefit from knowing about it? My neighborhood, as another example, has a growing retirement population. If someone could share timely information about services they might need (e.g. snow removal), that could be useful to know. The opportunities to connect people with services or share relevant information are endless if you first find out who your neighbors are.
Build Trust Through Insights
As a professional, we trust that you are great at speaking about homeownership and all the real estate services that you provide. However, if your real estate content strategy begins and ends with real estate, you’re missing an opportunity to really connect with people. All good relationships have a dynamic quality to them, and your relationship with your geo farm should be no exception. That means that you should talk about real estate and your areas of expertise. But it also means that you should talk about the things that other people in your community care about too. Doing this will help you demonstrate that you see them, that they matter, and that you share common goals.
Top Real Estate Content Strategy Ideas
Local News
There may be other news sources out there, but hyper local news often doesn’t make it to the top of the page. If you can stay up to date on important information, sharing that on your social channels will serve as a shortcut to great insights for your geo farm.
Community Events
Is there a local parade? A farmer’s market? A street festival? Everyone appreciates staying in the loop, and you could be the person that helps them do that. What’s more, by sharing about local events, you also create an opportunity to connect with local organizers, adding value to them, too.
Business Promotions
Some of the top leaders in a community are business owners. Not only do they fuel the local economy, they also connect with a larger volume of people, drive traffic, and influence culture. Get to know them and help them promote themselves by sharing about their deals. Again, by doing this you help the local business as well as the residents who frequent it.
Pro Tip #1
All neighborhoods have housing trends, and homeowners, new and old, could benefit from expert advice. For example, if many people in your community are starting to remodel, there are insights you could share that could save them time, money, and heartache. Identify neighborhood trends, or better yet, open yourself up for questions, and provide free and valuable tips to people in your neighborhood. They will appreciate what they learn and they will grow to trust you more in the process.
Pro Tip #2
If you need help identifying, creating, and managing content for your local community, Parkbench has mastered the recipe. They help you connect with local businesses and community organizers by giving you something to give to them. Parkbench is a hyperlocal website with news, deals, and more. When you sponsor your neighborhood, they manage and update the content for you. Plus, they teach you how to use their system to build real relationships. They’re so sure it will work for you, they have a double-your-money guarantee.
If you give Parkbench a try and don’t get at least six transactions as a result, they’ll not only give you your money back… they’ll DOUBLE it.
Learn more about them in the link below.
Or, if you’re ready for your free demo, go ahead and book a time here. One of their coaches will answer any questions and check if your neighborhood is still available.
Common Real Estate Content Strategy Mistakes
Another way of auditing your real estate content strategy is paying attention to common missteps. Many agents are active in creating content and sharing it on social media. But, if they aren’t careful, that content could be doing little to help them advance their goals. We recommend taking a step back every once in a while and auditing your content for common pitfalls. Here’s a checklist to help you do that:
- Is your content all about you? If you focus too much on making yourself look good and appear successful, it costs you authenticity points.
- Are you asking more than you are giving? If your content is all about advertising your services, you’re asking more than you’re giving. A good rule of thumb is to have a 7:1 ratio: This is to say that you should offer value at least seven times before making a pitch.
- Are you trying to speak to everyone? By being afraid to leave anyone out with your messaging, you reduce your chances of reaching anyone. Know your audience. Speak to them directly.
- Is your content generic? If your content does not offer a unique brand position, you’re not helping yourself to establish a brand. Try to develop a look and feel consistent with your brand, and stick to it. That way, on a subconscious level, your business image could be something your audience will grow to trust over time.
- Is your content diverse? Make sure your content offers a good mix of mediums as well as message types. Use videos, images, and articles, and cover a variety of relevant subjects over a given period. What you want to avoid is having a wall of content on a single subject or issue, which can cause people to disengage.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a good real estate content strategy can and should be an integral part of your geo farming efforts. Done right, it can keep your community engaged, build trust, and establish yourself as an expert in your field. Done wrong, it can alienate your audience and cost you valuable time and money. We hope that the insights found here have been useful to you as you develop your own content strategy. For up to date real estate news, insights, and strategies, subscribe to our newsletter.