Your commercial real estate blog is a vital tool to help promote your listings online. But if you want to set your blog apart from the rest, a content strategy is a must-have for your business.
In 2018, the most successful B2B marketers reportedly spent 40% of their budget on content marketing. What’s more, you have a 434% higher chance of appearing higher on the search engine rankings if you feature a blog on your CRE business website.
If that’s not enough to persuade you, businesses using blogs get two-thirds more leads than those that don’t. Good quality content not only demonstrates your prowess as a thought leader in your industry, but also helps your website’s search engine optimization.
What is a content strategy?
A content strategy is effectively just a marketing plan of any media you intend on publishing. This could include any visual, downloadable, or written content.
For the purposes of this post, we’ll talk about building a content strategy for your CRE blog. Here are the steps you should take:
- Define your goals
What do you want your blog to achieve? Simon Sinek’s TED talk about the power of “why” may help you during this step. It will help you identify the reasons behind your blog and “why” you’re creating it in the first place.
For example, you may want to drive more traffic to your company website. Or, you may want to demonstrate your expertise to others in the CRE industry. Thirdly, you might want to build more leads or simply build your brand.
It’s important not to have too many goals (two or three should do) otherwise you’ll struggle to build consistency into your blog. Identify your niche and try to stick with it. This will help you establish yourself as an authority in your field.
- Work out your target audience
Running a CRE business, you probably have a clear idea of the people you want to connect with. However, you may want to create posts for different audiences. For example, do you want to provide advice to brokers or buyers?
Your content strategy can cater to different types of readers. It’s important to identify your target audience before you start planning any other aspects of your content strategy.
It may help to do some basic target market research. Try to find out where your audience currently gets its information, the articles they enjoy reading, and the platforms they use to find out information about the CRE industry. Google Demographics and Interests is helpful to source this information.
If you have any existing content on your site, you could also use Google Analytics to determine which content produces the best results.
You could even come up with some user personas. These will help you visualize your target audience and cater to their needs when you start writing.
- Come up with some topic and post ideas
Your next step is to come up with some high-level topics you’d like to cover on your CRE blog. You may want to look at current industry trends.
Also, do some keyword research at this stage. Try to find keywords that have a high search volume and low competition and build these into your post titles.
When you’re coming up with these initial ideas, make sure you keep your target audience in mind. Every piece of content you create needs to add genuine value to your readers.
- Create a content calendar
Next, you should start determining a schedule for specific topics and blog posts. You could even come up with monthly themes.
A content calendar helps you finesse your ideas and gives you a bird’s eye view of your posts, helping you to identify any gaps or missing themes.
- Start writing, early
All too often, companies start a blog with the best intentions to post every week. But after a few months, enthusiasm is lost and so is momentum with the blog.
By writing blog posts that aren’t time sensitive and developing an large quantity of them, this will provide you with a plethora of posts you can rely on if you find yourself stuck for time and/or inspiration in the future.
- Keep an eye on your metrics
A content strategy is a highly useful tool, but it’s not set in stone. Make sure you continue to use Google Analytics to analyze which posts work, and conversely, which ones don’t.
If you find your readers aren’t engaging with a specific topic or format, you’ll need to adapt your content strategy accordingly.
Also, keep an eye on your social media channels to see where and how your content is shared. This can be a good indicator of in what way and why a certain piece of content is popular.
Some final thoughts on your content strategy
As you can see, creating a content strategy for your CRE blog isn’t rocket science. But it can take time and thought to implement.
Once you have found your formula for success, a content strategy will help you save time by not continually thinking up new ideas. As a result, your Commercial Real Estate blog will become a powerful tool to help build your business and your brand.