As an agent, have you ever felt like giving up on real estate blogging? It does take lots of time and the results may not be immediate. But don’t give up just yet. The truth is that, despite everything, content is an agent’s best bet in a competitive online marketing space.
Content is king for good reason, from driving traffic to your optimized website to building your reputation, to becoming your exclusive branded long-term asset.
But today, we’d like to focus on the even more down-to-earth benefits of real estate blogging or guest blogging to show you how it impacts the purchasing process.
Folks at Content Marketing Institute and SmartBrief partnered up to create a joint report answering this exact same question. Let’s take a closer look at what they have found out.
How content and real estate blogging influence the buying process
1. Buyers actively look for content to help them with decision-making
It comes as no surprise that the majority of surveyed people (81%) say they search for the info before contacting any vendor. In terms of the real estate industry, this number is even higher, making it 98% of people who search for their new homes online before talking to an agent.
Source: How Content Influences the Purchasing Process by CMI and SmartBrief
2. Buyers don’t care about the source of info but its credibility
The digital marketing scene is very competitive and agents who can offer valuable content at the right time and successfully put it in front of their audiences will gain more. As it happens, buyers don’t care much about the source of content but its credibility. At the same time, 24% of people would want to receive that information from an agent they consider working with.
Source: How Content Influences the Purchasing Process by CMI and SmartBrief
This should remind you once again how important it is to produce great content, even if you manage to do this less frequently. And great content relies heavily on trustworthy sources so make sure your posts will stand up to scrutiny before publishing them.
3. The most important qualities of content
Not surprisingly, buyers want relevant, informative content that helps them answer their questions. In particular, great content has the following qualities:
- “speaks to my specific needs and/or pain points”: buying or selling in the local market, sorting out mortgage payments, negotiating successfully, etc.
- “provides product/service specification”: unbiased property description and info, videos, and photos;
- “is more educational than promotional in nature”: showing life in the local area as well as a wealth of property-related info rather than repeating how great an agent is.
Source: How Content Influences the Purchasing Process by CMI and SmartBrief
What’s next?
Your audience does want to hear from you so quitting real estate blogging is not an option. Give them the info they want and you’ll see your pipeline filling in with the new leads from posts you’ve long forgotten about.
