Content marketing is an essential part of any online lead generation strategy, but how can you make sure that you’re not filling up your blog section with content that isn’t actually helping you achieve anything?

First, it helps to understand why you are producing the content in the first place. Great content for property businesses can be useful in several ways, including:

• Building trust in your brand with localised, relevant and reliable advice and information for your customers.
• Creating a regular flow of SEO-friendly content which can boost your ranking and visibility. The content needs to be high quality though and churning out filler content could see your site penalised.
• Bringing customers to your website for you to direct towards higher-converting pages. Blogs are traditionally at the top end of the lead generation funnel, turning ‘strangers’ into ‘visitors.

That’s all well and good, but what kind of high quality content can you actually use to help you sell houses? This is something we have delivered for clients across the property sector, so here are some tips to help you get started with a successful content strategy:

Define your pillars

Coming up with original and relevant content needs to be a strategic rather than ad hoc process and it can help to group your ideas together under key pillars that will appeal to your audiences. For property marketing, you could use the following pillars (or similar) to help spark ideas and make sure your content will be relevant and useful:

• Education: Create content that covers information that will be informative for your audiences by explaining routes to purchase like Shared Ownership and Help to Buy as well as some of the more complex issues around mortgages and the home-buying process. For first-time buyers in particular these can be big hurdles and they will remember if you made it easier for them.
• Lifestyle: Don’t forget that you’re selling homes that people will live their lives in, so writing content that helps them imagine doing that in your homes can be an important stage in their decision-making process. It’s an opportunity to focus on the benefits that buying one of your homes can have in terms of giving them a blank canvas to make their own or having an extra room to use for flexible working, a home cinema or a yoga studio.
• Plot & Price: You shouldn’t be afraid to use content to be more direct in your sales approach. It gives you the opportunity to advertise key properties or types with a different tone and style to your development pages. You can bring more of the lifestyle-type language into a blog and these can be used as part of targeted email campaigns as well as promoted across social media.
• Location: Where your homes are is as important to potential buyers as what they look like or offer, so this pillar of content needs to help them imagine what it would be like to live at your development. What’s in the local area in terms of natural beauty, amenities and entertainment? How easy will it be for them to get to nearby towns and cities for work? These are questions your buyers will be asking, so why not answer them up front and grab their attention?

Get your tone of voice right

Consistency is key when it comes your brand’s tone of voice, across every interaction a customer has with you, both written and verbal. This helps them to know what to expect and helps you to build a relationship with them. A tone of voice should be built on your values, based on what they mean, what they don’t mean and how they sound to customers. If they can trace those values from your blogs to their conversations with sales advisors and customer service staff, your tone of voice will be doing its job.

Make sure your content is engaging

The most important part of any content marketing process is making sure your content is actually enjoyable to read, otherwise nobody will actually read it. The pillars may be right, the tone of voice may be spot on, but if it’s boring content that could appear on a million other property websites, it won’t have the necessary impact.

You can read our top tips for crafting compelling storytelling to get some ideas for how to actually write content that tells your stories in an engaging way, but the main takeaways are that you need to be authentically YOU and speak fluent human (not ‘property developer speak’).

Getting started with a content strategy to drive property marketing leads can be daunting, but with these tips you should be able to start generating ideas that will convert. Why not have a chat with us about how Social can help you take your lead generation to the next level?