Content Marketing for Real Estate Agents: Not All Content Is Created Equal

12/17/2013 11:06 AM (CDT)

infografic content marketingUnless you live under a rock, you must have heard an expression that “content is king.” But in reality, not all content is created equal; therefore, not all content is king.

We’ve seen real estate professionals struggle with content creation for many reasons. Lack of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) knowledge is one of them. But most likely, it is the lack of tangible plan and failure to create content consistently what prevents real estate professionals from leveraging their marketing efforts through content marketing.

So, let’s talk about content and map out a contenting marketing plan for real estate agents in 2014.

First of all, just how much content is out there? A lot! Chartbeat has recently recruited a group of data scientists who discovered that over 92,000 articles are posted on the WWW each day. 

Although many of those articles don’t get much traffic and attention from eyeballs, some do.
What kind of attention are we talking about? 1,194,902,462 engaged minutes, to be exact, every single day. 1.19 billion engaged minutes translate roughly into 10 seconds per every person on earth or 2,273 years of time.

Two conclusions can be drawn from the above findings. Firstly, an insane amount of content is being posted online every day. Secondly, people spend a lot of time reading stuff online, but, of course, not enough to read everything that is being posted and shared.

Ever wonder where all this traffic coming from?

The Chartbeat found in their study that - Of a sample of 4.5 Billion sessions 74% of traffic come from desktop and 26 percent from mobile. While 50 percent of traffic comes from direct sources, 29% from social media, 14 percent from external and 7 percent from search.

A few more conclusions can be made based on the above data.

Firstly, while mobile engagement is growing, people still read articles mainly on their desktops. Secondly, half of the traffic goes directly to the source without any intermediaries, so your offline marketing efforts shouldn’t be underestimated.

Finally, not all content is king. While high quality, targeted, and strategically placed content is of high value, mediocre, recycled, or-worse-copied content is simply a waste of time. Not only it won’t attract any traffic, but it may become a target of unforgiving Google algorithms.

In addition, here’s another piece of useful information (which is not part of the Chartbeat study). The effectiveness of content marketing depends on a very important indicator that marketers like to call CSI, or Content Saturation Index.

infografic real estate marketingWhat is CSI? CSI shows how crowded your industry is. The more content an industry has accumulated, the harder it is for a blog or other vehicle of content marketing to become noticed. If the industry is very competitive (as real estate is), it is very hard to become highly ranked in Google searches and, therefore, many bloggers and other content creators never get noticed and get very little or no traffic.

If you are a real estate agent and you’re going to use content as your means of marketing, you must be prepared for competition and must never expect instant results.

Now when you have some background information on content marketing, you’re ready for a content marketing plan. Keep your eyes open… we’ll have it posted here next week!

To be continued…