10 Types of Effective Real Estate Marketing Content
“A-B-C. Always be closing.” This classic line from the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross has turned into a popular mantra for real estate agents everywhere. You can only imagine how many deals have been successfully closed through the years with this phrase as a guiding compass for realtors.
Real estate is a fiercely competitive business. The number of members in the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has steadily increased since 2012, reaching 1.56 million in 2021, an all-time high. This growth in numbers has tracked right alongside an uptick in the volume of home sales, which has continued climbing since the financial crisis of 2008. Even in 2020, during the pandemic, over three million licensed realtors in the United States competed to sell roughly 6 million existing homes.
In this day and age, having a mantra and a single method for marketing yourself as a realtor isn’t enough. Traditional open houses and flyers still matter, but savvy agents must take advantage of digital real estate content marketing. You need proven tools and tactics to establish yourself as an expert, solidify your reputation, grow your client base, and, ultimately, get your share of the sales pie. This is where real estate content marketing comes into play.
The Importance of Content Marketing
Expanding your digital footprint and online presence is more important than ever before. Approximately 70% of all brokers and agents in the U.S. have their own website, and 81% of NAR members share listings on their websites. About 74% use Facebook for professional purposes, and 20% of members get a percentage of their business from social media alone. Going digital is not a choice, but a must, if you want to beat out the competition and succeed in capitalizing on your local market. Creating, publishing, and sharing stand-out digital real estate content can help you do that.
The importance of content marketing in real estate might not be evident to everyone, but it is a critical part of the equation if you want to sell properties at a high volume. Across generations of home buyers, the first step in the search for properties is to look online for home listings. Gone are the days of being driven around town by a realtor and taken out to lunch to discuss must-haves. Today, 84% of home buyers use the internet to find homes that they will eventually inquire about.
So the search rarely starts with the realtor; instead, interest is first sparked by the property itself. That’s why it’s so important to showcase your listings (and your real estate business) digitally – and in the best possible way. Real estate content marketing involves creating online materials, i.e., valuable content, to educate buyers and sellers, promote your brand, communicate to clients, and pique interest in available properties. With the right content marketing, you can magnet more traffic to your website and social media profiles, engage your potential market, and generate a steady influx of leads.
Types of Real Estate Content with Examples
Content marketing allows you to build and maintain that critical relationship with your audience of potential buyers and sellers. As a realtor, you are effectively a walking brand, and customers want to do business with brands they know and trust. The end result? Next time they need to buy or sell a home, they’ll think of you. So here are our ten tips on real estate marketing content and tactics that you should embrace to get to the top. Take a look.
1. Newsletter Marketing
Newsletter marketing provides consistency that clients love. Typically sent out on a monthly basis, email newsletters are a great way to continuously provide information to past, present, and future clients, all while keeping your name top-of-mind. Newsletters should include information like:
Tips and information about home buying and selling
Guides to community resources and events – you’re the local expert, after all!
Stories about local businesses in the neighborhoods you serve
Recently listed properties as well as what’s just been sold
Market trends and median pricing changes
The format should be rather consistent, but the content should be new and exciting each month. When you publish digital content on Issuu, you can utilize our GIF creator as well as our Mailchimp integration. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, imagine what a GIF is worth. This visually engaging solution drives traffic by attracting readers to a stunning preview of your content directly within the body of the email. This clever marketing tactic simply works, so it’s worth trying in emails that link to your digital real estate newsletter.
2. Email Marketing
Beyond sending a monthly newsletter to your client base, regular email marketing is a highly effective way to promote your new listings and get showing requests on the books. It’s also an appropriate avenue to ask for referrals when your listings are running low. Keep the following points in mind when sending emails:
Send emails regularly, but not too frequently as not to annoy your clients
Always have a clear call-to-action (CTA) button
Ensure your emails are relevant and segment your audience if they’re not
Seek to inform, educate, and entertain; don’t be afraid to be personable
Sync your email marketing efforts with promotion across all channels (this is called omnichannel marketing)
As mentioned in the first tip, GIFs are an excellent way to preview listings in an email and link recipients to a fullscreen view of your dynamic flipbook. The visual interest of pictures set to motion with a GIF will entice readers to explore properties in-depth. Showcasing your listings on Issuu with photos, links, and video tours can help you do that. The publication below from Christie's International Real Estate is an example of a customized digital listing that's ready to be shared in fullscreen - see what it's like.
3. Real Estate Catalogs
Real estate catalogs usually fall into three categories: residential, commercial, and industrial. More formal and in-depth than an individual listing or a brochure, real estate catalogs help build your brand by showcasing collections of properties that share a common thread. Whether it’s a collection of build-to-suit suburban homes in a planned neighborhood or modern condos perfect for city dwellers, utilizing a real estate catalog is key to attracting specific audiences. It’s flexible and adaptable, depending on the intended audience.
Always start with a one-page overview that gives the history of your business and a bit about you before sharing a table of contents and subsequent pages of properties. Include lots of photos, neatly compiled in an easily-digestible format, with addresses and sales information. Plus, when your catalog is published and shared digitally, you can even link the individual listings within. Get additional tips on how to design e-catalogs for real estate in this blog post, and check out these great examples of real estate catalogs:
4. Informative Infographics
Another great real estate content format is the all-powerful infographic. By combining information and graphics, this data visualization tool allows consumers to digest concepts at a glance. When done correctly, visuals and text can convey key information and ideas in a short format.
Infographics are easily shareable on any platform, which means they can help generate more traffic to your blogs, videos, listings, and website. You can post infographics on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms. They’re often used to tempt readers to want to know and read more by providing a visual summary of what your content has to offer.
It’s best practice to include a good mix of statistics, impressive facts, and other valuable information you want your audience to know alongside easily readable fonts and eye-catching graphics. Make sure that the infographics you publish or share are well-designed and branded appropriately.
5. Virtual Tours
Virtual tours pose a more recent challenge for buyers and sellers due to the pandemic and a hot housing market where deals happen lightning-fast. Scheduling physical tours has become increasingly complex, but virtual tours can be set up quickly and happen by the hour. However, the experience is not without its problems; virtual tours require a good WiFi connection in the property and an agent who is available to drive from one property to the next (often the day they hit the market). Even when they go well, sometimes they’re simply not enough to sway buyers who want to see a property more in-depth than what a FaceTime video can provide. Can you blame them?
By transforming flat content, like listing flyers and even digital listings where viewers traditionally click through tons of photos, savvy agents can combine text and photos alongside embedded video in an Issuu flipbook that serves as a virtual tour. By having all aspects and details of a property together in a single digital publication, prospective buyers can take a virtual walk-through of properties at their own pace – before ever actually setting foot inside. This speeds up the process of eliminating homes that aren’t the right fit while quickly requesting in-person tours of the ones that are. It saves agents a lot of time, too.
6. Videos
People love videos, whether you are providing house tours, DIY tutorials, or other related content. Videos will attract your audience to your page, especially when you use the medium to showcase the properties you are selling.
Quality real estate videos are an essential element when generating content for real estate social media. These videos can be shared on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms such as YouTube or Twitter. Videos can also be embedded directly into digital flipbooks published on Issuu, so digital listings give buyers “the full picture” before they ever take a tour.
7. Social Media Marketing
Our motto is “Create once, share everywhere” because we believe that busy professionals should be able to do and say more with less work involved. Why reinvent the wheel when you don’t have to? Issuu makes it easy to repurpose your real estate marketing content into eye-catching assets for social media, setting all of your channels into motion. The Issuu platform lets you create GIFs, Article Stories, social posts, and more, automatically deconstructing flipbook designs and letting you choose individual images and pages to design the best social graphics your clients have ever seen. These assets are optimized for mobile viewing and are designed to be engaging; there’s no doubt your audience will love them. You’ll increase your reach while saving time sharing and promoting your content across social media channels.
Start posting a continual flow of compelling content quickly – and watch that follower count rise. Real estate expert Greg Righellis at Tahoe Mountain Realty does an excellent job of sharing listing videos on Twitter alongside his firm's Issuu publications.
8. Storytelling with Client Testimonials
Oftentimes, landing new clients comes down to three things: emotion, storytelling, and social proof. Do you connect with people well? Can you storytell in a way that helps clients imagine their next home? Do past clients have great things to say about you? Testimonials are easily one of the most important parts of your marketing strategy because they have the power to make or break a deal. Client testimonials provide the reassurance prospective buyers and sellers need that you are the right person for them and you will help them find or sell a property fast and at the right price.
Be sure to include client testimonials in all of your core publications used for real estate marketing, like broker and agent overviews, monthly newsletters, and catalogs. Turn testimonials into powerful storytelling by giving a light background on each client, your approach to helping them buy or sell, how the property was positioned in the market, and a personal quote from the client. Most importantly, always be sure to get approval from clients before quoting them in your marketing collateral!
At Issuu, we leverage customer testimonials, too. Take a look at this single-page format, and feel free to create something similar to share with prospective clients at your own company.
9. Blog & Education Resources
Blogging is an excellent way to share your knowledge with your target audience and keep clients informed. When trying your hand at real estate content writing, your goal is to provide useful information to help potential homebuyers make informed decisions. Through your articles, you can build trust and engage your potential clients while elevating your reputation online.
Educational resources – like short and straight-to-the-point real estate brochures – are critical, too, because for many clients this may be their first time buying or selling. Or, perhaps it's been decades, and they need help on how to make this process go as smoothly as possible. Homebuyers need to feel like all their questions have been addressed before they can move forward – and there’s a lot to cover in the search process. Digital brochures help answer their questions by incorporating FAQs, narrated home tours, floor plans, eye-popping images, and even links to trusted inspectors or local government resources. Additional kinds of popular real estate education resources that are perfect for sharing digitally include Buyers Guides, Sellers Guides, and Staging Guides, like the ones here:
10. Evergreen Content
Publishing and sharing evergreen content – content that is generalized enough to attract a wide audience and won’t become redundant or outdated in the months afterwards – is an important element in your content marketing strategy. Some experts suggest creating twelve pieces of evergreen content each year that aim to answer frequently asked questions buyers and sellers are seeking answers to, such as:
Should I buy or rent a home?
What kind of home can I afford?
Why should I move to this city/state/country?
How do I photograph my home for listing it?
Do I really need a real estate agent?
How much do I pay a real estate agent?
How much of a down payment do I need?
A profile video, for example, is a standard piece of evergreen content that every realtor needs. This would sit nicely within a self-promotional flipbook on Issuu that tells buyers and sellers a bit about you and why they should work with you. Client testimonials, examples of properties you’ve sold, and a nice explainer video never go out of style. Couple this with other evergreen content presented in an engaging format, all hosted on a professional publisher profile page with your website and contact details linked, and you’re lightyears ahead of the competition. When done well, evergreen content will drive traffic and new business for many years to come.
Make The Most of Your Resources
Create real estate content and repurpose it so that you can reach a wider audience. You can use tools such as Issuu, a digital publishing platform where you can quickly turn your existing content into a digital real estate magazine, online real estate brochure, or real estate marketing flyer.
With a few clicks, you can produce visually attractive real estate marketing assets. From these, you can repurpose the content by embedding it on your website or deriving marketing assets to share on social media, turn into videos, share as ebooks, or distribute to your email list.
When you find that specific content marketing materials give you better ROI, then do more with those materials. Invest more in strategies that have shown success.
Sell More Houses with Issuu
With more than 2 billion monthly page views, Issuu is a tried, tested, and trusted platform for the biggest brands across all industries. Issuu helps you present information beautifully and gives you real-time access to the results. We are your partner in executing a winning real estate content marketing strategy.