Successfully Planning Content for a Real Estate Farming Campaign

I've recently written quite a few articles about how to successfully plan and deploy a real estate marketing campaign. One thing I have not touched on, though, is how to plan your content for this campaign, ensuring that you will be successful and grow your real estate practice. This step is not difficult, but you won't believe how many people skip doing it, and in the long run, compromise their results.

So here are some tips and suggestions on how to position yourself correctly, from the start, by successfully planning your real estate marketing campaign.

Why Plan Ahead at All?

This is a question we get all the time. Many Realtors we work with have the initial thought that by planning ahead of time with all their content, it runs the risk of becoming stale. They feel that picking a topic every single month instead is the best way to proceed.

This is a very logical thought. Having timely content does make a lot of sense. The problem is that you need a backup plan. Real estate is a very chaotic business. If you plan your topics every month without preparing ahead of time, inevitably you are going to get busy and your marketing will slip, your campaign will become inconsistent, and you will fail.

Our best practice suggestion when it comes to planning a successful real estate marketing campaign is to plan content ahead of time, with the idea that on any given month, if you have enough spare time, you may switch the topic. For instance, what if on a given month, you had a huge sale that you want to let your prospects or your geographic farm know about? No problem. Just do that in place of what you've already planned.

No matter what, you don't want to be caught asleep at the wheel. Planning ahead is always the best course of action.

Any Marketing Is Good Marketing, Right?

The next step is picking the actual content you will use in your real estate marketing campaign. Many times when speaking with a prospective client, we get on the topic of the actual types of content we are going to use, and they make a suggestion that we simply "use whatever works well for other agents."

While it is true that there are a few things that would be applicable to any marketplace and would perform well, the truth is you cannot build an entire campaign on this type of information. The reason for this is because every marketplace is different and every homeowner is different.

The purpose of doing any marketing campaign is to establish yourself as the thought leader in the minds of homeowners in your marketplace. To do this, you need to tailor your content, pinpointing topics and educational items that will be deemed as valuable, pertinent and interesting to homeowners in your marketplace. If you do this, you will solidify yourself as the thought leader in your market, and in turn be the first person a homeowner thinks of as they decide it's time to sell their home.

Okay, I'm Sold. How Do I Find this Information?

While it does take a little digging and brainstorming to do this, you basically have two choices. Your first choice would be to hire a firm like ours to assist you in this planning. The second choice is to use the best tool you have at your disposal: Google.

There are quite a few very detailed demographic and lifestyle websites you can use to specifically look up information about the homeowners in your marketplace to find out what makes them tick, and allow you to draw some conclusions and create a client persona that you will use as the roadmap for your content creation.

That's All I Need to Do?

While most of the "heavy lifting" is done up front when planning the perfect campaign, once this initial work is done, you are not finished. The wisest approach to ensure that your campaigns are successful is to track your homeowner interaction and your overall results. For real estate farm postcards, my favorite way to do this is by using capture code marketing. For Facebook advertising, with a little reading, you can learn how to leverage the power of the Facebook Ads Manager.

Remember that even though you are planning ahead, no campaign is "set in stone." If you aren't getting the results you think you deserve, MAKE CHANGES. You are spending your hard earned money. It makes no sense to keep paddling upstream if it looks like you have made some wrong decisions. If you can't figure it out yourself, look to an outside firm to help tweak your campaign and get you where you need to be. The key take-home message is constantly measure and revise your campaigns.

Planning a successful real estate marketing campaign is not impossible. There are just many moving parts you need to consider from the beginning in order to succeed. Be sure not to forget content planning

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.