Learning to COPE: Making Your Real Estate Content Work Smarter

Whether you’re already writing blogs, emails and social media posts, or you’re just starting to venture into content creation, you understand that successfully marketing your real estate business includes sharing your message with the largest audience possible. So, you COPE with it: create once, publish everywhere. For example, say you’ve written a blog post — you COPE by then sharing that content through other channels, such as email or social media posts. Distributing your message to multiple outlets maximizes visibility of your real estate storytelling and helps turn your audience into true fans.

Here’s how to COPE and make your real estate content work smarter.

Put your best foot forward

Half the battle in making your real estate content work smarter is writing relevant, timely and engaging messages. Only COPE your best content; don’t spam your audience with every little thing you come up with. Always keep the audience in mind — remembering that it includes people you haven’t yet met in person — and post content that makes them feel something: happy, anxious, curious, empowered. Follow the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of your content should be about something other than selling, like community happenings, hidden neighborhood hot spots or reviews of local amenities. The remaining 20 percent of your content should be about your real estate business.

Be selective about where you publish

The idea of publishing “everywhere” can be overwhelming and perhaps a bit unrealistic: It takes a lot of work to distribute, track and manage your content, so choose only the most appropriate channels to share your best work. You’re probably already active on Facebook, so now is the time to explore other places to grow your audience. Do you prefer long-form communication like white papers and how-to guides? Include LinkedIn on your list or offer to draft something for your community newspaper. Do you have a good CRM in place? Launch an email campaign. Are you a fan of more visual messages? Instagram and Pinterest are ideal places to post them. Like your news short and sweet? Tweet it.

Once you’ve started sharing your messages regularly through one outlet — perhaps your blog — add a second channel to your distribution list. When you’re comfortable with the quality and cadence of your messages on these two outlets, add another.

Use your online analytics tools to find out where your traffic is coming from; pay the most attention to the channels where visitors spend the most time and click on the most pages — those are the sites where you should COPE. Your content will help create deeper connections with your audience when you focus your efforts on sites where they’re already engaging with you.

Keep it simple

It’s a challenge to come up with a regular flow of interesting and engaging content, but it’s easy to find ways to share it in different places. For example, say you have a terrific photo of you and your real estate team helping out on a neighborhood improvement day. You can write a blog post about why community stewardship is important to you, and then put the same photo out on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram asking friends and followers to share their favorite ways to give back.

Take one last step

More and more consumers use their mobile devices to view content, so it makes sense to give them the best reading experience. Optimize your content for mobile viewing; responsive design ensures your real estate website looks good regardless of a user’s screen size.

When you’re looking for a way to make your content work smarter in marketing your business, sharing your messages across multiple channels is a time saver and an audience builder. By posting your best content on more than platform, you help increase your visibility on the sites where your audience spends its time and you turn them into brand cheerleaders who want to share your message with others who haven’t discovered you yet.