Digital marketing strategy: all the levers ...

Before creating a digital marketing plan

An effective digital marketing strategy begins with careful content planning. In real estate, as in commerce, clearly defining your objectives allows you to align your content efforts with market expectations. Whether it's to generate more leads, increase brand awareness or establish a position as an opinion leader, each objective needs to be precisely defined to measure success and adjust strategies accordingly.

Setting goals

First, think about what you want to achieve with content marketing. Do you want to generate more leads, increase brand awareness or establish thought leadership in your industry? Clearly define your objectives so you can measure your success and adjust your strategy if necessary.

Identify your audience

Next, think about who you're writing for - that is, who is your target audience? What are their needs, wants and pain points? Understanding your audience is essential to creating content that resonates with them and stimulates engagement.

As a real estate agent, you probably don't have just one type of audience. Especially if you function as both a selling agent and a buying agent. Knowing more about each segment can help you target the topics they're most interested in and create content they'll be excited to read.

To identify your target audience, start by examining your current customer base. Who are your current customers? What do they have in common? Use this information to create a profile of your ideal customer. You can also use tools like Google Analytics and social network insights to gather information on your audience's demographics, interests and behaviors.

Now you can start thinking about where you'll reach your audience.

Define Distribution Channels

We've all published a blog post or LinkedIn post and heard the crickets. There are many reasons why a post can fail to gain traction, including using the wrong channels. If you focus on Twitter while your commercial real estate clients are all on LinkedIn, there's a good chance your posts will go unnoticed.

To avoid this, research your audience to find out more about their habits and the platforms they interact with. This will help you determine how best to distribute your content to achieve your objectives.

Set up measurement tools

Let's end our pre-planning with a nice touch: If you want to know whether your content is helping you achieve your goals, you need to track its effectiveness. If you've done your homework, you already have clear, measurable objectives. Now it's time to set up analytics tools like Google Analytics that will help you monitor your site's performance. If your goals are related to social engagement, make sure your current publishing platform offers the metrics and insights you want.

Your analyses will help you :

1. Identify trends and patterns, enabling you to create more targeted and effective content.
2. Measure ROI so you can make informed decisions about where to invest your resources.
3. Optimize your strategy with data-driven insights into what works and what doesn't.

As you develop your plan, keep in mind everything you've learned about your goals, audience and channels. This will help you stay on track. Use metrics to verify that the path you've chosen is the one that will help you achieve your goals. If your content isn't moving the needle (i.e. your metrics aren't improving), then re-evaluate your strategy to identify potential roadblocks.

Essential ingredients to boost your digital content marketing plan

Now that we've got the technical details out of the way, it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty of content development and creation.

Developing topics: What should you talk about?

With your audience in mind, it's time to start thinking about the topics you want to cover and how best to present them.

When brainstorming topic ideas, focus on the questions and concerns your target audience has. What information do they need to know? What problems do they need help solving? Use these questions to create a list of topics that will be valuable and relevant to your audience.

Keyword research & SEO

Social networks and e-mail newsletters reach people who already know about your services. If you want to expand your audience, you need to reach people who have never heard of you or considered your services.

That's where SEO comes in. Integrating SEO and keyword research into your real estate content marketing plan can help you improve your search visibility and attract new prospects to your site.

There are several tools available for keyword research. Consult our list to identify the best keyword research tool for you and learn the basics of keyword research.

When choosing keywords for your content, keep the following in mind:

• Search intent: Why do people search? What are they looking for?
• Search volume: How many people search for this term each month?
• Keyword difficulty: How difficult is it to rank for this keyword?
• Relevance to your audience: Is your audience interested in this topic?

When choosing keywords, don't overlook long-tail keywords. These keywords are generally less competitive and more targeted, making them easier to position. They may have lower volume, but they're high intent.

Once you've found good core keywords, turn them into keyword themes, then use these primary and secondary keywords naturally in your content, page title, meta description, h1 and alt text. Keyword themes are based on semantically related words and phrases and help you avoid over-optimized content while creating more ranking opportunities.

Content creation

We're now at the stage where you can start writing your content. When creating an article around a keyword, start by seeing what already exists and think about a unique approach you can take to the topic. Use your research to create a brief and an outline.

Use these resources to develop your topic:

• Summary
• Plan
• Model

A plan will help you structure your thoughts and get into the rhythm of writing more easily.

Format for legibility

Formatting your content for readability is important for keeping your audience engaged and making your content easy to consume.

• Use subheadings to divide up your content and make it easier to scan.
• Add bullet points to highlight important information and make your content easier to read.
• Write short paragraphs to make your content more digestible.

Follow SEO best practices

And of course, in the wonderful excitement of writing, don't forget to follow SEO best practices. Here are some of the main ones to keep in mind when creating content:

• Integrate keywords naturally. Use semantically related terms. Keywords should appear in your h1 and subheadings.
• Use relevant keywords in your title tags, meta descriptions and image alt text.
• Add internal links to help search engines understand the structure of your website and the relationships between your pages. Linking to relevant content makes navigation easier for visitors.

Incorporate visuals

Visuals can be a powerful tool for capturing your audience's attention and making your content more engaging. When appropriate, add high-quality images or videos to your posts. I'm not in favor of images just for the sake of images - if an image can help you get your point across, then include one.

If you choose to add videos to your site, include a transcript. This will help search crawlers understand what your video is about. And if you want to focus on video, be sure to check out our SEO tips for videos.

Measuring the success of your digital marketing plan

You've amplified your content and shared it on various platforms. Now what?

In addition to continuing your content creation process, you should also start tracking what you've published everywhere.

Measuring the success of your real estate content marketing plan is crucial to determining its effectiveness and making informed decisions about your strategy going forward. Here are some key indicators to track:

• Website traffic: Track the number of visitors to your new pages.
• Engagement: Monitor how many likes, shares, comments and other forms of engagement your content receives on social media platforms.
• Leads generated: Keep track of the number of leads generated by your content marketing efforts, whether via submission forms or phone calls.
• Conversion rate: Measure the percentage of leads that actually turn into customers or clients.
• ROI: Determine the return on investment of your content marketing efforts by comparing the cost of producing the content with the revenue generated by these efforts. You'll have to wait a while before starting this one, as the results won't be instantaneous.

By tracking these metrics, you can gain valuable insights into what works and what doesn't.