5 Content Distribution Strategies For Real Estate Agencies

Is your real estate firm following a content marketing strategy?

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways you can boost your profile, particularly online, but the thing is you need a good strategy behind it.

Simply creating content is not a strategy of itself. Many have found that “build it and they will come” is simply not true. You need to do more.

This is where content distribution strategies come in. Instead of throwing up a blog post, creating an ebook, or crafting and infographic and hoping visitors turn up, content distribution means getting your creations out further — sending them to places where they should grab the eyeballs of your target audience.

Let’s look at a few strategies for getting your content out further…

#1. Get Engaged

There are literally thousands of online communities already out there where your agency can connect, provide value and share content. If you want to effectively distribute the content you create, it’s a good idea to be active and engage these forums.

Social Media Groups

There are a LOT of choices when it comes to social media groups, so the important thing for using your time effectively will be in finding those that are the most relevant.

“Relevant” means that:

• They have a large and active group, full of people who match your target market.
• The group has the kind of ecosystem which allows for you getting involved and contributing.

The general rule of thumb for any of these groups is that you must be contributing something of value. Get involved with discussions, answer questions or post some of your own. Where you have relevant content that can contribute to the discussion, most groups allow you to share.

Avoid being overly self-promotional however, as that tends to be frowned upon in most of these groups and you can find yourself swiftly removed if you cross that line.

Influencers

Influencer marketing is a long-standing practice, but there are now far more tools available to you to engage with the right people. Use tools such as Buzzsumo or Klout to find out who the top influencers are in your topic areas and connect with them.

One of the simplest ways to do so is by mentioning, quoting or linking to them in your content. This then gives you an “in” to mention them on social media. Often if you link to influencers in your content, you’ll find they share it with their audiences too, improving your reach.

As pointed out on the RESAAS blog, by connecting with influencers, you are not only providing value to your prospects, but potentially to the influencer themselves when you give them mentions. This helps to gain you the trust of your audience, more traffic and possibly mentions in return.

[tweetthis]Connecting with influencers can be a great way to distribute real estate content further.[/tweetthis]

Quora

Quora is an excellent platform to provide value to others and share the knowledge that you have. While it may be more difficult finding questions that are specifically local to your area, there are many more general real estate questions for you to answer, and definitely a lot specific to some of the bigger cities.

Find relevant questions that you are able to provide a good answer for, and give an answer that will be of value to others. A good way to do this and get your content out there is to choose a question for which you have related piece of content. Answer the question and provide a link to your content, directing people to go there to find out more.

#2. Republish

Have you got some great-quality, valuable blog posts which you’d love to see circulate further? Republishing is an option to get them onto platforms that are much larger than yours. Another advantage is that it doesn’t require you pitching and writing unique content for the other platform.

Sarah Peterson wrote a detailed article on republishing content for SumoMe. Republishing has been known to drive huge amounts of traffic back to websites while really maximizing the potential of the content you’ve already worked hard to create.

Some well-known platforms include:

• Business2Community
• Medium
• LinkedIn Pulse
• Huffington Post
• Elite Daily
• Entrepreneur

A tip for finding the right platforms to republish your work is to search for articles published by influencers in real estate. The chances are they will have been approached by republishing sites for content, so finding those can help you shortlist.

#3. Content Discovery Networks

These are a paid method of distributing your content and getting it in front of eyeballs on larger platforms. If you’ve ever seen links at the bottom of a blog post on a popular website which say things like “from around the web” or “you may also be interested in”, these are often content discovery networks in action.

Basically, you pay the network to position links to your content on popular sites and target them to the people who are most likely to be interested.

Popular options for doing this include: Outbrain, Taboola, Disqus and Gravity

#4. “Owned Channels”

“Owned” channels refers to any platform which you can control directly. These might include your newsletter, RSS feed subscribers, and your own social media accounts. Being consistent with these is just as important for content distribution as reaching out to platforms which you don’t own.

You can (and should) do the obvious methods such as emailing your list and posting on social media, but there are other things you can do to make that content go further and potentially cover more ground.

For example, you can pull out “snippets” from your content to use as tweets and schedule them out over time, linking back to your content. You could also take some interesting facts, pair them with good graphics and create an engaging Slideshare presentation, also including website links.

While you’re at it, why not repurpose content across multi-media channels? You could take a topic you’ve already written extensively on and turn that content into a podcast for iTunes or Soundcloud, or a video on YouTube of Vimeo.

Source: Kissmetrics

#5. Guest Posting

Guest posting is worth looking at as a “distribution” method, though your best bet is to create a unique piece of content specifically for the guest blog.

This simply means finding another blog owner who would like to showcase a post of yours on their blog. Of course, not all opportunities are created equally here, so as a real estate business, here are the kinds of blogs you want to look for:

• First and foremost, those which are likely to attract your target audience as readers. This may be popular local blogs such as news sites.
• They should be relevant — your audience might like cake, but it doesn’t really make sense to publish on the local cake shop blog!
• You want to be able to have a bio and preferably a link back to your website — anyone who wants “ghost written” material is not right for you.
• Look for high-quality blogs which will boost your reputation to be associated with.

Final Thoughts

Content marketing can be an excellent strategy to boost the profile of your real estate firm, but it’s not usually enough just on its own. “Build it and they will come” does not work as there is so much content out there competing for attention.

Content distribution strategies can help you to resolve this problem. When you create a good piece of content, don’t just let it sit, but find other methods such as interacting with influencers, engaging on social media, paid distribution, and republishing to get it out beyond the confines of your website.

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