Crafting an Effective Real Estate Marketing Content Calendar
Creating a real estate marketing content calendar is like planning a huge trip across various terrains. An effective content calendar is more than a map to take you where you need to go – it’s the vessels you’ll use and the timing of each leg of the journey.
It might seem like a daunting task to create one but it is so much easier than coming up with every piece of content for each marketing campaign on the fly. That is a recipe for disaster. Often, it’s a recipe for nothing at all – just days of missing or half-hearted social posts and skipped emails.
If you want more leads, sales, and success in your business, you need a detailed plan of how to get there. In this blog, I’ll show you the steps for creating a real estate marketing content calendar to keep your marketing on course and your audience engaged.
What is a real estate content marketing calendar?
A real estate content marketing calendar is a strategic planning tool for organizing and scheduling content creation and distribution, ensuring a consistent and cohesive strategy throughout the year. It includes ideas for various content formats, specific publishing dates, real estate marketing channels, target audience identification, key industry dates, content objectives with performance metrics, and collaboration details. This tool helps real estate professionals maintain a steady flow of valuable content, build a stronger online presence, and engage effectively with their audience.
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How to Make a Real Estate Content Marketing Calendar
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Before you plot any piece of content on your calendar, be crystal clear about what you aim to achieve. Are you looking to increase awareness of your personal brand, generate leads, or establish yourself as a thought leader? Your goals should dictate the content you create.
Establishing five or so primary goals and then creating a cadence for each is an effective strategy.
Step 2: Know Your Audience
Understand the needs, challenges, and desires of your target audience. This understanding will guide the topics you cover, ensuring your content is valuable and relevant to your audience.
Check out Answer The Public to see the questions consumers are asking in your area. Reach out to your sphere and ask about their primary concerns and questions. Keep a notebook of what people are saying and refer to it during your content planning sessions.
Step 3: Audit Your Current Content
Take stock of what you've been sharing. What has resonated with your audience, and what's fallen flat? Invest in what works but don’t allow it to make your perspective myopic. If a certain piece fell flat, what went wrong with it? Use this as a basis to see where you can improve.
After evaluating your own marketing, look at what other agents are putting out. What do you want to rip-off-and-duplicate?
Step 4: Plan Your Topics
Based on your goals and audience needs, brainstorm topics for blogs, video marketing, social media posts, and newsletters. Make sure to cover key aspects of real estate that potential clients would be interested in, such as homebuying tips, market trends, and home improvement ideas.
Set a goal for each piece of content. If you have multiple goals you either need multiple pieces of content or pieces of exceptional quality that serve multiple functions in the simplest way possible Word of warning: don’t overcomplicate each individual piece. You want a clear message or CTA that won’t get watered down by switching topics.
Step 5: Set Your Content Mix & Cadence
Decide how often you'll post and on which platforms. Consistency is key in content marketing, so choose a cadence you can maintain. Whether it’s multiple times a day on Instagram or weekly blog posts, stick to your schedule.
Be sure to factor in how much time it’ll take you to batch content for each channel you’re working. Shooting a few videos each week might not seem like it’ll take long, but if you don’t also account for the time it’ll take to write your weekly email newsletter and long-form podcast, you might run into trouble.
Step 6: Schedule Your Production Time
It doesn’t matter how good your content calendar is if none of it ever gets created and sent. Everything must be scheduled, including the time to make and schedule your content.
The best way to do this is to batch. Set aside one day to produce an entire month’s worth of content. This leads directly to the next step.
Step 7: Outsource and Utilize AI
Batching your content allows you to raise your level of production by booking a videographer, editor, or other forms of talent for a particular time period. Many of our high-level coaching members have regular videographers or writers they work with for these kinds of sessions.
If you work with a team, delegate tasks and make it clear who is responsible for what roles, such as creating and posting each piece of content. Collaboration and accountability are crucial for a smooth content strategy.
And of course, you can’t forget about real estate AI, which will allow you to produce high-quality content far beyond your own skill level in a fraction of the time it would take you to make even simple pieces. Having your tech stack already set up will allow you to know what kind of content you can create and how long it’ll take you.
This will fuel you with new ideas and creativity, and it’s one of the reasons I highly recommend you sign up for AI Marketing Academy with Jason Patnana. In just four weeks, your content creation will be on an entirely different level.
Step 8: Incorporate Key Dates
Factor in major holidays, national events, and local happenings that you can tailor content around. This keeps your real estate content calendar relevant and timely.
Step 9: Use a Content Calendar Tool
Whether it's a physical planner, a spreadsheet, or specialized software, choose a tool that works for you and update it regularly. This central hub is pivotal for keeping track of what's been posted and what's coming up.
Regardless of whether or not you’re running a team, I strongly recommend you use something that’s easily sharable so that your videographer, writers, or other co-creators can have access.
Step 10: Analyze and Adjust
Regularly review your metrics to see what's working and make changes as needed. Be flexible and willing to update your strategy to align with your audience’s response and the evolving market.
Remember, in real estate marketing, content is king but consistency is the key to the kingdom. By adhering to a well-structured marketing content calendar, you're ensuring that your efforts are systematic, strategic, and ultimately successful.
Also, keep in mind that creating content should not be a lonely business. The more collaboration and support you have, the more tapped in you’ll be to what’s resonating with consumers and the higher your creative output will be. That’s what agents in the Tom Ferry coaching ecosystem thrive in their marketing.
There is so much support from fellow coaching members and having a coach is second to none when it comes to evaluating what’s working. I don’t want you to waste your time, effort, and money in creating content that doesn’t resonate with the market – and that’s why I want you to schedule a call to learn more about coaching today.