Producing content is a major part of any brand worth its salt, and having a content strategy in place for your property brand keeps you on track with providing quality and consistent content that boosts your company’s reputation online. 

Content can make the difference between standing out and getting lost in the sea of property professionals. Potential buyers and vendors can do a simple online search to find information, background sale data and articles about an agent or agency. If your story or pitch is blah, chances are you could lose a potential sale. 

When you make a positive impression on your audience, it’s easier for them to call your brand to mind and streamline the decision-making process for them. Enough associations like this have allowed certain brands to corner and rule markets just from how quickly people can recognise them, and engaging, impactful content is how they do it.

When you want to maintain a digital presence that resonates with your brand and what you stand for, it’s essential that your content also reflects this, as well as pays attention to what information your target audience is seeking. Your customers’ needs may change with time and other conditions, which is why it’s crucial to periodically revisit your content strategy.  

Start with a content audit

It’s hard to tell what needs to be adjusted if you’re building a strategy without prior knowledge of how your previous content performed.

Keeping track of your content’s performance needs to be a well-thought-out activity, not just a daily check of the social dashboards hoping to see what lands. When you undertake a content audit, you’re carefully gathering and analysing information about how your content is performing, and taking note of the materials’ performance relative to your overall strategy.

Content audits can boost website traffic and improve user experience, so it’s crucial you begin with this process before reviewing your content strategy. Getting started involves these steps:

• Remembering your goals: You’re identifying engaging content for your audience, so you need to lead with your objectives so you spend your time and energy on seeing the strengths and weaknesses of your content and workflow relative to your goals, not just taking note of all the information available about your content performance.
• Build an inventory of your content: Your audit can cover multiple types of content, so make sure you identify which you’ll focus on and compile the backlog of the material in a spreadsheet; examples you might want to include in your monitoring are the page title, content type and format, word count, date modified and linked CTAs.
• Organise your content: Separate the content on your spreadsheet according to the category you’re looking at, as something like an SEO audit will have you observe backlinks, page speed and keywords, versus a content conversion edit that will focus on different types of conversions, click rate and traffic before you derive your insights.
• Analyse the data: View your data critically and take note of correlations, patterns and trends, especially in terms of what content is missing, underperforming, outdated, or performing exceptionally well, as you can integrate learnings from this audit into your content strategy’s updated strategy and tactics.
• List next steps: Based on what you’ve learned from the audit, set action items for keeping, updating, deleting or rewriting the content you already have, and what these mean for the next stage of your content strategy.

3 signs you need to revisit your property content strategy

Even before you perform a content edit you may already be getting the sense that something about your content strategy needs to be looked at again–so we’ve shortlisted some of the warning signs you need to take note of, and what may be behind them. When you know the causes behind your content strategy’s challenges, you can improve the next one you create. 

1. You’re experiencing less website traffic

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase your brand awareness, particularly by boosting the visibility of your digital platforms. When your audience seeks specific information and your brand is there to address their concerns, shows what your company cares about and communicates clearly, you’re positioned as an authority in the field.

If your content is currently not catering to a particular audience (i.e. you want to reach everyone) then this may be a reason for your dip in website traffic. This may be due to a number of factors, but the chief of them may be poor content due to a disconnect from the content strategy, among other aspects. 

Other reasons for a drop in website traffic could be:

• Low-quality content: Fluff pieces created just for the sake of posting something, especially if these don’t adhere to your content strategy, are often too short and don’t offer much use for readers, which most search engines will deter audiences from.
• Over-optimisation (i.e. keyword stuffing): Putting too many keywords in your content tells search engines that you’re only there to push your service, not user experience, organisation and information, which turns even more eyes away from your website.
• Dated keywords: You can get carried away with the way you use language to create your technically sound, industry-aligned content, but phrases like ‘areas with best clearing rate,’ are less likely to bring more vendors and buyers to your site versus ‘best neighbourhoods for families’. It’s crucial to keep natural language in mind and produce content that shows audiences the information they’re searching for.

Less website traffic is not the end of the world, but fewer eyes on your page may be a sign of problems with your content that you need to address before you proceed with a new strategy.

2. You’ve lost track of your content goals

Starting with a simple goal like ‘driving traffic to your website,’ can be a way to begin thinking about what you want to achieve with your content, but a content marketing strategy needs to reflect your objectives in a concrete and measurable way so you’re able to check if the plan works. Effective content marketing goals allow you to measure your content’s success.

When setting content marketing goals, you need to keep your overall business goals in mind to make sure you’re leading up to what your brand needs to achieve as a whole. Your content production and promotion have an impact on your company’s bottom line, so these need to align with your property brand’s possible objectives, such as the following:

• Building a subscriber base: People agreeing to receive content from you means they’re interested in your point of view and could require your services in the future, so you’re able to provide value while also consistently marketing subtly to a core audience.
• Qualifying leads: A step up from subscribing is your audience sharing more information about themselves because they believe in the content and service offer, so this helps you measure impact through the landing page conversion rates, number of downloads, plus percentages of marketing- and sales-qualified leads.
• Supporting sales: Content created usually provides proof points and helps justify your brand’s offer, so tracking lead-to-customer conversion rates, how the content affects the amount of time needed to close new customers, and revenue can help here.
• Encouraging customer loyalty: How-to and after-sales related content allows customers to see the value in your brand once you’ve closed the deal, and tracking the percentage of existing customers who consume content, the reduction in the number of support calls, the number of repeat customers, revenue from upselling, retention rate, and changes in churn rate allows you to see what audiences find most valuable.

Keeping your overall brand goals specific and measurable allows you to keep them in mind as you continue to create your content and promote the unique value of your property brand. 

3. You’re struggling to think of what type of content to produce

There are lots of ways to create content for your property brand, but not all of them fit your brand and your content strategy. When revisiting your strategy, if it’s a challenge to pick and choose among the ways to produce content, especially given your objectives, then it may be a sign to revisit your strategy as a whole.

There are multiple ways to create content for a property brand because there are many aspects that property professionals can highlight and feature their service or product offering:

• Buyer tips share information for multiple types of prospective buyers, whether they’re first-time buyers or investors.
• Just-sold posts tell audiences that you can sell properties but you also humanise your brand by sharing a brief description of how you met buyers’ needs.
• Interesting or unique listings show special characteristics of the areas you operate in and your established presence in these areas.

Content marketing is a lengthy process and is an activity that allows you to provide value and build a subscriber base, so taking note of these warning signs when you get a sense of them allows you to tweak and adjust your content strategy and how you move forward with it.

As content marketing is as much a part of your property brand’s journey as other aspects, getting it right can be a process of checking what works until it sticks. We can help you set the plan up for success with content that keeps up with your audience’s needs.