First things first, agents: it's time for a quick refresher. What the heck is content marketing anyway, and how does it differ from all the other types of marketing you have to manage for your real estate business? 

To put it simply — after all, this is content marketing 101 — content marketing is the act of taking the content you've created and putting it out there for consumers to find. With this definition in mind, why is content marketing so important?

Content marketing: the rundown agents need to know

Content marketing is how you relay important information, updates, and directly showcase your brand and expertise to an audience of prospective clients, both online and offline. Creating content isn't just checking a box, it's a place to visually highlight what you want to share with the world. 

Your content needs to answer crucial questions like:

• What do consumers need to know about the home buying and selling process?

• What do they need to know about their market?

• What are the most important things they need to know about your brand?

• What should they think, feel, and understand after seeing your content?

Creating content that answers these important, decision-fueling questions will serve as the backbone of your content marketing. After all, you already know your current and potential marketing channels, your marketing budget, and likely have a pretty solid idea of what works well (and what doesn't). By focusing on content marketing, you can amp up nearly every area of your real estate business.

Let's get into how.

How content marketing can help your lead generation

Like we shared earlier, content marketing helps you spread the word of your brand, your business, and your market far and wide — especially online. This makes it a particularly impactful method of lead generation.

When prospects are searching for the perfect agent to partner with, how will they know who to reach out to in a sea of names, faces, and witty taglines? Through the agents' content. How do they see this content in the first place? Through marketing. See where we're going with this? Here are the resources you need to lean into to leverage content marketing for your lead gen.

Start here:

We did an in-depth breakdown of real ways to use content marketing for your lead gen here in our article, "How to use content marketing for real estate lead generation." Give this blog a thorough read to get a deeper understanding of what content marketing is made up of and how you can use it effectively.

Put it into action:

Once you've gotten yourself well-versed in the basics of content marketing, you're ready to get a move on putting it into action and marketing your content! Check out our breakdown of all the types of digital ads that are out there in our blog "Real estate ads: A rundown of everything you need to know." This article was created specifically to help you weigh the pros, cons, and features of each ad type, so you can get a clear line of sight as to how you want to promote your content online.

To really give your content marketing strategy a boost, you can also get our free download guide, "The online marketing roadmap for real estate." Think of this guide as the ultimate handbook of everything you need as an agent to get set up for successful online marketing. 

There's also our free eBook, "The Complete Guide to Social Media." Although we created it for our newbie agents, it's jam-packed with principles agents of any experience level can take and apply to amplify their content on social media channels.

Using content marketing to reinforce your real estate brand

It's important to remember that content marketing is a critical piece of your real estate brand. Without it, how would consumers learn or know anything about your brand and what it offers? Your real estate brand is the heart and soul of your business: it's what your biz is based on and what fuels every decision, action, and interaction. 

In short, making sure people know about your real estate brand is a big deal! We've taken plenty of deep dives into real estate branding, and also into ways agents like you can use content marketing to reinforce and strengthen it.

Start here:

"How to be everywhere using branding" is a great starting point to understand real estate branding and why it's so important to get it out there. This article also gives you four actionable tips you can take to elevate your brand and grow its online presence — which is only made possible with content marketing.

Put it into action:

In "4 branding execution hacks for real estate agents," you can get action-packed tips to infuse branding into your content, quickly and easily. Once your wheels are turning, take some time to dive into "The art of social networking: How to build your community online" for a step-by-step walkthrough of how to promote your brand through effective, impactful digital community-building.

How to create your content for content marketing

At this stage of reading, you're already becoming pretty content marketing savvy — way to crush it! Now, it's time to get into the "content" in "content marketing" and talk about the best approaches you can take to actually create the content. Don't sweat; we've broken down various content creation strategies, approaches, and tips and tricks. 

Here are some of the most important ones you need to know:

• If you're short on time (and really, what real estate agent isn't?), check out "7 ways to use your everyday real estate life to fuel your content strategy." This blog gives you clear directions on how to work smarter, not harder, and maximize your day-to-day as an agent to create content that moves the needle.

• Real estate testimonials are a crucial part of your business and they play an even more important role in your content marketing. Using your reviews as content will help consumers feel more confident in your brand and working with you. To help, we designed 9 free Canva templates specific to real estate testimonials you can download, quickly update, and use for your content marketing. Click here to get all 9 of them.

• At a certain point, you'll get so good at content marketing that it'll seem like there's no new content for you to possibly create. Spoiler alert: there's always new content you can create. We compiled a special calendar for real estate agents to use that captures every holiday you can think of, year-round, here in our free download, "The ultimate social media holiday content calendar for real estate agents."

• As you scale your content marketing, creating, managing, and posting content can feel like yet another full-time job. And as a busy agent, you don't have time for that! Get a helping hand and learn about social media helps specifically designed to give your content marketing efforts a helping hand in our blog post "9 social media apps real estate agents can use to streamline content."

Use content marketing to amplify your brand and boost your business

Home shoppers and sellers need your help, guidance, and expertise. But they work with you or know you're the best agent out there if they aren't able to find you or educate themselves on your business. Content marketing solves this problem by providing you a platform to educate, empower, and reach a wide variety of consumers. It also helps reinforce your brand, expand your reach, and build up new business.

For more content marketing insights and deep-dives, make sure you have our Resource Center bookmarked — we're updating it regularly to help support agents like you!