Content Archives - Marcom talks about Professional Internet Trends

How to Make Content Work For You

Professional Realtor blogs are a great way to market yourself as practiced by my favorite Madison realtor. They provide an extremely cost-efficient and personal way for you the Real Estate Agent to connect to potential clients and differentiate yourself from other Realtors. To be effective your real estate website should contain information that people are searching for and need when making purchasing decisions. Once they get to your site your goal should be to build a positive relationship with your clients. To do this your professional realtor blog needs to be active. You should post information that updates over time, causing them to return over and over. In doing this when next they are ready to take the next step, purchase a house, they will turn to you as an agent they already know and trust.

A Professional Realtor blog is a marketing tool like postcards, ads or word of mouth. A website is a tool to market your services, generate leads and convert them into customers. Dollar for dollar websites is a great place to spend your marketing budget. Each postcard costs $0.44 just for the stamp, sending 1000 postcards costs around $500. For every 1000 postcards, you will usually generate on average five leads. Contrast that with a blog that given proper promotion can provide you with greater exposure, more leads and in addition create lasting relationships to help you convert them to customers. All for the same price.

Potential, past and future clients visit and return to your site for the content you provide. As a realtor, you can provide many interesting types of content either from sources such as MLS or from personal experience and knowledge. Most people will visit your site for up to date listing information and return to view updated information or newer listings. It’s important to make the listings easy to share since your visitors will be sending them around gathering their friends, family and spouses opinion. A link is much easier to share then making people enter write down and enter the MLS number. The second source of content for your professional real estate blog is local information about the area. When showing homes people ask you all sorts of questions about the neighborhood, write these down, then write a blog post about each question. If one person asked you the question chances are more people have the same question and probably searching for it on google. If you create a post about it they will find your website.

Your professional real estate website is a showcase for your services, invest time in building up your site. Make sure it looks like a site you would trust using. Keep the information on it current and targeted to your audience and when they are looking to rent or purchase their next house they will choose you.

How to improve your copywriting’s conversion rate by writing for individuals, rather than groups

What do you think is the most important element of your copywriting? The headline? The benefits? Or the product itself?

Well, this was the topic of Eric Graham’s (aka The Conversion Doctor) recent video – ‘My #1 Conversion Boosting Secret Revealed’ – and I don’t think I’ll be sending any shockwaves by revealing that it’s understanding your reader.

In the rush to get websites live, emails sent and direct mail in the post, assumptions are often made about the target audience’s hopes and fears. But this can be a mistake because the copy is read by individuals, not a homogeneous group. And making assumptions about your reader could mean missing a lesser known critical pain point that triggers them into buying.

So how can you build a better understanding of your readers as individuals, and avoid lazy stereotyping?

Eric’s video is packed with useful advice, so I’d recommend sitting down with a notepad and watching it all the way through.

But if you’d like a quick overview, here are a few tips you might find useful:

1. Read the magazines and blogs your target is likely to read. This will help you get inside their head and build your knowledge of the issues they’re dealing with, as well as identify what type of language to use.

2. Visit the forums frequented by your readers. Note down any questions, comments or complaints on common problems they need solving.

3. Interview at least 10 people from your target market. Prompt the interviewee with a few questions and then just let them talk. Record the calls and get them transcribed. You should then use THEIR EXACT WORDS in your copy so you can reflect back at your readers their language and mental dialogue so it engages on a deeper level (watch Eric’s video for an example).

4. Create a customer profile of 1-3 paragraphs based on your research. Your profile should describe an imaginary person matching some of the typical characteristics you’ve discovered. This could include their family, education, income, occupation, and hobbies. Then imagine you’re addressing this fictional person when you’re writing.

It’s easy to make assumptions about target readers. But often the key to effective copywriting is finding that hidden pain point or desire which unlocks people’s resistance to buying.

The best way of discovering what keeps your target reader awake at night is to actually talk to them, which is why I think tip 3, in particular, could make a big improvement to conversion rates.

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