Content marketing is an important part of a real estate agent’s marketing toolkit. You know you need to keep in touch with your contacts on a regular basis. It encourages them to think of you when they, or someone they know, needs an agent. Offer great ebooks, and everyone will want one! These tips will help you use them effectively.
Use Ebooks for Direct Response Marketing
As you probably know, direct response marketing for real estate agents is the most effective type of marketing. Everything that you publish should include a call to action that motivates the reader to take you up on some type of special offer. In the world of content marketing, that special offer is often some type of information, such as a free ebook, that the reader just can’t resist owning.
You can use real estate ebooks as a special offer when you send emails to your contacts using your real estate CRM, when you put the offer in a blog post that you also feature on your social media sites, and when you make an offer to your website visitors. You can also put offers on things such as house flyers, post cards, and any type of marketing material.
What Makes an Ebook Irresistible?
As a real estate agent, you know many things that typical buyers and sellers don’t know. But you need to make that information attractive to the consumer.
- The first thing that makes an ebook irresistible is the topic you choose. It must be information that the consumer wants. Choosing a topic sounds difficult to many agents. The thing to remember is that you probably take your knowledge for granted. It’s easy to think that everyone knows what you know, but they don’t.
- After the topic, the most important characteristic of a good ebook is the title. It needs to have a marketing spin to it. For example, you could use an ebook titled, How to Write an Offer. Or, you could use one called, How to Write an Offer that Sellers Can’t Resist. The ebook could contain exactly the same information, but which one do you think will generate more interest?
You Can Write an Ebook Yourself
An ebook doesn’t have to be a huge project. Some marketing ebooks are only two to three pages long. Add in some images, and writing isn’t that big of a project.
Finding Topics
Many agents have a difficult time thinking of topics for their real estate ebooks. Anything that makes a good blog post would probably also make a good ebook topic. You’ll also find help on the internet such a this list of 121 ideas for real estate reports. You can think of a report like an ebook. It’s all in how you market it.
Learning How
If you want some steps to follow to prepare an ebook, this ebook how-to guide from the well-respected marketers at Hubspot is a big help. They also offer 13 free customizable ebook templates that you can use in Powerpoint.
You Don’t Need to Write the Ebook Yourself
You can put your own mark on an ebook if you do it yourself, but there are some alternatives. If you do a search online, you’ll even find some free ebooks like the ones listed below. Naturally, you need to evaluate whether they’re of a quality you want to use – the list doesn’t indicate our endorsement.
- Houselogic: This is the content arm of NAR.
- Homes.com: You must provide your contact information to get these ebooks but you can always unsubscribe later if you don’t want to be bothered.
Your other alternative is to hire a writer to create the ebooks for you. If you get one client from an ebook, you’ve paid for the cost of hiring a writer many times over.
Next Steps
If you could get leads yourself just from having a great offer that consumers will respond to, would you do it? Try writing or acquiring one ebook and give it a try; you may need a bit of trial and error to find the topics your market responds to best.
But whether you’re using someone else’s topic idea or writing about a service you provide to your clients such as the effectiveness of real estate SMS marketing or obtaining showing feedback, you may find that real estate ebooks are just leads waiting to happen.
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