From hard earned experience, I’ve learnt the best way to succeed here is to have a documented content strategy that is agreed and distributed amongst the wider team in the office. It ensures:

• You’re more organised and aligned to your goals
• You get buy-in from your wider team in the agency
• Greater effectiveness in content marketing tactics and social media
• You can justify budget to spend on content marketing
• You are monitoring and measuring the success of each content piece and making the most of your program

I learnt this the hard way. When I first started out in real estate content marketing I didn’t have a documented content strategy. I rolled from month to month randomly adding in different types of content covering different topics that I thought would be valuable. Not surprisingly the results weren’t very good. I had no idea who I was talking to, I had no clear mission, I wasn’t creating content to support any goal, I wasn’t offering much value and I certainly wasn’t differentiating our brand.

Fast track 2 years and a lot of analysis into why things weren’t working, I created a documented content strategy.

• I conducted a content audit to understand what content we already had
• I looked at what was working with our current content and what wasn’t
• I looked at what was working on social media and what wasn’t
• I analysed our competitors – what were they doing well
• I mapped our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
• I mapped out our audience
• I created content goals
• I created a monthly plan for content
• Finally, I created a dashboard to track and measure content performance

2 years later and we were winning the ultimate industry awards for digital presence – an award we went on to win 3 times.

Why did we win – we drove significant tangible business results through our digital program and I can proudly say the content strategy underpinned this success.