With today’s tech savvy consumer and our smart phones pulling at us with a gravitational force like never before seen, now is the time to create. Our customers are now sifting through pools of data about home sales, the history of properties, comps… many of them likely feel that they should get a license themselves.
This is our chance to show them our skills… and thanks to Facebook, we can now pinpoint and grab the mindshare of buyers and sellers in any small part through hyper local targeting.
What Exactly is a “Digital Mayor”?
The term was coined by Gary Vaynerchuk in 2016 at the Inman real estate conference. He is a big proponent of constant content creation and if you follow him, I am sure you will agree that the amount of posts, videos, blog posts, snapchats and Instagram stories this guy produces on a daily basis is just dizzying… but effective. The plan is to become the media company for your community. Great restaurants, local business reviews, what traffic bottlenecks to avoid, who serves the best cinnamon buns… These are the things that can help you create goodwill with an audience that is sure to have a real estate need at some point in time.
Take Your Real Estate Hat Off
Being the digital mayor is not about selling real estate and our biggest challenge with content creation is to truly take ourselves out of the picture and step into the shoes of our audience. It’s so easy to be promotional when the camera turns on, but resist with all your power. Instead, look for the gaps in information available for our future customers and then make content to fill that void.
Be Prepared for the Long Game
Our mortgages are due every single month, and of course having a buyer jump in the car and buy today would be more ideal… but we are not selling ipods here.
Real estate is a slow burn. Relationships take time, and planning life moves can take even longer…
With a NAR average of 5 years, our customers have a long planning cycle and whether buying or selling, knowing the play is a long term plan will only help us in becoming the digital mayor. Creating evergreen content will stretch your efforts for years, so staying away from monthly market updates or anything that can be quickly dated is a good move. Consider interviewing your local elementary school’s principal, answer questions that incoming buyers with your families need to know.
Choose Your Channels
Whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, we all have our favorite social channels. In a perfect world, distribute to all of them, but let’s face facts… we get busy and unless you have a social media manager, pushing great stuff out to all the channels is just not reasonable. If I had to choose one, I would choose YouTube, simply because Google is the search engine of search engines, and if I am creating long form content, it only helps to be where people are searching. Quora is also a great place to land because the entire platform is based around people asking questions.
Be the King of Content
Taking the time to shine a spotlight on things you feel your customers would want and need to know is all if takes to become the digital mayor in your city. Asking yourself what you would want to know if you were relocating.. or asking yourself if you were selling, what should you see before choosing an agent? This is the best way to make your claim for content in your community. Be like Gary V. Just keep going. Be purposeful, and more importantly, be helpful.
