Want better content marketing ideas? Start with audience relevance.

• Joshua Lasky
• Jun 23, 2021

At Revmade, we’re constantly keeping track of content trends across our clients’ industries through an approach we call our Relevance Monitor – a methodology for uncovering audience intelligence for our clients that we’re constantly refining. And today we decided to kick off a series of articles to look at what’s relevant across different industries and topics, using the methodology behind our Relevance Monitor. Partially because we’re endlessly nerdy and partially because we think this stuff is endlessly useful. Today, we’re talking audience content trends powering activity in the real estate market.

Throw a stick in any direction, and you’ll find an article about a red-hot housing market, frustrated Millennials opting for rentals over homebuying, or rising (and falling) home construction prices. Healthcare has understandably been a primary topic during the COVID-19 pandemic, but real estate is just as pressing as generations grapple with a historically abnormal housing market.

We surfaced the publishers that had quantifiable relevance for those audiences interested in home buying (or selling) and the articles with demonstrated traffic impact from those publishers. After crunching the data, a few trends stand out:

• Buying a home is only the first step: After the purchase, people still need help bringing their new place up to snuff. We found that target audiences weren’t just keyed on the websites talking directly about real estate (e.g., realtor.com), they were also likely to be engaging with home lifestyle and design publications like housebeautiful.com and architecturaldigest.com, or media entities that span the two (hello, HGTV). You can see strong engagement on this subject across evergreen and emerging topics: for example, ideas for bedroom decorating, how to get your space organized, before and after backyard transformations, and tips for how to care for succulent plants.

• Audiences need guidance in a challenging housing market: The most resonant articles were keyed into perceptions about where this overheated housing market is heading. Resonant articles created a drumbeat on whether the housing market is due for a crash, whether the crash will be bigger than we think, and if data is pointing in the wrong direction. It’s not all negative, though: Articles providing info to prospective homebuyers on what to do if they’re on the outside looking in also drove substantial engagement. To sum it up: Whether your organization has a positive or negative take on where the housing market is heading, audiences are hungry for a point of view — and informed predictions — to help guide them.

• Aspirations and inspiration are recurrent themes: Whether it’s celebrity home stalking or spectacular vistas, audiences flock to content that acts as a bit of an escape for them. Readers won’t necessarily relate to “Miley Cyrus’s Beautifully Boisterous Los Angeles Home,” but there’s a level of fascination that is undeniable in the data. And HGTV practically has a cottage industry of its own with its myriad sweepstakes (and the content campaigns surrounding them). Just last month it announced the winner of its Dream Home 2021 campaign to considerable audience engagement.

So, how can you as a marketer take advantage of these insights? We see three areas of opportunity:

• Think beyond the point of transaction. While you can’t get closer to the sale than the point of purchase itself, there are lots of data points leading up to (and trailing) a transaction. In this case, what matters most to consumers after their home purchases? Are there topics or needs not yet met — either by your organization or your competitors? Even a quick survey could yield unexpected insights.

• Find the whitespace between your audience and your expertise. Data may illuminate surging audience interest in a certain area (say, concerns about a looming market crash), but that doesn’t mean your brand should weigh in on it. Carefully reflect on audience trends in the context of your brand and expertise, and strike on the opportunities with the best fit.

• Understand it’s a big (long, and sometimes unusual) game. Not every audience touchpoint will lead to a sale, and that’s OK. In real estate, readers clearly have their eyes set on aspirations that may be years away from fruition. Creating content that provides a resource to your target audience increases the likelihood that you’ll be able to earn trust and build a relationship that can eventually lead to a transaction – or several. R