[CASE STUDY] How this London-based letting agent got 11,600 landlords & tenants visiting one single blog post, without paying a penny

If you have ever seen any of my videos or read any of my blog articles, you are probably somewhat familiar with our 8-step roadmap for taking someone from cold to an advocate.

This is called the Customer Value Journey. (Here is an interview with Christopher Watkin on YouTube, where I explain the concept.)

And step one, is called awareness.

If you want to attract leads, be that landlords, tenants and even vendors and buyers, your prospects need to know your agency exists. If they don’t, there is no chance of them ever instructing you.

There are many ways to promote your brand and make prospects ‘aware’ of you.

You can use social media, canvassing, local print media, events, SEO, PPC, YouTube, even things like your ‘for let’ boards and shop front promote your brand.

In a nutshell, any channel that puts your services, offers, and solutions in front of your ideal prospects.

And the aim of the awareness phase is to reach as many of your ideal prospects (such as landlords) as you can, each and every day, but ideally, for as little of your money as possible.

One of those ways is through blogging.

But here is where you need to be cleverer with your approach to get something back.

There are 4.4 million blogs written each day (as of March 2019, Source: Worldometers).

So, writing just any old blog talking about stuff you care about (but not what your landlords want to read) is not going to help you in any way. There is just too much noise out there and your local community could do without any more irrelevant content.

The key to attracting the prospects you want with your blog content is to fully understand their current pain points and struggles and offer them quick-win solutions, one blog at a time.

Your blogs should appeal to your ideal landlords even if they are not always about property related subjects – as long as they address a problem or answer a question a landlord would have or ask.  

Why?

Because the aim of blogging is to make someone aware of your brand and position you as the company they can trust.

It’s NOT to sell your services. This happens later in the journey.

Here is what a good blog looks like:

• It’s well-written and researched, inspirational and thought-provoking.
• It’s well optimised for a chance to rank in Google.
• It has a great headline, one which will entice them, engage them and capture their attention as well as attract clicks, likes and shares on social media.
• It is well laid out – not just a bunch of paragraphs copied from Word, but with proper spacing, font size and use of sub-headings, images and links.  
• Has one main call to action which is in-line with the topic. (This is where you can progress this prospect to the next phase of the customer journey.)
• Is properly tracked and has Facebook and Google retargeting pixel in place.

Ok, without further ado, here’s how this estate and letting agent client of ours got 11,600 landlords visiting one blog post since it got published. (Sept 2018-Dec 2019)

First, let’s talk about the topic – ‘When is a landlord responsible for paying council tax’ – this is a very landlord specific topic. In fact, it’s a question which many landlords would want to know the answer to. So, we can comfortably assume that anyone searching this question (or this topic) is going to be a landlord – which is who we are looking to attract to our client’s blog.

Choosing the right topic is crucial for a successful marketing strategy. The best way to decide what topics to cover is to create a customer avatar, and then list any topics that will help your avatar improve their life somehow.

Here are some ideas on blog post types you can be using on your website.

The next thing we did was to understand what keywords we should optimise this blog post for, so we can attract traffic organically.

Here is an example of the top 7 keywords we have ranked our article for in position 1 and 2 and the volume of monthly searches.

Not all of your blog posts will rank on page 1, but if you do not invest time in properly optimising your blogs they will have very little chance of ranking for any decent keywords.

Below, you can see that the vast majority of the traffic to our blog article has come from organic search, some 11,250 visitors.

What’s also interesting is that 292 visitors came direct which probably suggest that they bookmarked this blog in their browser.

Only 39 people came from a referral – this means from other sites that have linked to our blog article. And finally, 19 people came through organic social media channels. (i.e. not paid advertising)

What’s important to note is that we would not have known any of this if we did not track and review our data.

Knowing which of your blog posts attract visitors and what those visitors do when they arrive on your page (i.e. do they bounce back, do they go to another section of the site, do they stay for long) will allow you to take further actions – such as improving your call to action, your copy, your ranking, retargeting your visitors with the correct messages and creating new blogs or assets that will progress their journey to the next logical step.