Content marketing is something that I’ve seen people get involved with again and again only to give it up after a few blog posts when executives decide there isn’t any return on investment.

It’s often a hard sell especially when management doesn’t understand how to measure its success or how to create valuable content.

Content marketing is more than just blog posts. It includes everything from videos, social media posts, articles, guides, press releases, podcasts, pretty much anything that can make an impact by putting valuable information in front of your audience.

One of the major mistakes people make is not effectively promoting their content. It doesn’t matter how valuable an article explaining how to buy a home is if no one is reading it.

Producing quality content is one step but you also need a strategy in place to promote it as well.

If you create a blog post on your website for example be sure to post it to your company Facebook page, tweet it out using your company’s Twitter account and tweet it out again in another couple of hours. Post it to LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and any other social media accounts your company might have.

If you have the budget you might even want to spend a few dollars promoting your social media posts to get them in front of more people.

This is especially effective if you don’t have a large audience on social media yet. For a few dollars a post you can select an audience of people based on almost any criteria you could imagine so exactly the correct people will see your post.

You don’t have to stop with just social media either, if you’re a member of any communities or forums in the real estate industry post there as well.

If you have multiple people or teams managing things like social media or content production make sure they coordinate with each other to effectively promote the content you’re investing in creating.

Another mistake is not knowing the strengths and weakness of the platforms you’re using. Twitter for example is great for quick sound bites of information since you don’t have many characters to send a message. Instagram on the other hand is the place for visual content, if you have beautiful photos of homes for example post those there.

Content marketing is all about providing value to your followers. Your ultimate goal is to generate leads and make sales but you can’t just start off with promotional content.

When pushing for a big sale it’s better to start off with education articles for example to build permission and trust. Back these articles up with a social media campaign to keep the ideas in the minds of your followers and then once you have their attention you push your promotional message.

Your main goal with content marketing is to gain the attention of your followers and get their permission to send them more content.

Once you’ve gained their permission and trust by providing valuable content then you can make your sales pitch. Since you’ve already established trust providing them with a relevant sales message can be incredibly powerful.

Content marketing is definitely worth it but you need to do it in a way that’s less about aggressively pushing your sales messages and more about building long term relationships.

If you adopt this mind set your content marketing efforts will be much more successful and you’ll get more people in your company to buy into the idea.

For more on the topics discussed in this article I highly recommend the books Permission Marketing by Seth Godin, Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk.