Photo by Brandon Alms
Purchase Photo
Hometown: Springfield | Twitter: @kdrenon
Take Note: In 2017, Drenon beat out Madison Hildebrand of Million Dollar Listing fame to win the award for best social media strategy from The Enterprise Network, the prestigious industry group to which Murney belongs.
If you’ve ever devoured a post on The Murney Blog, you have Kyle Drenon and his team at Murney Associates, Realtors® to thank. The temp–turned–full-time graphic designer began exploring how content marketing could work for the firm in 2015. Six months and a 45-page proposal later, he had talked himself into a new job: Murney’s first director of marketing. Two years since Drenon, 34, transformed the blog, Murney’s content marketing strategy is paying off big time.
“With any writing, you have to know your audience first and foremost, and [you should] have a mission for the content you’re creating. People say you should have a blog, but the plan behind the blog is more important than just getting stuff out there. It has to always go back to a mission statement, and ours is that we’re selling more than a home, we’re selling a community as well. We feel like we’re uniquely qualified to be the stewards of that information—giving people a real picture of what it’s like to live in Springfield and really the Ozarks as a whole—because we’re out in that community every day.
“One of our KPIs for the success of content marketing has been overall web traffic and the number of sessions on our site. At last count, we had over 200,000 unique viewers of the blog content for the calendar year. Since we implemented it, we’ve seen a yearly increase of 500,000 sessions. That’s [the] number of times [people have] logged on. I think it was an increase by about a third. Overall web traffic went up exponentially as well. Content has given us the ability to connect with people in our community and shine a light on some of the things that people are doing that our readers may not have known about.”
