Today, I'm going to share what Inbound Marketing for real estate looks like, and how you can use this methodology to change the way you market yourself, your team or your brokerage, and see results that end up being the targeted, best case scenario clients you are dying to attract.

Granted, this is a VERY abbreviated explanation of what Inbound Marketing actually is. It is my intention though to give you the basics. If you are interested in learning more, I'm more than happy to discuss this with you, personally, at length.

WHAT IS INBOUND MARKETING?

Inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream clients, inbound marketing attracts qualified prospects to your real estate practice and keeps them coming back for more.

In other words, it's the age old suggestion that "givers gain."

To figure out who your "ideal clients" are, you need to build client personas for the people in your marketplace. Client personas ensure you are relevant to the needs of your ideal clients. If you are, there is an inherent, built-in human condition that will keep people coming back to your blog or social media sites to learn more, and also make them feel like they owe you something in return (e.g. calling you and asking you to come to their home for a listing appointment).

HOW DOES INBOUND MARKETING WORK?

For the purposes of today, I'm going to give a very, very brief overview of each step of the process. If I get enough response from this article, I will devote an article to each step of the Inbound Marketing methodology in detail, and also give you tips on how to specifically relate that knowledge to real estate. Just comment on this article and I'll hook you up.

The basic ideas of the Inbound Marketing process are:

• Content Creation - Using the personas of the ideal customers in your marketplace that you've built, create targeted content that answers your ideal customer's basic questions and needs. You not only create that content, but you also share it. A rule of thumb is to figure that you spend 40% of your time developing content and 60% of your time promoting that content. You promote that content, of course, through your social media channels.

• Pipeline Marketing - You need to recognize that people go through stages as they are preparing themselves for the idea of selling their home, and that each stage requires different marketing/follow-up actions. Based on this, you need to come up with a strategy for follow-up messages that speak to each of these stages.

• Personalization - As you learn more about your leads over time, you can better personalize your messages to their specific needs. This is best done by tracking email open rates, what links they are clicking on, what other pages on your website they are looking at, and what they talk with you about when you speak with them on the phone.

• Multi-channel - Inbound marketing is multi-channel by nature because it approaches people where they are, in the channel where they want to interact with you (e.g. whatever platform they originally found you on--your blog, Facebook fan page, Google+ account, Twitter page, LinkedIn account, etc.). For that reason, you want to share your content across all your online platforms.

• Integration - All your publishing tools and analytic tools need to work together. This is where a flexible, robust CRM comes into play, allowing you to easily track interactions, respond to people and quickly find out what is working and what isn't.

SOUNDS EASY, RIGHT?

So given my very, very brief description of Inbound Marketing, it sounds easy enough, right? Well, truth be told, this isn't a magic bullet. Just like any type of marketing initiative you take on, it requires relentless consistency.

Inbound Marketing is my passion project--a project I think is massively underused by the real estate community. For those that are interested, I want to help you get started.

Have a great day! :)

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.