Traditional marketing for country club real estate has seen a decline in sales results for some years. Inbound marketing can be a solution for effective lead generation and increased sales.

Unlike the old outbound methods of buying ads or mailing lists to generate leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating informative content to provide value to potential customers. By creating content that is valuable to your clients and aligning it directly with their needs, you can build interest that will translate into sales and loyalty over time.

Real estate marketing is one area that has traditionally used outbound marketing techniques and channels to create interest and drive consumers to action.  As more consumers make buying decisions using these new inbound channels, content marketing is a natural fit for real estate marketing. Let’s examine the process of a typical inbound marketing campaign.

Content and Inbound Marketing Methodology Explained

Golf Community Real Estate - The goal of inbound marketing is to create content that is relevant and will educate, entertain, or inform your customers. With the proper content, your inbound campaign will have four distinct phases.

1.     Attraction - Creating buyer personas, or archetypes of your ideal clients, helps you to create content that is useful and relevant to your target market. Using methods like blogging and social media to distribute your content, and optimizing keyword placement to aid with search, you can attract visitors to your site that are prime consumers of your services.

2.    Conversion - Once you’ve driven traffic to your site, you need to convert readers into leads by gathering contact information. Contact information is the most valuable currency there is to the online marketer. By offering something valuable like a free ebook or whitepaper as an incentive, you can get visitors to willingly provide their information for later follow-up.

3.     Closing - You’ve attracted the right people to your site, and with your valuable information, you’ve converted them to leads. Now it’s time to turn those leads into customers. By using closing tools like lead scoring or ranking leads in order of interest, email follow-up, marketing automation to nurture leads through the process, and analyzing where those leads came from; you can turn those leads into customers.

4.   Loyalty - Inbound is about creating valuable content and continuously communicating with your visitors throughout their engagement life cycle. This commitment will drive your customers to spread the word about your company through their social networks in an organic way.

Inbound marketing is about creating value to attract your ideal customer, and that is what keeps them engaged and coming back to your site. Creating a campaign using content personalized to your visitor’s level of involvement guides them through the engagement life cycle.  By using a targeted multi-channel approach through various social media networks where they’re searching for information, you can offer value. Integration of your publishing with analytics tools allow you to focus on publishing the right content in the right place at the right time.

Content Marketing Sells Real Estate For Country Clubs

A recent study found that the way to grow and sustain golf is to give occasional and infrequent golfers a reason to become “engaged” golfers. “Engagement” is one of the primary benefits of effective inbound marketing.  The Canadian Golf Consumer Behavior Study found that the game “needs more engaged/loyal consumers, arguably more than it needs new participants.”

Country Club Real Estate Amenities

A recent article on the Golf Inc. website summed it up. 

“The strategy of building on your base is a sound primary goal for increasing revenues. The more engaged the golfer, the more he or she will spend on rounds, equipment, lessons, apparel and everything else. As in the US, avid and core golfers in Canada – 25 percent of the nation's 5.7 million total – account for the majority of rounds played and money spent."

Inbound marketing is a means of engaging these core consumers as well as attracting new or infrequent players to the game. Through the use of content like video golf lessons, blogs featuring tips, and even unique personalized discount offers, new and occasional players will become more engaged.

“Golf: It‘s a great game. Millions of people enjoy playing it. But like retailing, it requires a complex bundle of systems to create and deliver a satisfactory player/customer experience. Some operators haven’t figured out how to do that in the face of profound social and technological change. The business model needs to be updated or new models developed, perhaps in ways we haven’t imagined yet.” – GolfWikiBiz.com

Inbound marketing is a perfect solution to the challenges facing country clubs today. It is a means of increasing and enhancing the existing player’s experience while engaging and motivating new players to join the game. Creative content and targeted delivery will ensure that country clubs continue to thrive and grow during this challenging time and well into the future.

About Michael Conway

I'm the owner and strategist at Means-of-Production. My firm builds Squarespace websites, Houzz profiles, and content marketing and advertising solutions for architects, interior designers, design-build contractors and landscape design firms. Our all-in-one marketing tactics attract the right clients with exceptional architectural photography and brand messaging that sets you apart from the competition.