If you want to rely on content marketing, you better get it right. Every day, countless businesses publish blog posts, ebooks, and whitepapers that receive few or no views. They spend hours of time coming up with content, providing minimal returns to an audience that can't find it or simply isn't interested.

How do you reach home buyers and sellers that are choosing the internet as their most trusted resource over getting in touch with a realtor? How do you find just the right moment to offer a partnership with them?

Answering these questions can be difficult. In the real estate industry, audience behavior is rapidly changing. As Homes.com points out, millennials now represent the largest share of home buyers at 32%, and they don't go through the process in the same way their predecessors did:

For many realtors, marketing is a nuisance. Reaching potential homebuyers is both expensive and vague; in fact, it's almost impossible to find a traditional marketing tactic that reaches only the audience you want to communicate with.

Billboards, TV ads, and other traditional marketing options can get your face known in the local community. But above all, they take significant budgets to run, only to interrupt the lives of their viewers, 95% of whom probably don't want to buy or sell their home anytime soon.

Every business needs marketing, but no one has time for it.

You need to promote your law firm in order to expand your reach and gain new clients. But at the same time, full case loads and administrative needs make prioritizing those promotions on a daily basis a struggle.

Of course, the worst thing you could do in that case is to forego marketing altogether. So instead, why not automate your practices?

If you're new to the concept of inbound and lead-based marketing, it's tempting to consider lead generation as the central goal of your efforts. But what happens once those leads enter your database?

Ignoring existing leads can be devastating. Only a fraction of the contacts in your database are actually ready to become your clients, while the majority probably signed up for some interesting content.