Link building has been dead for years – say the people who fail to adapt to the changes and don’t leverage the link building for the lead generation. In the previous blogs, I have shared the tactics to reach out to your target audience. Today, I will share the techniques to make your target audience reach you.

That happens when your real estate website is ranking high in Google. And good rank comes with link building if done right of course.

Google favours good quality backlinks, that’s why it has listed Link building the number 1 factor for ranking and content being the king of ranking. So, both go hand in hand. If you are trying to rank well on Google without backlinks, you are fighting the battle with both hands tied behind your back.

If you don’t believe me, hear it directly from Google officials, Andrey Lipattsev. Andrey is a search quality senior strategist at Google who confirms that the first two ranking factors are Links pointing to your website and Content.

Now, when Google says so, you got to take it seriously and spend your time and money on it because you know it will generate good results.

Should you just get the paid links to your website if links are the most important ranking factor?
NO! Let me tell you what types of links Google favours

What Google thinks is a good link?

All links are not equal depending on the quality. Relevancy is the key. Links should be relevant to your business, to your audience and must be associated with the great content.

Natural high-quality links + People Loving the Content = Google Keeps you high-ranked

Let’s compare Bad Link Building with Good Link Building to shed more light on the both

Tips for Building Good High-Quality Backlinks

1. Ask for favour

Friends, relatives, or real estate colleagues, who have their website up and running, are a good source to get a backlink if you are new to it. Don’t tell them to put your website link in the sidebar or footer. Have them a blog written on their website that somehow links your business. Tell them to insert a link to your website in the blog content. If your friend’s website is relevant to your business niche, that’s icing on the cake.

2. Build Long Term Relationships

It’s a long shot, but a sure shot. A well built and maintained professional relationship goes a long way in the lead generation. You do it by indulging in a conversation in the comment section of the blog that is related to your niche or on Facebook under the post related to your business niche. By actively participating in such conversations you build good relations with people of your business community and increase your chances to getting backlinks.
If you do drop your website’s link in the comment, you are likely to get spammed by the blog owner.

3. Testimonials

Testimonials are another great way to get you a backlink. It’s a give and take relation. The other side gets a testimonial from you and you get a backlink from them. Be sure of giving a testimonial to the website that is higher that has a higher rank than your website and is relevant to your business niche.

4. Directory Listing

Not all directories are good and not all directories are bad. I recommend listing your website on the directories that regularly get updated, give you option of sharing content along with the link and related to your business niche. Having your website listed in such directory websites also help you index your website pages.

5. Guest Blogging

The website for which you are guest blogging must have high Domain Authority, trustworthy, and related to your business niche. The content or blog your write for them must be informational, educate the audience, add value to their website, well-written, professional, interesting, relevant to the topic and most importantly must not be promotional at all. Promotional blogs are rejected by the website owners. You can ask to put a backlink where you mention author’s profile.

6. Start Your Own Blog

You can have your blog setup on Blogger or WordPress with a different domain name if your website is also on WordPress. Keep updating your blog site with helpful information for the users. Have a set of keywords work for you. Keep the 80-20 ratio i.e. 80% blog should be informational and 20% of the blog should be promotional. Or you can simply leave a Call-To-Action at the end of each blog linking back to your website.

These are the Tips that help you BUILD your BACKLINKS. There’s another technique that let EARN your BACKLINKS.

Building the backlinks is all about your efforts in different areas to build good quality backlinks.
Earning the backlinks is all about your efforts at one place i.e. the content creation and you let the content do its work.
Let’s recall what Andrey Lipattsev said; the first two ranking factors are Links pointing to your website and Content. Now, we will focus on the content.

The ingredients of a Good content that Google loves are
Interesting
Relevant
Valuable
Offers Solutions
Easy Accessible
Desirable
Engages the Reader

Such Good content will bring you the backlinks naturally. And, by good content, I don’t mean only the written content. There’s a lot of scope for content to be interesting, relevant, valuable, solution oriented, desirable, and easily accessible.

We have Infographics, Powerpoint Presentations, Lists, case studies, reports, videos, transcripts, and podcasts.

Read my blog on best marketing material and lead generation mediums

In a Nutshell

Organic high-quality link building has always been hard. So, don’t lose hope if you don’t get desired results in short time by link building. It’s a long-term plan. Link building demands its own time and efforts. And, if you keep following the right techniques, your link building strategy will be on the right track soon.

Why am I saying this? Because people often move toward black hat ways to get link building done. Black Hat means illegal in Google’s language. And, if Google finds out that you are following black hat techniques, then it can penalize your website permanently. And, why go the Black Hat way when you need real people, real connection, and real relationship with your clients.

If you need any assistance in link building, share your queries with me.

So far, I have shared with you how to generate leads using various channels, how to manage leads in the marketing and sales process, how to nurture leads and how to avoid mistakes in your lead generation process. Today’s blog is based on one topic and one topic only i.e. LinkedIn Lead Generation.

Many marketers miss the trick I am about to discuss today. It’s not your average LinkedIn lead generation tactic. This tactic will teach you how to reach in potential’s client’s email inbox without knowing their email address. Yes, this can happen. LinkedIn helps you do that. When I applied this tactic for my LinkedIn lead generation campaign, I received an overwhelming response from it.

To begin, you need to have a Linkedin account, premium if possible!

If you have a Linkedin Account you must have noticed that email you receive from Linkedin that tells you who has viewed your profile. What do you do when you receive that email? Most of you might ignore that email in particular. Some of you might visit the profiles of those who visit your profile.

Did you notice that people who you don’t know anything about are in your inbox and somehow making you visit their LinkedIn profile?

That’s what we have to do.

As a realtor, you target sellers and buyers. Now, if you cover only a region or a town, still there could be thousands of sellers and an equal number of buyers for that matter. You don’t know everyone’s email address or Linkedin Profile, but you do know they are from one particular place. Let’s say you serve in Vancouver and your work in condo sales in Vancouver.

For this LinkedIn lead generation strategy to work in your favor, you need to join the LinkedIn groups that are related to Vancouver and Vancouver condos. If you are not restricting yourself to an area, you can join the groups that are related to property types.

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The next step is to visit profiles of the people who have joined that group. Just open the link. Now, we know there are 5,000 to 500,000 group members sometimes. You can make a schedule to visit a fixed number of profiles every day. You can either do it via an app called LinkClump or you can do it manually. It just takes a few minutes to click on 10 profiles at a time. Then you can continue doing your job. After an hour or so, click on 10 more and so on. Set the target of 50 or 100 profile visits per day.

Your action of profile visiting will send those people a notification and an email from Linkedin that you have visited their profile. For a moment, they look who you are what you do and the question that intrigues them the most is ‘Why he visited my profile?’ So, what they do is they visit your profile back. And, if the persons who have visited your profile back are either sellers or buyers, they might be interested in you as you are a realtor. That’s job done for you there.

Even for every 100 profile visits, you get 4-8 profile visits back and invite you to connect, these 4-8 people are likely to get your services because they have shown interest. They are in your sales cycle. The next step is to delight them.

This Linkedin lead generation tactic is used to make people feel your presence and grow your professional circle with the target audience. When you perform this tactic, make sure you have enabled the option of add connection for faster response.

It’s a practice of pitching yourself to the targeted audience without spending a penny.

The second phase of this practice is creating a group. If you haven’t come across any such groups on Linkedin that are related to your business or service niche, then you simply create a new group and add new members. This way you would know that people in a particular group have similar interest. You can pitch them the content of their liking.

Building group’s reputation takes time and a lot of good content, but it’s all worth it.

Now, the Big Question
After seeing the profiles in the group, why don’t simply send an invitation to connect on Linkedin?

You wouldn’t know by just seeing them in the group that they need your services or looking for a realtor. This tactic is for funneling the lead to the targeted ones. You can send them the invitation to connect who has viewed your profile back. The chances of working with them increase.

Once you connect with them, send them a customized message and schedule a meeting with them. Share your number with them. Once they are in your profile, the next step is to convert them into clients.

When I started visiting profiles of my target audience, I got 4% response. A few in those 4% viewed my profile and the left ones did send me an invitation. Those who only viewed my profile, I send them an invitation and a personal message to all those 4%. They are still in contact and I am building a good professional relationship.

Don’t simply rely on this single LinkedIn lead generation method; consider it an additional strategy when you don’t have time or resources. You will find other free and effective lead generation strategies mentioned in my previous blogs.

Continuing to the common lead generation mistakes, today I will share 7 more such mistakes that are hampering the digital marketing campaigns and lead generation processes. Being a realtor, you don’t have to adapt core digital marketing skills to practice the best lead generation methods. Once you clutch these tips, you can do it on your own.

Before this, you can read Common Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid (Part – 1)

Going for Quantity Over Quality

Number of leads generated matters, but this shouldn’t be the priority. Priority must be treating each potential lead with sincerity and focusing on individual leads. We don’t sell cola bottles in real estate where our customer base is in millions. Realtors should look for long term relation with their best clients. Realtors make the mistake of going after quantity and in the process of that; they miss out quality in their service.

So, don’t keep on filling your sales pipelines with irrelevant leads. Those leads will waste your time and resources.

Not Aligning Marketing and Sales Departments

Before aligning sales and marketing departments one needs to understand how a lead is defined for both the departments. Once a marketing qualified lead is sales-ready, it should be sent to the sales department. If a sales-ready lead retreats, then it is sent back to the marketing department.

The catch here is that marketing department and sales department must share a common definition of marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead. That way, both will know which department will handle the lead when the lead reaches a particular state in the sales cycle.

Scripting

It’s a two decade old practice that doesn’t align with today’s inbound methodologies. The need of the hour is treating each lead separately and customizing messages for it. You just can’t send the same message to every contact in the list.

For Instance: Assume you have 15% leads in your contact list are ready to buy a property and 35% of the leads are the ones who are still finding the right property and 25% of the contacts are the first time buyers.
You can pitch ‘buy this property at best price’ to all of them.

15% leads (Sales-ready leads) should get the message ‘buy this property at best price or discount available’
35% of the leads (awareness stage) should get ‘Finding difficulty in choosing the right property to buy? Here are the best options for you.’
25% leads (first time buyer) should get ‘Tips for the first time property buyers’

Now, imagine pitching the same message to all of them, which, in fact, a big blunder in lead generation
The first time buyers are getting the message ‘Buy this property at best price’
or
Sales-ready leads getting the message ‘Tips for the first time property buyers’

Automating Everything

When I tell realtors to install and work on marketing automation software, they simply install and automate everything. If software allows you to automate the process, this doesn’t mean you should automate everything.  Only automate the processed that are time consuming and doesn’t require or improve your core skills.

The tasks of creating messages, emails, social media posts that need customization/personalization. Realtors make the mistake of automating this task also.

Not Following the Analytics

There’s a separate work class of analyzers who after reviewing and analyzing the weekly, monthly, quarterly reports predict and plan for ahead. Facebook insights, Google analytics, Twitter analytics, and Email Marketing analytics are offered for free which are crucial for your campaign’s success. Realtors make the mistake of just doing things, and if they get good results first time, they don’t even bother looking at the analytics. But, if someone wants constant good results, analytics are important.

Studying analytics lets you know which of your practices are working for you and which are not so you can make changes in your plan and improve your results.

Not Optimizing for Mobile

We are majorly working on our desktops, but do you realize what your clients/customers are using. The majority of the device share among the customers is smartphones and tablets.

We, when work on our desktops, optimize everything as per it, and completely forget the device that our customer base is using thus, not optimizing our strategy for mobile. Landing Pages, social media images, and email templates, all need to be optimized for mobile for optimum performance and maximum reach.

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Not A/B Testing

A/B testing or split testing can be applied on landing pages, email templates, CTA buttons, web pages, contact forms. A/B testing is done to see what’s working best for you.

By running a test on your CTA button, you get know the colour, the placement, and the text that is working for you. Here you take two types of CTA button. Run your campaign for a week using one each time. The results will tell you which button performed best.

By running a test on your Landing page, you get to know which type of landing page is getting maximum response. Do as you did in case of CTA buttons.

In case of emails, you get to know the best subject line, body text, timing to send the email and the template for your email campaign.
Always remember to test out one element at a time.
1st Test: Colour
2nd Test: Text
3rd Test: Placement
4th Test: Size
5th Test: Timing
By doing so, you’ll know which element to keep and which one to change. By changing multiple elements in one test, you wouldn’t know that which element did affect the campaign’s performance.

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So, next time when you design your lead generation campaign, make sure you don’t repeat these common lead generation mistakes. Plus, you can now check whether the digital marketer you hired is doing a good job or not.

I’ve been sharing a lot of information about what should you do for better real estate lead generation, why lead segmentation can turn the tables for you, and how you can take benefit from lead nurturing. I hope that these tips have helped as they have helped me in my real estate lead generation process.

Today, I won’t share what you should do. Today, I will share what you should not do intentionally or unintentionally in the process of real estate lead generation.

Even after knowing all the “To-Dos”, marketers still miss crucial points. They grasp the knowledge only from the surface and miss the depth.

Here are the most common lead generation mistakes that marketers do. These minor mistakes leave a major impact on the overall campaign performance.

Not Using Landing Page

Landing pages are designed with the goal to convert. There isn’t much text in it, it doesn’t have website navigation, and it just pitches the product or service. Marketers don’t bother having a separate landing page for their product or service. They simply put everything on their website’s service page. They think, they will get traffic and the visitor can navigate the whole website. This is not the recommended approach for lead generation.

Take for Instance: You have a deadline of selling a particular Condo in Vancouver by the end of the month. Instead of directing your visitors to the web page where they can see all the listed properties, you create a separate landing page for the targeted Condo in Vancouver you want to sell. This way you increase the chances of selling that particular Condo in Vancouver.

Thinking CTA is just a Button

CTA is not your average button. It’s a gateway for visitors to become leads. It’s color, placement, text, everything plays an important role. Marketers either don’t put a CTA button or put a lot of them which confuses the visitor.

Even if they put the right number of CTAs, they don’t give a second look to its color, text, and position. Some of them have even put the CTA button of the same color as the background.

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Lead Capturing Form

Have you ever given a thought to the number of questions to ask in your lead capturing form? Are the questions to many? Are these too less? Or Are the questions necessary enough to get the info what you need?

The goal of the campaign will help you decide the questions. If the campaign is just for the newsletter, then you just need an email and full name. If it is for product selling, then you need an address and contact information. A form with too many questions can repel the leads.

Note: Keep your lead capturing form above the fold.

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Not Encapsulating The Lead Capturing Form

Similar to the CTA button, marketers don’t encapsulate their form. Without encapsulating, it just looks like the normal text or worse, visitors won’t it.

The form should be given borders that would separate it from the rest of the text. There should be a title text above of the form and CTA button at the bottom. It shouldn’t get mixed with the rest of the text.

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Not Explaining the Benefits

You have a brilliant product, we get it. But if you keep talking about its features in the text without mentioning how it will benefit the users, the audience won’t get the idea why they should buy it.

A user-focused tone is always based on ‘how it will benefit the buyer’. Even on the landing page where you pitch the offers, always display the benefits of the products/services to the users. Without such information, users won’t know the value of the product for them.

Text, Text, and Text

Too much text becomes monotonous. When marketers begin writing benefits, they just keep on writing, putting everything into words, and pulling of the interest factor for the audience. The interest factor can be maintained by giving the information in the mixture of text and graphical representation.

Whenever I plan for any online campaign, I prepare the list of things that should be in the campaign and should not be in the campaign. And, I each aspect of my campaign with respect to the list I prepared. This eases my work and helps me get things done on time.

These blogs will help you create a checklist for yourself.

The list of common lead generation mistakes has not ended. There are more to come in the next blog. So, stay tuned for Common Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid (Part -2).

Subscribe to my realtor newsletter to get the latest tips on real estate lead generation and real estate lead management.

I hope everything I shared about real estate lead generation and lead segmentation has helped you. This week’s topic is on successful lead nurturing process.

The process of building relationships with prospects along with the goal of earning their business once they are ready is termed as Lead Nurturing. The secret of a successful lead nurturing process is being helpful and relevant, offering value beyond the sale. In simple words, just follow the word definition of Nurturing – Help Someone Grow.

A case study has shown that 73% of the B2B leads generated via various lead generation methods are not sales ready. Lead Nurturing process is important to convert those ‘not-sales-ready’ leads into sales-ready leads. You educate these prospects, build trust, and help them in the path of conversion. That’s a successful lead nurturing process.

Lead Nurturing Bridges The Gap Between Marketing and Sales

Conversions achieved using lead nurturing set 20% increase in sales opportunities. So, not just marketing but the whole company gets to benefit from lead nurturing process.

Email is an important way to communicate with your leads, but it can also be abused. Email marketing is often compared to spam, here’s why.

Realtors purchase contact lists and send irrelevant emails to the whole list resulting in people putting you in the spam folder. With lead nurturing, you should know you are using it as an inbound tactic, not as an outbound tactic.

These are the three best practices for building an effective lead nurturing strategy

• Using lead nurturing for your business
  
• Build a lead nurturing workflow
• Communicate with your leads based on their behaviour

How to use lead nurturing for your business?

Well, there are three ways to think about it.

1. The traditional approach to lead nurturing: In this model, you generate a new real estate lead via any method. You qualify whether that lead is a good fit and interested in your services. This you do by sending emails and following the proper channel. Once a lead has shown good fit and interest, it’s time to take that lead to the sales process. If you are managing all by yourself, then simply put on your sales cap and put that lead in the sales bucket.
2. The Sales-Fit Nurturing: When you convert a real estate lead – again, either any of the methods. You take that lead directly to the sales bucket without nurturing it. If the sale becomes successful, that’s job done. If it doesn’t convert to a sale that means the lead is not sales-ready. Then you send that real estate lead back to marketing bucket and nurture it until it becomes a sales-ready lead. Once the lead is nurtured successfully, send it back to the sales bucket.
3. Lead Nurturing as a Gatekeeper: In this scenario, you convert a real estate lead and then start nurturing them. If the lead is successful, then nurturing is paused and the lead is given time to travel on the path of purchase. If on the purchase path, the lead is on hold and not showing any sign of being a sales-ready lead, then you continue to nurture that lead using a different approach. Send relevant and appropriate offers.

If you need help choosing the best lead nurturing practice, then consider answering these questions before choosing the lead nurturing practice

• Number of real estate leads you to get each month
• Channels through which you get those leads
• If you have sales representatives, then how many
• The business model and the sales cycle you are following

You can always switch to another model if you think it might be more effective. Experimentation and testing are an important part of an effective email strategy.

Lead nurturing strategy to know how to build an individual lead nurturing workflow. It’s comprised of three steps:

• Deciding who you would like to nurture
• Selecting a Goal
• And Sending emails to help readers accomplish that goal

Deciding who would you like to Nurture: This is possibly the most important decision for your lead nurturing strategy and workflow. These steps determine with which group of people or segmented list, you care going to communicate with. This is where send the right message to the right person at the right time come in.

Read my Blog on Lead Segmentation. Once you’ve decided who to nurture, the next step is to determine a goal.

Determining a Goal: Design a structured and purposeful experience for your leads. That means picking plain, real and actionable goals that can be measured such as

• Attend a webinar
• Download an ebook, guide or offer
• Request a consultation
• View a case study
• Start a free trial

Writing & Sending Emails to Accomplish Goals: Take a minute to consider some key questions before you start building:

First, how many emails do you plan to send? I recommend 3 to 4 emails per lead nurturing workflow. You can always add or subtract emails depending on the success.

How long should the time delay between each email send?

While considering the time delay, take into account: The stages in your buying cycle because the buying behaviour is different while buying a house than the behaviour while buying a phone.

Lastly, what is the goal of each email in the workflow?

Broadly, there are four types of emails:

Trust Emails: Trust Emails create relevancy and trust that will condition your contacts to open future emails.
Additional Downloads/Resource Emails: Additional Downloads emails educate your leads and give your valuable insight into which topics and information resonate with your contacts.

CTA for Goal Emails: CTA for goal emails positions the goal of the workflow as the next logical step for a contact to take. They are direct and to the point.

Break-up Emails: Break-up emails make it clear this is the last time a lead will hear from you. The goal is to keep these contacts engaged or to learn why you missed the mark with your messaging in this nurturing flow.

Communicating with your leads based on their Behaviour

Behaviour email: It means sending emails to your contacts based on their actions and behaviours.
To choose behavioural mail

Track how people interact with your business online: Each channel, and event is a chance to listen to users, learn more about them and start a conversation.

Determine the important actions a user might take: The important actions include lead submit the form, viewing the case study, sending weekly updates about new blogs.

Start a conversation with a user on that behaviour: choose the best channel, and personalized message to start a conversation with the user.

This is how an effective lead nurturing process looks like. Take for instance that your goal is to make users signup for consultation. Here’s how you do it.

Goal: To request a consultation

Set Starting Criteria: Download an ebook offer. An educative offer that enlightens them, and after reading that they might have a few questions and would like to clarify their queries.

Step 1: Send a Blog Post related to the topic for which you want people to ask for a consultation. In the blog post, you should pitch that you are an expert in the field.
Step 2: Send a Case Study that is relevant to the topic.
Step 3: Now, when everything is in place, send an offer to request a consultation. By now, you’ve built a reputation among the users as an expert. Now, you are the one who can answer their questions and solve their queries.

In the second scenario where you want people to attend your webinar, here’s how you can set it up.

Goal: To have people attend your webinar

Starting Criteria: Shoot a straight Signing up for your webinar. Give all the reasons why they should attend it. ‘How it will benefit the attendees’, ‘Topics of discussion’, and ‘send in your queries’ everything that is a highlight of the webinar.
Keep reminding people about, it. Don’t overdo it by sending the reminder mail daily. Keep a delay of 15 days.
Step 1: Send a 30-day reminder email
Step 2: Give valuable content in email 15 days before the webinar. You can highlight the special attractions, list of speakers, and topics of discussion.
Step 3: Send a reminder email and a formal invitation a day before the webinar
Day of Webinar: Send a thank you next day email

If you have any other idea for a successful lead nurturing process, do share it in the comment section.
If you have any doubt or query that you would like to ask about real estate lead generation, lead segmentation or lead nurturing for real estate leads, I’m always here for you.

Subscribe to my realtor newsletter to get the latest tips on real estate lead generation and real estate lead management.

In the previous blogs under this series, I have shared several methods to generate real estate leads online even if you opt out of the IDX listing. Generating good real estate leads is one aspect of the job. And handling the leads is another and equally important. The last thing you want is to waste the leads that you generated using the best real estate lead generation methods. You may start losing them if you don’t handle them professionally. You need Tools and Talent, Men and Machine to work on your real estate leads. First in the segment is lead segmentation.

Lead Segmentation

Lead segmentation is a process of subdividing the generated leads into groups with similar traits, demographics, interests, lifestyle, and needs. To identify ideal segmentation parameters, start by collecting data. The data may come from an online form submission, website traffic, past customer profiles, and customer surveys. Then look for the similar patterns, which later on become segmentation parameters. The entries under such segmented data will look like

1. The real estate leads who have viewed a particular listing page twice or thrice a day. They might be interested in the property. Now, you know it. It’s your time to make the move.
2. The real estate leads who have booked a property on your event to get a discount are ready to buy it anytime soon. It’s a hot real estate lead.
3. The real estate leads that have filled a form to get latest tips to sell a home in Vancouver might be planning to put their home on a listing. Approach them and ask them if you can help them anyway in the selling process.
4. The real estate leads who have called you for a free consultation after viewing your advertisement
5. The real estate leads who live in Canada and invest in real estate as a passive income

All these and much more like these go into your segmented contact list. Segmentation is another word for generalization. You know it is not easy to generalize people based on the decision they make. You can create the contact lists under the following categories.

Potential Home Buyers

You have to make an email contact list of the real estate leads who have enquired about the properties. They come under ‘Potential Home Buyers’. Further, you can subdivide them based on their place in the cycle as ‘First Stage Buyer’, ‘Second Stage Buyer’, and so on.

1. A first stage buyer would be someone who is currently enquiring about the properties. He is looking for the available options he has as per his budget.
2. A second stage buyer would be someone who is done with the enquiring and has shortlisted the properties. He has shortlisted a few properties as per his budget and now considering the other options that will separate the best property for him out of the rest.
3. A third stage buyer would be someone who is ready to buy. He is just negotiating to get the best price. He is mentally and financially prepared to buy
4. A third stage potential home buyer would also be someone who has the money and looking for a property for investment purpose. Any property that can get him good ROI is a good option for him.

By subdividing the real estate leads into these stages, you can precisely prepare a customized message for them and increase the chances of them getting converted in your favour.

Potential Home Sellers

Regular real estate investors for whom it is a passive income, people who have responded to your home selling tips ads and posts and those who contacted you to get a price quote of their property are all potential home sellers. Hence they come under ‘Potential Home Seller’s list’.

Geographical

Here, you make a list of people from a similar region. You can even create a subdivision of rural, urban, local, foreigner.

Demographical

Leads that have similar gender, occupation (government or private), pay-scale, education, relationship status are listed. Basically, people with similar demographics come under this list. And, similarly, you can create a list of their buying behaviours, interests, and their loyalty towards their favourite company and so on.

Segmentation of your contact list should be in a way that it directly relates to your business goals, sales goals and marketing goals. Whether you are selling products or offering services, contact list in each segment must define the goal.

There can be a segmented list of contacts for

1. The uninitiated ones who don’t know about your business at all. Focus here is to spread awareness about your business, product, and services for the people in this list.
2. The people who can become your potential clients, but often go to your competitors. Give these people a reason why they should contact you for better products and services.
3. The people who often visit a particular listing page twice or thrice might be inclined towards that property more if you pitch an enticing offer to them.

Still haven’t made up your mind about lead segmentation? This will break the ice. Here are the stats from MailChimp comparing email campaigns results of the segmented campaigns and non-segmented email campaigns.

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The second table is the comparison result of the campaigns run under the list segmented on the basis of interest and the general non-segmented campaigns

In the beginning, I mentioned that you need tools and talent, men and machine to accomplish this task. Here’s how the tasks are divided.

Your marketing Automation Software such as InfusionSoft takes care of telling you that from which platform or campaign a particular lead is generated. You can even add UTM source to your links to track the leads. The software can give you the analytical data once the campaign is finished.

Tracking, reporting, and time-consuming tasks for humans must be automated in the software. Tasks such as customizing email messages, customizing campaigns for optimal results, manual segmentation of contact lists are for the man on the job.

If you are not that tech-savvy and don’t do email marketing, then I assume you go the traditional way of cold-calling of the prospects picked for the data.

Customization

**If you are not customizing your messages, there’s no point segmenting your contact list. **

1. By not customizing your message, you might be sending a sales pitch message to the client who is just researching in the market. You will be a pushy guy for him without any value.
2. By not customizing your message, you might send an information message to a client who is ready to buy and just needs a quotation. You would lose a great opportunity there too.

A decade ago, people used to use one script for all their prospects, and that worked well at that time, but not anymore. Sales and marketing methods have changed because customer behaviour has changed. Their buying habits have changed and any sales or marketing process that doesn’t comply with the new buyer methods isn’t recommended at all.

Just as customized message in the email campaigns, you need customized script for each contact in a particular contact list that you segmented. By knowing your prospect’s position in the sales cycle, you pitch the right message at the right time which ultimately increases your chances of closing that lead.

In a nutshell

1. Lead segmentation is a way to divide your contacts in the database into groups based on similarities that reflect your business goals, marketing goals, and sales goals.
2. The segmented lists give you the information about the contacts using which you can send them customized messages. This increases the chances of conversion. Segmentation also tells that the lead generated is sales qualified lead or marketing qualified lead or disqualified lead. It helps in deciding which department has to work on it.
3. Use CRM and marketing automation tools to automate the tasks, but the message customization needs a human touch.

So, this was all about lead segmentation, why to use it, and how to make full of it. I will be covering the further steps to make your lead management stronger. Subscribe and stay tuned.

I have talked about how realtors can get a good Google rank by opting out the IDX indexing and how you can lock more real estate leads via Facebook. In this series of blogs, this is the third one on lead generation ideas for realtors. Now, apart from good Google rank and Facebook, here are the other things you can do to generate more real estate leads online.

Trusted relationship is a must for any lead generation. Each point in the following list consists based on a trusted relationship with your lead. I have divided this article into two sections one: channels/mediums where I have listed the best real estate lead generation channels such as your own website and Facebook as discussed in the previous blogs. Second: The Material where I have talked about the best marketing material for generating good real estate leads.

Let’s begin with Lead Generation Channels/Mediums

2. Referral Systems

Referral systems are other beneficial mediums to get leads. You spend only on the lead you get. It becomes the duty of the third-party to promote their channel to give you potential leads. There are hundreds of referral channels running online. The limitation here is that referral is not beneficial for all types of leads. Mostly the referral systems are used to get more sales leads. So, if the campaign is sales focused, you should definitely go for referral systems to generate real estate leads.

4. Events

Online or physical events, both are recommended here. For a realtor, an exhibition on available properties such as “Condos for sale in Vancouver” would do the job. Put an exciting offer that if the property is booked or the booking amount is paid during the exhibition time, then the customer will get n% discount. Now, to get that discount, the customers who have made the decision of buying or near to making that decision will book the available properties. Realtors can even conduct a survey in the exhibition for potential buyers. You may or may not get sales, but you’ll definitely get a lead on which you can work on in and turn it into a sales client.

6. All Social Media Channels

Remember what I shared about Real Estate Lead Generation on Facebook. You can do the same on Twitter, Linkedin, and even on Pinterest. Pinterest is an image sharing site and what better way to show a property to the people. Click a picture of the available property, tweet it, upload it on Pinterest, Linkedin and share it with your targeted audience. You can even run a paid ad of the post. On Linkedin, create a real estate group for your locality just like I told you to do on Facebook. Read my previous blog to know how things are to be done on Facebook. You can do those in similar fashion on other social media channels by following that social media channel’s protocols.

Now that I have covered the mediums or channels to generate more real estate leads, it’s time to discuss the marketing material you need to put online to grab some hot real estate leads.

2. eBooks

The biggest advantage of the ebooks is that people can save it and read it in their free time. Here also, keep the introduction of the ebook or the introduction of the each chapter in the ebook for free. Have landing page and a form for them to fill to get the full version. In the ebook, solve a complex problem the real estate industry is facing, offer them a solution to the most common real estate problem, and tell them what they are missing. Information that helps the reader is always popular among people.

4. Infographics

Infographics are an interesting way to tell any process, story, or tips in a pictorial representation. It delivers the information quicker than an article or blog, but it takes more time to make an infographic than writing and article or a blog. As they are quick to grab and understand, they are more shared. You can offer a step by step solution to a particular problem in the infographics. A good infographic will also help in increase the ranking in the image search results.

Regardless of the marketing material, you are working on, make sure your content tone is enticing for the audience, the reader should have an idea what will be in the ppt presentation, ebook, video or newsletter.

In the next blog, I’ll be sharing tips to handle the generated leads.