Glossary of Multifamily Marketing Technology

The clickable text of a hyperlink. For SEO purposes, your anchor text should be relevant to target page. In HTML, an anchor text is written as <a href=”[URL]”>[visible text]</a>.

A software liaison that makes it possible for application programs to share data and interact.

An automated email generated in response to a call-to-action, and to distribute newsletters, e-zines, brand updates and promotions. Autoresponders are an integral part of a sucessful email campaign, by managing email correspondence as well as reaching a growing audience. There are many autoresponse services are available, such as MailChimp and ConstantContact.

A graphic or image (measuring 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high) used for web advertising, and is a clickable link that redirects users to a target page.  As one of the most ubiquitous forms of web advertising, hosts are paid per-impression, per-click and per-action.  However, declines in click-through rates in recent years have reduced banner ad rates.

Refers to 1) the rate at which users leave your site after viewing a single page; and 2) the percentage of undeliverable emails in a campaign.  This can be used to indicate any issues concerning your webpage, as high bounce rates are equated with poor-quality content, design, user experience, etc.

How recognizable your brand is with consumers, and the utilization of all available marketing channels (i.e., radio, television, print, social media, etc.) to increase your exposure to your target audience.

In e-commerce, B2B describes when a business markets its product or service to other businesses.  Typically, B2B brands support businesses across multiple industries (e.g., a new app to help process payments).  Innovative B2B solutions continue to evolve to meet emerging markets and new technologies.

When a business markets its product to consumers.  B2C marketing initially declined as the result of the explosive growth of the B2B market, but it continues to thrive today.  B2C grows brands using ads, referrals, and social media to connect directly with consumers.

A promotional marketing tactic used to direct your audience to perform a task via clickable content (i.e., link, banner, button, etc.) with auspicious labels such as “Click Here”, “Register Now”, and “Enter to Win”.  A strong call-to-action can result in increased leads, traffic and sales conversions.  CTAs are widely used across the e-commerce and social media marketing landscapes.

Metric for the average number of click-throughs per hundred impressions, measured as a percentage.  The CTR expresses the immediate audience response to a particular ad, email or call-to-action, but it’s not indicative of an impression’s overall success.

Metric used to determine the percentage of users that perform a specific call-to-action in a specific timeframe, generally resulting in sales. The conversion rate is calculated by dividing your number of goal achievements by the total number of visitors (e.g., 50 sales ÷ 1000 visitors = 5% conversion).

Creating links directly to relevant, valuable content outside of your own site.  A controversial practice, deep linking furthers the philosophy of a free and open web, yet opponents feel it puts corporate interests at a disadvantage with regard to brand-building and advertising opportunities.  Deep linking connects various content with other influential and trusted sites, and creates new business opportunities.

Marketing strategy that targets and makes direct contact with prospective leads. This includes contact via phone, text, email, print, television, radio and online advertising. Direct marketers generally utilize lead data generated from email lists, social media pages and other analytics.

A list of email addresses used in email campaigns to send branded content to multiple recipients.  Email lists can be compiled in a variety of ways, most notably by collecting lead information via an online form.

Mobile marketing tactic that employs mobile devices’ geopositioning system (GPS) to target consumers’ mobile devices with location-based content (e.g., advertisements, promotions, etc.) via SMS or push notifications based on their IP address.

External or third-party links that bring visitors to your website. Your inbound links rate is the primary factor in your Google page ranking and plays a large role in your brand’s visibility on other SERPs. Inbound links are also integral to increasing traffic to your site.

A passive brand marketing strategy that utilizes consumers’ initiative to seek out a product or a service before engaging them with promotional content, also known as permission marketing. Once users are interested, they are presented with various branded content including blogs, e-books, podcasts, social media, videos, whitepapers, and more.

Popular and influential entities including bloggers, journalists, brand evangelists, and others with a significant voice in their respective audiences.  They can increase your brand’s traffic by endorsing and/or promoting your product or service via their own content marketing channels (e.g., blog, website, social media, etc.).

An array of metrics – also known as “Key Success Indicators” – used to determine the strategic and operational goals of a given campaign.  Actual key indicators can vary depending on the industry, but generally are used to track growth and performance. In digital marketing, indicators may measure unique website visitors, bounce rate, average on-site user-time, average page-viewership, conversion rate, brand persuasion score, search engine ranking, and much more.

Using relevant keywords and keyword phrases to gain greater brand exposure through digital ads (typically banners) specific to a web page, SERP (GoogleAds), or otherwise. Keywords are crucial to increasing organic (unpaid) SERP rankings and search results.

Online marketing tactic that directs users to a single webpage upon clicking an SERP link or online ad. On the landing page, users enter their information (typically an email address) to receive a promotional offer, newsletter, etc., and is also known as a “lead-capture page,” as they are optimized for building lead lists by capturing user data.

Lead nurturing is a mostly automated process to raise awareness of your community in the prospect’s eyes. This is done through a multi-step program of providing relevant, informative, and engaging content, designed to attract the user to sign the lease.

An automated lead nurturing program allows agents to spend less time nurturing the leads while allowing them to spend more time on one-on-one relationships to close the lead.

An integral part of the lead management process:  this is where you “track” prospective users in order to focus providing additional promotions and content dependent on the level of user interest and response.  Leads are tracked using contact history via a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

List segmentation is the process of dividing your leads into sub-groups. Segmentation allows you to target specific messages to specific sub-groups, leading to a better response on each message. List segmentation is also the foundation of an efficient lead nurturing process.

Leads can be segmented by a variety of criteria: demographic (age, sex…), psychographic (activities, interests, opinions…), or even lead nurturing stage (new, active, sales-ready…).

A written document that describes in detail the overall marketing strategies and tactics that will be developed for a given campaign. A good plan will propose a campaign’s goals, aesthetics, budget, schedule, metrics, and ROI.

Email is requested by users.  In email marketing, there are two types of opt-ins:  the ‘single opt-in’, where users simply sign up; and the ‘double opt-in’, where users confirm their subscription by responding to an auto-generated message.

A link that directs users from your website to an external domain. Many SEO experts agree that these are the primary contributor to page rankings.  SEO best practices dictates that you never stuff a site with outbound links or risk losing page rankings.

Marketing metric that measures the percentage of users that receive and share a branded message or content (e.g., coupon, promotional email, social media).  Also known as the metric for “word-of-mouth” marketing.  This can also be used to identify “brand evangelists” within an audience.

Digital marketing tactic used to direct traffic via ads on a webpage, in which advertisers pay the host site for every click received.  With SERPs, advertisers can bid on keywords relevant to their target audiences.  Also known as “sponsored links.”

Metric used to determine the effectiveness of a marketing campaign by tracking traffic and conversions generated across multiple channels, audience engagement and other factors, against the hard costs of executing the campaign.  ROI is calculated as total profits divided by the total investment (e.g., $1000 profit ÷ $5000 investment = 20% ROI).

Online ad buying tactic that rotates ads on various pages on a single website or network.  This is used to generate broader traffic by reaching out to random users as opposed to a target audience.

The art of using relevant keywords to “optimize” your content and pages in order to gain more web traffic and more prominent search engine page rankings.  Good SEO tactics yield more “organic” search results, which contributes to an overall better user experience and are heralded by white-hat SEO wizards.

The audience that will be most apt to use your product or service; the one you are trying to market to.  Target audiences must be discovered through property market research, or risk losing valuable time and money marketing to the wrong demographic. Social media is used prominently in discovering your brand’s target market.

To “go viral” is a marketing phenomenon that describes when branded content gets shared by the audience and thereby explodes in popularity on an exponential scale.