Property Natter: Marketing Jargon Buster

Marketing and property often go hand in hand. But from time to time you might come across certain marketing terms that make you think “what the hell does that mean?” 

Well, to ensure that you don’t spend too much time scratching your head over the latest buzzwords, I have attempted to come up with the definitive Marketing Jargon Buster for estate and letting agents. 

So, from now on, you’ll know your SEO from your PPC and your CTAs from your CRM.

Brand Awareness – kind of speaks for itself, I suppose, in that your main aim is to make people more aware of your brand. But how do you go about doing that? Brand awareness is often interconnected with things such as customer engagement, online presence and online reputation. 

So, whether it’s an active social media strategy (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube videos, the works) or more traditional methods such as For Sale boards, leaflet drops and local/newspaper advertising to get you recognised out there on the street, the aim is always the same – to bring your service/product/company to as wide an audience as possible. 

Call to action – I’ve explained this one before, but you can never have too much of a good thing. So here goes: in marketing speak, a call to action (CTA) is defined as an instruction to the audience to provoke an immediate response. 

This could be an instant online valuation tool, a contact us form or some other way of engaging with the visitor as soon as they land on your webpage. It might be a top 10 tips for landlords/how to get the best price for your property type blog, ebooks/downloads or some form of content provision. Whatever it is, all these CTAs will provide you with opportunities to generate leads.   

The eyes of the user should be drawn immediately to the call to action. As such, the CTA needs to be focused, clear, colourful, attractive and, above all else, engaging. You also want to veer away from having too many CTAs on your homepage – you don’t want to overwhelm people or have their eyes looking in too many different directions.

CRM (Customer Relationship Marketing) – this ties in nicely with the whole customer engagement thing. Once you have customers, it’s your duty to then keep them happy, to manage and massage the relationship so it suits both parties (hang on, I feel like a marriage counsellor all of a sudden!) 

In effect, a CRM system is a way of managing all your interactions with customers and prospective customers. In estate agency this is particularly important – managing your clients’ concerns and issues during the sales process is all-important. If you provide a great service, the chance of repeat custom is that much higher. 

Good customer management will also increase your chances of being recommended to others – word of mouth, even now, is still so key to an agency’s success.  

Landing Page – also known as a “lead capture page” or a “lander”, a landing page is a “single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine result or an online advertisement”. The main mission of a landing page is to turn site traffic into sales or leads.

Landing pages are often linked to from email campaigns or social media, with the idea being that the page encourages visitors to enter their contact details somewhere. This can then be followed up and converted into sales/leads.  

Lead Generation – this is one I regularly bang on about in this very blog. The technical, jargon definition is “the initiation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business”. 

In simple terms, it’s all about generating leads, capturing interest and hooking potential customers in. Without leads, estate agents can’t do business, so the importance of effective lead generation really can’t be underestimated.

PPC (Pay Per Click advertising) – this is any online advertising that involves paying for clicks as opposed to impressions (e.g. Google Adwords). The way it’s sold is that you're getting more bang for your buck.

So there are loads of options for PPC to get the most impressions, to direct people to your website or landing page, to push content, to increase conversions etc. but whatever you choose, you're paying for what you choose as opposed to just appearing somewhere. 

Google Adwords cost per click ads are about bidding on keywords to appear higher up on Google so it’s a way of appearing above your competition that doesn't involve SEO, you just have to monitor what the competition are doing. 

SEO (search engine optimisation) – another term I’ve used quite regularly in previous editions of Natter. Most people will have heard of SEO, but people might not be aware what the abbreviation stands for or what SEO is actually all about. 

It is, in its simplest terms, the process of maximising the number of visitors you get to your website. This is done by making sure that your site is high up on the list of results produced by search engines, especially Google (because, let’s be honest here, who uses anything other than Google on a regular basis?) Whole companies are nowadays set up to improve SEO rankings and – in this technological, internet-based world that we now live in – it has become more and more important.

SEO can be hugely beneficial if you work with the right people and balance it with a good social media, content and marketing strategy.   

Traffic conversion – taking the traffic you get and turning it into leads. It’s that simple. A CTA helps with this – pouncing on any visitors to your site and giving them a reason to stay, click elsewhere, get in contact with you. 

In the first place, traffic can be garnered via social media, effective advertising and a good level of bespoke content on your site. I’ve written before about how content, content, content can help to generate the right levels of traffic.

So there you go. If I’ve done my job right everyone reading this will now be a fully-paid up marketing expert!

Until next time… 

*Nat Daniels is the Chief Executive Officer of Angels Media, publishers of Estate Agent Today and Letting Agent Today