Digital marketing is essential to the growth of most businesses. However, if you’re not in the business of marketing yourself, it can often be difficult to understand all the terms and jargon being used by your marketing team.
Luckily, we’ve pulled together a list of common marketing terms that will not only make it easier for you to communicate with your team, but will also be crucial to the decisions you make to drive your business forward.
Analytics
In brief terms, analytics is the analysis of data or statistics provided by software. They can be used to inform marketing campaigns and shed light on customer behaviour, to help identify if there are any areas which need improvement.
B2B
An abbreviation of “business-to-business”, B2B describes a business that sells products, services or information to other businesses, rather than between businesses and consumers. Examples of B2B businesses include, marketing agencies and IT companies.
B2C
In contrast to B2B, B2C is the act of businesses selling products or services to end-user customers. Examples of B2C businesses include, streaming services and fashion retailers.
Bounce Rate
When visitors arrive on your website and leave without initiating another action, it is quantified by the “bounce rate”. The aim is to have a bounce rate that is as low as possible.
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is essentially a profile of the characteristics, demographics and needs of your ideal customer. When possible, you should use data gathered from your marketing and sales activity to help create an accurate buyer persona. If you don’t know where to start, try HubSpot’s Buyer Persona tool.
Call-to-Action (CTA)
An image, a line of text or a combination of both – which is aimed at encouraging a specific engagement from your target audience – is defined as a “call-to-action” or CTA for short.
Examples of call-to-actions include: asking your audience to sign up to your mailing list; encouraging them to make a purchase with a “Buy Now” button, or encouraging them to get in touch with you if they have any questions.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-Through Rate (or CTR) refers to the percentage of users who clicked on a link after seeing it. You can measure the click-through rate of your adverts, search results or links on your website.
This metric helps you to understand how effective the call-to-action is, so you can adjust your content to get better results. Generally, you’ll want the click-through rate to be as high as possible. However, you need to bear in mind that it will often decrease when these links are shown to consumers with broader interests, but will also increase when they are shown to fewer people with a more specific interest in your content.
We recommend analysing your click-through rate alongside your clicks to get a better understanding of your performance.
Crawlers
Sometimes referred to as “Spiders”, a web crawler is a programme or internet bot that visits websites – and reads their content – in order to create entries for a search engine index.
CRM
Short for “Customer Relationship Management”, a CRM is a piece of technology that is used to manage interactions between businesses and their customers. These can help you to organise your workflows and avoid potential human error throughout your sales process. Some popular CRM tools are HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA), is a metric originally developed by MOZ to help you understand one of the factors influencing your position in search engines. Websites acquire authority based on how many other websites link to them. Domain authority is measured on a scale of 1-100 and the aim is to score as high as possible (relative to your competitors).
While domain authority isn’t an official metric used by Google’s ranking algorithm; Google does determine rankings based on the quality and quantity of links to your website. For this reason, it is generally a good idea to consider DA when analysing the performance of your website.
Direct Marketing
In basic terms, direct marketing is the act of presenting information about your business without the use of an advertising middleman. Direct marketing techniques include: email, texting or private messaging on social media.
Direct marketing is a useful tool for engaging with your target audience on a personal level, and for offering solutions that solve any problems they are currently experiencing.
Indirect Marketing
Opposite to direct marketing, indirect marketing is the act of presenting information about your business, without having any direct communication with a customer. Indirect marketing techniques include: creating blog posts; getting mentioned by another company or influencer, and having a presence in search engine results.
A large benefit of indirect marketing – especially in today’s marketing world – is that it feels more genuine and less ‘spammy’ for users; enabling you to subtly build awareness and loyalty over time.
Impressions
Impressions measure how many people have been exposed to your brand online, regardless of whether they’ve clicked on your content to find out more. You can measure the impressions you get on search results, paid ads, and from any content you publish onto social media platforms.
Impressions are a good place to start your performance analysis, as a higher or lower number of impressions will inform you of how often your chosen platform is showing your content to users, and if any changes are required.
For instance, if you notice that clicks to your website have decreased, but your impressions in Google search results have risen or stayed the same; then you know that you need to make your content and titles more appealing to audiences. However, if your clicks and impressions appear to have fallen, then you know that you need to improve your reach in search engines through Search Engine Optimisation.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is the process of bringing customers into your business through content that helps to solve any problems they may have. In doing so, this helps to position you as a leader and figure of authority on a particular topic in your audience’s mind.
Once your audience has read your content, the aim is to then get them to take some form of action on your website that turns them into a lead (e.g. by providing you with their contact details for future marketing materials) and finally a customer (by making a purchase).
Keywords
Keywords are terms or phrases that relate to your business and what you offer customers. They should be consistently used in all marketing activity, e.g. on website pages, social media and in emails.
Your digital marketing plan should include a keyword strategy that is based on relevant keywords that your target audience have used in search engines that can help your content to appear higher in search results.
KPI
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a value that defines how effectively a company is achieving their key marketing objectives and targets. High-level KPIs focus on your overall business performance; while low-level KPIs focus on a specific department’s successes.
Quantitative KPIs use a number to define goals and are generally easier to measure; while qualitative KPIs use characteristics to define their goals (e.g. opinions about a company or process). If you’re setting qualitative KPIs, we recommend also setting a quantitative KPI that can support the qualitative goal.
For example, if your qualitative KPI is to improve your brands reputation, then your quantitative KPI could be to decrease the search volume of “your brand + complaints” by 50%.
Marketing Funnel
Often used to describe a customer’s journey with you; a marketing funnel essentially shows the route your customer takes from first learning about your business, to turning into a conversion, to then reaching the purchasing stage.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to readers that find your online content without the aid of paid advertising. Some platforms will include audiences who have discovered your business through links on social media and other websites in their definition of ‘organic traffic’; while other platforms choose to refer to organic traffic as ‘users who found your business through search engine results’.
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is the practice of reaching out to audiences with marketing material when they’re not actively seeking help or services such as your own. Generally, outbound marketing involves making them aware of potential problems they might be facing, before showing them how you can help resolve these issues using techniques such as email blasts and cold calling.
PPC
PPC stands for “Pay-Per-Click” and refers to a form of online advertising where you pay every time someone clicks on an ad for your business. However, over time PPC has evolved and is now used to describe all forms of online advertising – even if they pay for something other than a click (e.g. an ad impression or a final conversion).
SEO
Short for “Search Engine Optimisation”, SEO involves optimising your website to make it more search engine friendly or rank better on Google. Tweaking website code and adjusting website copy can have a positive effect on your ranking.
The better your website ranks on Google; the more likely your target audience will find you.
SMO
The definition of SMO is Social Media Optimisation, and is the act of increasing brand and product awareness through the use of social media. This can include, posting content and paying for ads on your chosen platform. This can be an incredibly effective tool.
Truthfully, there is a lot of digital marketing jargon out there – other than the ones we’ve listed above. However, all of these can easily be used as a stepping stone to broadening your understanding of the basic elements of your digital marketing strategy.
If you would like to discuss your digital marketing strategy in more detail, get in touch with our team.
