The Ultimate Guide to Online Marketing Terminology
Marketing Lingo 101: Key Marketing Terms
Have you ever been confused by marketing terminology?
Every market or niche has its own jargon or lingo used to describe things. In the digital marketing space, often we take for granted that everyone automatically understands what we are talking about.
We’ve created this post to help our readers understand more about the “words” used in marketing.
Keep these in mind when you are doing research for building your brand, growing your social media presence and navigating the world of digital marketing.
Must-Know Marketing Terminology:
A
Analytics
Analytics is a crucial part or means to accumulate valuable information related to your marketing efforts, customer engagement and lots more. The biggest benefit is that analytics measures and monitors your business performance to help you improve. Oftentimes the platform itself, like Facebook, provides the options to view analytics, stats and pull reports.
Affiliate marketing
This is a co-operating system or relationship where two companies agree to co-operate. One party will supply the other with referrals in exchange for a commission. Affiliate marketing has skyrocketed with the rise of influencer marketing.
A/B testing
A/B testing places two different marketing ideas side-by-side in front of an audience and their performance is then monitored (which will do better).
B
B2B (Business to Business)
This term refers to businesses that sell their services or products to other companies. This means their content is directed to businesses and not necessarily to individuals.
B2C (Business to Consumer)
This term describes businesses that sell their product or services to consumers and thus they direct their content to consumers or customers. B2C businesses can utilise platforms like Facebook and Instagram to grow their audience and brand.
Branding
The words used to describe the company’s values and ethics. In the world of social media, consistent and compelling branding is key to get noticed. Be sure to check out our article on creating your brand voice here.
Business brand
A set of “things” that associates with the business such as the values or ethics, which translates into the way the business content is written as well as the logo design, and everything else related to the business. Think of the impressive branding of companies like Coca Cola, BMW or Apple.
Even small businesses need to develop their brand image.
C
Conversion rate
The number of people who take action to either opt-in to your mailing list, sign up to a webinar, buy a service or product compared to those who simply visited and took no action.
CTR (Click through rate)
This is the statistics or percentages of how many people “click through” your content such as clicking onto a video posted by your company or a blog post on the company’s website.
CTA (Call To Action)
Words that persuade a visitor to take action for example “buy now”, “order today”, “subscribe”, “download now’ and so forth.
Content strategy
A specific plan in which all the content used will align and work towards achieving the business goals. A content strategy can help you stop posting at random and rather use social media intentionally to grow your business.
D
Digital media
Content that is used through digital platforms and devices, as opposed to traditional marketing (radio, T.V., newspapers etc.)
Data visualization
This is the process of creating visual content for easier processing by the audience, for example, video content.
E
Email list
A list of email contacts that make potential leads. Growing your email list is an invaluable part of digital marketing. Remember, you don’t own Facebook or Instagram, but you do own your email list.
Engagement rate
The rate at which people interact to a post whether they like, repost, or comment or whether they just saw it online and didn’t react.
F
Friction
“Friction” are the factors on the business website that may cause a degree of confusion for the visitor. Forms of friction can include but is not limited to colour, too much text, hard to navigate menus.
Frequency
This is to describe how many times a visitor is exposed to a specific post or content on your website.
G
Google AdWords
The Google ads platform which allows you to place paid ads onto Google. These can appear on the front page of Google search itself, or within websites/blogs via Google Display Network (GDN).
H
HTML (HyperTextMarkUp Language) Hashtag
This is a special language understood by search engines and the internet as a whole. This text is used to write websites.
The hashtag is a term made popular by Instagram, a social media platform. Hashtags are used as another means of communication, which combines other social networks into the same conversation such as Facebook and Twitter for example.
HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure)
This is a protocol for securing the communication between two systems. In the case of your website, it means securing the communication between the browser and the web server. We wrote an in-depth article about this, find it here.
Inbound marketing
This is the term used to describe a form of marketing that “draws in customers”. It forms part of the greater marketing strategy to get your audience to know, like and trust your business and brand.
Infographic
“Infographic” refers to an image that displays information, which includes data, statistic findings, and other facts. It’s more than just an image and thus very effective for visual processing of large bits of information.
Infographics are extremely user-friendly and shareable.
Instagram is a social media platform often used for digital marketing.
K
Keywords
These are special words used when optimizing content and often times these are the very words that people type into search engines.
L
Leads
A company or individual who visited your store and showed interest in your product is known as a “lead”. The easiest marketing terminology to understand, but one of the most important purposes of digital marketing as a whole.
Local marketing
Marketing in a smaller area or region, often locally centred. Brick and mortar shops often use local marketing to their advantage.
Long-tail keyword
This is a precision keyword that has several words inside the phrase and creates better engagement and impression.
M
Machine learning
Machine learning is the use of artificial intelligence that completes a task and learns from it. As it learns, it also improves.
Mobile optimization
This is the process of optimizing (making more effective) the website so that mobile devices are able to navigate the site with ease. Seeing as increasing numbers of people view your content via their mobile device, we highly recommend ensuring your website and content is mobile-friendly.
Marketing analytics
This data statistics software helps businesses to spot new trends in the marketing industry as well as measure how the business and the consumers are performing regarding these trends.
Marketing funnel
This is a method, which describes the marketing process from the time of consumers being unaware and carrying on through to the action of purchasing. There are many ways to create your marketing funnel to lead cold audiences to warm, engaged purchasers.
N
Net Promotion Score (NPS)
This is a metric system used to see how many people would recommend your business or services on a scale of 1 to 10.
O
Open Rate
This is another metric system formulated to emails, which analyze how many people actually open their emails related to your business. It will thus calculate the “open rate”.
P
Page view
When it comes to digital marketing the term “page view is often used” this is the number of times visitors to a website open the content. That page will thus get page views.
PPC (Pay Per Click)
This is both an advertisement tool as well as a money-generating tool. The advertiser on the website will pay the publisher (the business hosting their advert on their website) after a set number of clicks. Running Facebook ads is a form of PPC advertising.
R
ROI (Return On Investment)
ROI is the profit a company makes after investing in something, for example, advert campaigns. Was the money spent to create and maintain the advert campaigns more than what they are making? In other words, are they making a profit despite of the amount spent?
S
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A technique used to help search engines find content and websites.
T
Target market
This is a specific group of people targeted through a business. It’s important to direct your marketing copywriting to a specific customer type and not just a broad audience.
V
Viral content
“Viral” is the term used to describe content that becomes very popular online.
The Takeaway
We may not have compiled an entire glossary of all digital marketing terminology used, but these are the most important ones to know. If you’re new to the digital marketing scene, then these words may seem hard to wrap your head around.
This is exactly why we encourage you to come back and have a look whenever you need clarity about marketing terminology to use and to see what they mean.
Soon you’ll be creating digital marketing content like a pro and with this, work your way toward being on point with the lingo.
Happy marketing!
Originally published at https://blog.bigdomino.co.za on April 15, 2019.
