When learning about marketing, it is important to know the meaning of the jargon used, so that you have a good understanding of what to do and how to apply different tactics. I have created a list of 36 marketing terms to know when building an online business.
1. Digital Marketing - Any form of communication aiming to persuade people to purchase a product or service that occurs through some form of digital device.
2. Brand Positioning - Describes how a brand is different from its competitors and where, or how, it sits in customers’ minds.
3. Customer Acquisition - Acquiring new customers involves persuading consumers to purchase a company’s products and/or services. Companies and organizations consider the cost of customer acquisition as an important measure in evaluating how much value customers bring to their businesses.
4. Customer Acquisition cost (CAC) - Your total Sales and Marketing cost. To calculate CAC, follow these steps for a given time period (month, quarter, or year):
Add up program or advertising spend + salaries + commissions + bonuses + overhead.
Divide by the number of new customers in that time period.
5. Cost Per Lead (CPL) - Cost-Per-Lead, or CPL, is a digital marketing pricing model whereby the advertiser pays a pre-established price for each lead generated. In e-commerce, CPL is often utilized by businesses who sell subscription services or high-value products.
6. Cost Per Click (CPC) - The amount you pay for each click on one of your PPC ads in platforms such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads. Your cost per click is determined by several factors, including your maximum bid, your Quality Score, and the ad rank of other advertisers bidding for the same keyword
7. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - The customer lifetime value is the predicted net profit associated with the future relationship with that customer.
8. Growth Marketing - The process of designing and conducting experiments to optimize and improve the results of a target area. If you have a certain metric you want to increase, growth marketing is a method you can utilize to achieve that. Growth marketing can be applied across your business to areas referenced within the acronym AAARRR (sometimes referred to as pirate metrics) which stands for Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention and Referral. By improving these categories of metrics, you can grow over time.
9. Direct Marketing - A promotional method that involves presenting information about your company, product, or service to your target customer without the use of an advertising middleman. It is a targeted form of marketing that presents information of potential interest to a consumer that has been determined to be a likely buyer.
10. SWOT Analysis - An internal study often used by organizations to identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
11. Content Marketing/Strategy - The process of attracting and retaining happy customers through the curation of helpful, relevant content developed for a specific audience. This can be through blog posts, offers, webinars, ebooks, etc. This process should be ongoing and should be a consistent thing that your customers can count on, which is where having a strategy comes in handy. This will help you in developing, distributing and managing your content, so it aligns with your specific goals. Creating a content calendar is a big help with this.
12. Look-alike audiences - A lookalike audience is an algorithmically-assembled group of social network members who resemble, in some way, another group of members.
13. Re-Targeting/Re-Marketing - Retargeting, also known as re-marketing, is a form of online advertising that can help you keep your brand in front of bounced traffic after they leave your website. For most websites, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit. Retargeting is a tool designed to help companies reach the 98% of users who don’t convert right away.
14. Segmentation - The action of creating subsets of a market based on demographics, needs, priorities, common interests, and other psychographic or behavioral criteria used to better understand the target audience. By understanding your market segments, you can leverage this targeting in product, sales, and marketing strategies.
15. E-Commerce - Refers to the buying and selling of goods or services using the internet, and the transfer of money and data to execute these transactions. E-commerce is often used to refer to the sale of physical products online, but it can also describe any kind of commercial transaction that is facilitated through the internet.
16. Pixel - Pixels are snippets of code that allow you to gather valuable information about website visitors and what actions they took, so you can send them ads that are most relevant to them. Pixels are vital for measuring campaign performance, tracking conversions, and automatically building audiences based on behavior.
17. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) - The Act of organizing all of your marketing and sales activities, including storing contact information, tracking emails, storing deals, and more.
18. Marketing Automation - Marketing automation is all about using software to automate marketing activities. Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns -- not just for the sake of efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalized experience for their customers. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.
19. Marketing Funnel - A marketing funnel describes your customer’s journey with you. From the initial stages when someone learns about your business, to the purchasing stage, marketing funnels map routes to conversion and beyond.
20. Bottom of the Funnel - A stage in the buying process, this happens last – when leads move through the top of the funnel (identifying a problem), the middle (shopping for solutions), and finally, to the bottom, where they’re ready to buy. At this stage, leads are interested in a demo, a call, or a free consultation.
21. Top of the Funnel - Whereas Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) prospects are in the ready-to-buy stage, TOFU customers are at the initial stages of the buying process. They are looking for answers to a problem they just realized they are having. Marketers create TOFU content that help prospects identify the problem and leads them to solutions.
22. Demographics - A specific profiling aspect that takes into consideration age, gender, income, family life, social class, etc. It’s often used in segmentation or for focal points in marketing and advertising strategies.
23. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) - An ideal customer profile is a hypothetical description of the type of customer that would purchase your product or solution.
24. Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) - Metrics that can be used to track the progress toward your marketing goals. The key to a good KPI is to choose those which are most relevant to your industry and your business goals.
25. Analytics - The discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. When referred to in the context of marketing, it’s looking at the data of one’s initiatives (website visitor reports, social, PPC, etc.), analyzing the trends, and developing actionable insights to make better informed marketing decisions.
26. Click Through Rate (CTR) - The percentage of people visiting a web page who access a hypertext link to a particular advertisement.
27. Conversion Rate (CVR) - The percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web page, such as making a purchase. Pages with high conversion rates are performing well, while pages with low conversion rates are performing poorly.
28. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The process of improving a website's search engine ranking through unpaid results. SEO is a very tedious and detailed process which essentially details what your audience is searching for and what they want to learn about.
29. Return on Investment (ROI) - A common ratio that helps evaluate profitability and efficiency by measuring the benefit a company gains for the resources it put into a project or investment.
30. Earned Media - Earned media is publicity or exposure gained from methods other than paid advertising. Earned media may include mentions in online articles, television interviews or consumer-generated videos. Often, brands build earned media strategies through PR, digital marketing, and events.
31. Paid Search - The practice of displaying ads on search engines based on the terms, or keywords, individuals search for. Paid search works on a pay-per-click basis, meaning you only pay when someone clicks your ad for a given keyword.
32. Editorial Calendar - Is a calendar that acts as the central hub for content production, workflows, and deadlines. It’s essential for alignment of content production teams and visibility across business stakeholders.
33. Landing Page - A website page that contains a form used for capturing visitor information and converting visitors into leads, often by providing a valuable gated asset, such as a webinar, in exchange for that contact information.
34. A/B Testing - This is the process of comparing two variations of a single variable to determine which performs best in order to help improve marketing efforts. This is often done in email marketing (with variations in the subject line or copy), calls-to-action (variations in colors or verbiage), and landing pages (variations in content).
35. Offer - This is an asset that you’ll offer prospects on a landing page. The offer is designed to help you generate leads, and they can include everything from a webinar, ebook, checklist, template, demo and more.
36. Call to Action - A text link, button, image, or some type of web link that encourages a website visitor to visit a landing page and become of lead. Some examples of CTAs are “Subscribe Now” or “Shop Now.”