12 Digital Marketing Buzzwords You Need to Know

From the cosmetics industry to construction, every discipline develops its own language, a shorthand that practitioners use to describe processes and products.

Digital marketing is especially full of jargon and buzz-words, adding to its complexity and accessibility. So we’ve created an easy list of useful terms. Once you understand the terminology you’ll be ready to move on to the next level, using some of these techniques to grow your business!

Content Marketing

Content marketing is all about creating and sharing useful information with the aim of developing ‘leads’ or prospects. Your ‘content’ can be text, audio and visuals. And you share it via your website, through email and on your social media channels. Examples include blog articles, infographics, e-books, podcasts, and videos. Great content is designed to ‘give first and sell second’. It offers something of value, generates interest or provides useful information. Content marketing can build brand awareness, bring traffic to your site, generate new leads, convert prospects and improve retention of existing customers.

Social Media

While sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram typically come to mind, there are dozens of other social media networks, each with a unique purpose and user base. Social media platforms allow you to make online connections through the sharing of ideas and content with other users. Your social media pages are more relaxed and fluid than your website and provide an opportunity to engage with your customers and build a community.

Advertising on social media platforms is a great way to reach a highly targeted audience. Here’s a more in-depth look at social media.

Lead Gen

Short for lead generation, this is the process of identifying and developing quality leads (your prospective customers). This should form the basis of your marketing strategies – in other words, methods for attracting people that you can convert into customers. Lead Gen techniques include boosting followers on social media, offering a downloadable guide or e-book with an email address, directing traffic to landing pages to build email contact lists.

Sales Funnel

The funnel is a way to describe the sales process from prospect to customer.

The process, represented by an inverted pyramid, is divided into various stages from awareness of your brand through engagement/decision and then to a sale. Successful marketing works to combat a ‘leaky sales funnel’ where leads are lost before they can be converted to customers. Understanding how many prospects convert to customers will also give you a guide for your marketing campaigns, i.e. how many prospects you need to reach to meet your marketing objectives.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves improving your website’s visibility or ranking on search engines, this includes optimising your website using content, keywords, metadata and design to make it more appealing to the search engine bots that crawl the internet to provide the best results for people. In digital marketing terms, organic search engine optimisation is free. The techniques involved are all about improving your online presence so that customers can easily find you without requiring paid advertisements or boosted posts on social media. While it is ‘unpaid’ it can involve resources and time to write blog posts, update web pages and manage social media accounts. Find out more about SEO.

SERP

The search engine results page is the list of results you see after typing in a query online. The aim of SEO techniques is to increase your prominence on page 1 of these results. Research carried out by Caphyon found that the first page on Google received 71.33% of organic traffic, pages two and three a mere 5.59% and pages six to ten only 3.73%.

Keywords

Keywords are the words that a person types into search engines to find something online. The more relevant the information on your website is, in relation to that search term, the higher you rank on search results page. You can build keywords into your web pages, blog posts, and other content as part of ‘search engine optimisation’ to improve your ranking on search engines and help prospective clients find you online. The best way to do this is to make sure you have well-written text that describes your products or services and the solutions they provide your customers. You can also write guides, advice, commentary and information that relates to your product – this is a natural way to include your keywords without forcing them into the web text.

Long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are simply keyword phrases typed into a search bar by someone. They tend to be much more specific than a one-word search and therefore easier to achieve a higher ranking on, e.g. ‘furniture’ will be highly competitive but ‘mid-century modern dining table’ would be easier and give you a more highly engaged audience. Long tail keywords deliver less traffic but they are much more targeted and therefore their conversion rate can be higher.

PPC

PPC (Pay-per-Click) or paid search involves paying search companies (usually Google, given their dominance in search) to list ads above and below organic search results. You pay to access these positions by bidding on the keywords that are relevant to your business and that people are searching for. The more relevant the better, for example, a jewellery retailer is more likely to reach motivated buyers bidding on the keyword combination ‘buy gold hoop earrings online’ than the much broader ‘jewellery’. The more popular and competitive a keyword is, the more expensive it will be to bid on. However, it’s worth noting that your ad’s position is based on more than just the amount you are prepared to pay. Google also takes into account your landing page quality and relevance, plus your click-through rates. So the work you do in optimising your website, the landing pages that your ads link through to and it’s overall SEO score will help give you a better return when you invest in PPC activity.

Impressions

The number of impressions is simply the number of times your online advertisement is seen.  Each ad view counts as one impression. Impressions are not measured by the number of unique users, but rather how many times your ad or page is displayed and seen. CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) can be used as a pricing model for digital advertising as well as a reporting metric.

Remarketing

Many of the visitors to your site will visit and leave before they complete a sale. In 2017 research company, Statistica found that 77% of online shoppers abandoned their cart before purchasing and that statistic goes up to 81.8% in the finance industry.

Remarketing is an online marketing practice that allows your website to reach out to visitors who have already visited your site and left, or performed an action that added their information to your database. Remarketing is a tactic that aims your ads at this audience when they are searching elsewhere.

Cookies

Cookies come from websites you browse and are stored on your computer so that the next time you visit, it can remember small amounts of data. The main purpose of a cookie is to make things easier. Cookies can allow for items you had out in a shopping cart to be remembered when you return to the website. Cookies are also used for remarketing.

For more on Digital Marketing visit our marketing resources page.

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