Not only do marketing professionals need to walk the walk, keeping up with the latest trends and news, but they also have to talk the talk. Communicating clearly with vendors, your sales team, and your marketing contacts means you have to know what you’re talking about. If you don’t have a handle yet on common marketing terms, we’re here to help you speak more confidently. Don’t take another business meeting or sales call with marketing jargon that you don’t understand. Dazzle your colleagues as you convert more prospects into customers and increase your revenue, all by understanding these common marketing terms.
A/B Testing
How do you take the guesswork out of optimizing your marketing conversions? By comparing two marketing strategies which are identical except for one part. Having this one difference helps you see which strategy works better. You can test two versions of a webpage, email subject line, landing page, or Call-to-Action (CTA), all to see which one performs better.
Analytics
What are you doing with the customer data you collect? At the heart of marketing, analytics is learning what your data means. Tracking data, and creating patterns from that data, should improve future marketing endeavors. Data can come from website traffic, advertisement conversions, social media interactions, and other sources. Discovering meaningful patterns in your data can help you improve your business.
Buyer Persona
Do you know who your ideal customer is? A buyer persona can help you identify and define your audience. A buyer persona is a profile of your ideal buyer. This semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer is based on market research, real data about your existing customers, and hypothesis.
Call-to-Action (CTA)
You’ve worked hard and spent a lot of money on your marketing campaign, but do you have a place for customers to respond? Much like it sounds, the sole purpose of a CTA is to invoke an immediate response. Common CTA phrases include “call now” or “find out more.” The CTA should be compelling and entice the potential buyer to take action.
Direct Marketing
How can you be sure that you are reaching your customers? Direct marketing is advertising directly with customers, rather than through a mass medium. Think of this as communicating directly with your primary target audience. Examples of direct marketing include email and direct mail like postcards and catalogs.
Engagement Rate
How do you define the success of a marketing campaign? Engagement rate is one way marketers can measure success. Engagement rate is a measurement of likes, shares, comments, or other interaction a particular piece of content receives. The engagement rate is a percentage and is calculated by dividing interactions by the number of users following the account, then multiplying by 100. The closer to 100 percent, the better the engagement rate.
Inbound Marketing
Are you delighting your customers? What about educating or informing them? Inbound marketing is the process of attracting leads, pulling in a consumer, with content creation, social media strategy, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Educating, delighting, and informing are all goals of inbound marketing. How can your business reach those goals? By utilizing content marketing, podcasts, video, eBooks, email broadcasts, SEO, and Social Marketing.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
Do you know if you’re hitting your primary business objectives? KPIs are a means to measure the performance of various factors, indicating how effectively a company is hitting its primary business objectives. Before you can start measuring KPIs, you have to set your goals, whether that is conversion goals for the website, an increase in new customers, or a sales goal for the year. You can use tools that measure SEO, marketing progress, sales statistics, and other performance areas. Tracking KPIs will help your business know if it is achieving its goals.
Keyword
Are you struggling to get website visitors? That’s where keywords are helpful. Keywords are specific words or phrases that help people find your webpage via a search engine. Choosing the best keywords requires research, checking for keyword search volume, and competitive data. It’s important to pick wisely; the most optimal keywords will have a relatively high search volume and a relatively low difficulty score. Your keywords should describe the content of your webpage and align with your target audience.
Lead Nurturing
Do you know at what stage each of your leads is on the buying cycle? Probably not. Yet, it’s imperative to be providing relevant content to the right audience at the right stage in the buying and decision-making cycle. Lead nurturing is the process of engaging, building, and sustaining relationships with your potential customers through a variety of marketing techniques over a period of time. Providing lead nurturing doesn’t have a time limit; you should always be paying attention to your potential customers’ needs throughout the buying cycle to channel them into becoming customers.
Marketing Automation
Could you be working smarter and not harder? Marketing automation allows marketers to streamline marketing campaigns by replacing manual processes with automated solutions. By harnessing information from lead nurturing, you can use marketing automation to send the right marketing messages to the right people at the right time.
Offer
Are you looking to generate more leads? The answer for most businesses is probably yes. That’s exactly what an offer should help you do, generate leads. Your offer is a piece of content that you offer to prospects on a landing page. The offer can include a webinar, white paper, eBook, trial, webinar, slideshow, checklist, template, demonstration, or consultation. An offer is something that a reader can learn from or use to their advantage; an offer is not a landing page or a call-to-action.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Do you need website visitors right now? If you’re looking to drive traffic quickly, PPC is likely a good option for you. PPC is a method of advertising on the Internet where you only pay when someone “clicks” on your ad. A PPC ad is one that you might take out on a social media site or a search engine like Google. It’s basically the opposite of organic traffic, as you are essentially buying visits to your website, but it could earn you a lot of qualified, ready-to-buy traffic.
Qualified Lead
Don’t waste time and money on a lead that isn’t your target audience. While you say you want leads, what you really want are qualified leads. A qualified lead meets your company’s criteria, or buyer persona attributes, and is more likely to buy. This lead has usually opted-in to receive communication from you, such as subscribe to a newsletter. There are two kinds of qualified leads: a marketing-qualified lead meets marketing objectives, while a sales-qualified lead meets sales objectives.
Return On Investment (ROI)
How can you tell if your latest marketing campaign was a success? You’ll want to calculate your ROI. If the ROI is negative, it usually means you’re losing money on that campaign. It also probably means that it isn’t a campaign you want to duplicate. You want a positive ROI, and the higher, the better. Mathematically, ROI is calculated as net profit/cost of investment x 100. The resulting answer is a percentage used to help make better financial decisions. It’s important to note that ROI calculations don’t take time into consideration within their formula, so make sure you keep track of that as well. Measuring the ROI on your marketing efforts helps ensure that you’re putting your money into strategies that bring results.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Where does your website land in web search results? The higher up you show in the search rankings, the more website visitors you are likely to experience. So how does one improve web search results? The answer is SEO, which is the process of increasing a webpage’s performance in web search results. By tweaking some elements on a webpage, you can move your website towards the top of search results. SEO elements include keywords, title and image tags, links, and more.
Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
A potential customer’s first impression of your brand can often determine whether they become existing customers later on. Before you can ask a potential customer to buy a product or service from you, they have to know who you are. Top-of-the-funnel marketing refers to the process of getting your brand or business out there. TOFU customers are at the initial stages, specifically the Awareness Stage, of the buying process. The goal is to engage prospects who are not yet familiar with your brand. These prospects aren’t looking for a solution yet, so the content here is primarily educational and designed to help prospects with a specific issue they might have encountered.
The opposite of TOFU is BOFU (or BOTF, Bottom-of-the-funnel). At this point, your hopefully soon-to-be customer is close to making a purchase. Now is the time to leverage free trials and incentives.
Workflow
Do you find yourself needing more time to spend on the important tasks, and possibly spending too much time on tasks that could be automated? The answer to both of these questions is probably “yes,” and a workflow may be a solution. A workflow is an automated marketing tool that you can trigger based on a lead’s interactions with your content. This powerful marketing asset can be used to engage leads, learn more about prospects, segment lists, and more. Your workflow can be designed for several things, such as sending an email based on the number of times someone has engaged with your site or based on something they downloaded.
While this isn’t a comprehensive list of marketing jargon, it is a step in the right direction. You can always depend on Safeguard for an array of marketing services, advice, and ideas. Your personal Safeguard consultant is a dedicated marketing expert and can help you with the business and marketing solutions that best fit your unique needs. Connect with a consultant today to get started.