A/B Testing
A/B Testing is specific part of a marketing testing that tests two different aspects (one is the control and the other is the changed factor) to determine which has a better result in order the optimize a marketing effort.
Ad Space
Ad space is the section of a website that is allocated for advertising. Most websites set aside a portion of their page for marketers to buy as party of a paid advertising campaign. Web pages can contain one or multiple ad display spaces, and the format of the space can vary.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the practice of an advertiser paying a third party to publish ads on their web page. Payment can be given as either a percentage of a sale or as a fixed sum for each conversion.
Anchor Text
This is the text that is embedded in a hyperlink. It is highlighted and when clicked on, it will redirect a web user to the desired web page. It is an off-page SEO factor that other websites use to refer to your content.
Authority
Authority is one of the ranking factors that influence a website's SEO. It is a measure of the overall power of a web website across the internet. Websites with high authority are the more popular, respected websites.
Banner Ad
Banner Ad is a form of advertising that utilizes a graphic display to advertise a company. A banner ad usually appears along the sides of a web page: at the top, bottom, left, or right. They often take a rectangular shape and can contain both images and text.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking is the process of measuring a business’s performance, policies, strategies, and other metrics against the standard of its industry and those of its competitors. Companies benchmark to analyze their success and get a better understanding of how they are performing relative to their competition.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness measures a potential customer’s ability to recognize a brand and associate it with a certain product or service.
Brand Equity
Brand equity is the additional value a product receives from having a well known brand. It is the difference in price that a consumer pays when they purchase a recognized brand's product over a lesser known, generic version of the same product.
Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is the tendency of consumers to continuously purchase one brand's products over another. Consumer behavior patterns demonstrate that consumers will continue to buy products from a company that has fostered a trusting relationship.
Branding
This is the process of differentiating your product or service from other products and services through the creation of unique advertising campaigns, symbols, images, and themes. The goal of branding is to establish a distinctive presence in your industry as a recognizable company.
Buyer Persona
A Buyer Persona is a research-based representation of the ideal buyer for a company.
Call-To-Action (CTA)
A Call-to-Action (CTA) is a marketer's prompt to a visitor to perform a desired action.
Click-Through
A click through is the process of a website visitor clicking on one of your online advertisements. Whether it’s a banner ad, a link in an article or email, or any other form of advertisement that links to your web page, if a visitor clicks it, it counts as a click through.
Click-Through Rate
Click Through Rate informs you of how many people click on the ads, is a measurement of the success of online ads.
CMO
A Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is the highest marketing authority within an organization. The holder of this position is responsible for ensuring the successful marketing efforts of a company.
Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence is information collected about a company’s competitor that gives insight on the competitor’s recent and future activities, shows the effects a competitor’s actions have on a business, and analyzes a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
Contact Bucket
A contact bucket is a collection of contacts that share similar characteristics. It contains contacts that have been segmented and arranged into groups for convenience of targeted marketing.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is a form of owned marketing that involves emails, blog posts, guest posting, white papers, ebooks, webinars, case studies, website copy, infographics, FAQs, and social media content.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the measurement of success in getting visitors to perform a desired action.
Cookies
A cookie is a small file that is stored in web users’ search browsers when they visit certain websites. They keep track of browsing history as people navigate through a website. This allows a website to keep track of browsing movements throughout the site.
Cost Per Click
CPC or (Cost Per Click) is the measurement of the amount one pays to the advertisement publisher every time one of the advertisers' web ads is clicked.
Cost Per Impression
CPM or (Cost Per Impression) is the measured of cost that one will pay when their ad is shown per one thousand impressions. CPM helps to determine other calculations for ads such as CPC (Cost Per Click) and the CTR (Click Through Rate).
Cross-Selling
Cross-Selling is the marketing practice of suggesting complimentary products to consumers while they are buying a product in hopes that they will make additional purchases. This form of selling is prominent throughout the digital marketplace and often comes in the form of a related/suggested products page.
Customer
A customer is someone who has bought your product or subscribed to your service.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost that is required for a business to secure a customer. Businesses keep track of this to have an idea of how to allocate resources when they are trying to gain new customers.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the set of activities associated with managing interactions between a business and its customers. It focuses on organized methods for organizing the volumes of data collected from customers.
Data Mining
Data mining allows marketers to gather more complete profiles on their customers. It can help them create more effective marketing strategies that are personalized based on consumer interests and behavior. Consumers can be separated into groups targeted on a group level based on the information collected.
Data-Driven Marketing
Data-driven marketing is based on a systematic approach to goal-setting and benchmarking. Measurement is rooted in channel-specific metrics and goals.
Demand Generation
Demand generation is creating an interest in your product or service.
Direct Marketing
Direct marketing is a marketing method where advertisers directly provide consumers with marketing materials to elicit them to perform a certain action. Instead of employing broader marketing methods such as online ads, where companies pay a publisher to display the ad, direct marketing focuses on sending marketing messages straight to the consumers.
Display Ad
A display ad is a form of online paid advertising that is typically a designed image or a photo and copy where viewers can click on the image with the promotion and be taken to the corresponding landing page. Display ads function differently than text ads as they aren't found in search results. They can be spotted through media sites or sites offering some type of display ad network.
Drip Campaign
A drip campaign is a method used in direct marketing to acquire customers through repetitive marketing actions. It involves sending marketing information to prospects repeatedly over long periods of time. Drip campaigns are often executed through email marketing, where pre-written content is automatically sent at predetermined times.
Earned Media
Earned media represents one of the three sides of marketing (The other two: paid and owned). Earned media are the components that a marketer can “earn.” This earned media is press mentions, press releases or new features that point back to the marketer’s brand or company.
Ebook
An ebook is an electronic version of a book in print. These can be accessed on a computer or any compatible mobile device.
Email marketing is sending marketing messages to people via email. Generally, marketing emails will solicit an action from the recipient. This could include requests to buy products, fill out a survey, etc.
Engagement Rate
Engagement Rate is a metric that measures the level of engagement that your created content is receiving from your audience. Factors that influence your engagement rate include users' comments, shares, and likes.
Facebook is an online social networking platform that was launched by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes in February 2004. Facebook has over 1 billion active users and became a publicly traded company on May 18, 2012.
Facebook Algorithm
Facebook’s Algorithm is the formula used to determine which stories are displayed on the News Feed and the order in which they appear.
Focus Group
A focus group is a tool that marketers use to gather information about products and services directly from consumers. In a focus group, a company representative meets with a group of consumer and will ask them questions about certain characteristics of the product.
Geo-Targeting
Geo-Targeting is the process of personalizing a marketing message to a consumers based on their geographical location. Marketers can separate the distribution of consumers into geographic locations and can execute different advertising campaigns for each of the locations.
Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla marketing can best be described as unique, non-traditional marketing techniques aimed at promoting brand awareness. A guerrilla marketing campaign is usually characterized by a cheap, innovative, and extremely creative strategy. Generally, the goal of a guerrilla marketing strategy is to go viral, rapidly promoting a business's brand in the eyes of consumers.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is creating content and publishing it on another person's website.
Heat Map
A heat map provides on-page data analytics that visualize a user's behavior showing where they stop to view, areas they click that show a users' behavior on a page showing where they stop to view, areas they click, and mouse movements over a page.
HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is the primary computer language used in developing websites and is the groundwork of all web pages. HTML creates text on the page, embeds objects and images, and creates overall structure for a website.
Inbound Link
Inbound links, or backlinks, are the links on other websites that point to your page. They are created as hyperlinks on third-party websites or blogs and direct traffic to your website, blog, or other content platform.
Inbound Marketing
This is a method of marketing with a goal of attracting potential customers to a company’s site. Instead of having to convince a lead to look at a business, inbound marketing focuses on creating useful material for that business’s desired customer so that anyone meeting its buyer persona criteria will be naturally attracted to the business.
Instagram is a social media platform with sharing, editing, photo, and video capabilities. Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and launched on October 6, 2010. Over the last few years, Instagram has reached several milestones.
Keyword
Keywords are words that are used by a search engine to find web pages. A search engine reads the text entered by the user, and using those entered keywords, it identifies relevant web pages. Keywords are pretty much used in every aspect of marketing.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of determining the best words for a website to use to influence its SEO. Conducting research provides a much higher chance of success in boosting SEO because marketers can more efficiently plan their content strategies.
Landing Page
A Landing Page is a web page that a link in an online advertisement directs you to. Marketers can embed links to a landing page in an email, a social media platform, and advertisement involved in search engine marketing campaigns.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of establishing and maintaining relationships with possible customers.
Link Building
Link Building is the process of accumulating quality links from other websites, which search engines take into account to calculate search result ranking.
LinkedIn was found by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vallienat in December 2002. LinkedIn then launched the following year on May 5, 2003. On May 19, 2011, LinkedIn traded it’s first public shares at $45 per share.
Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are specific, multiple phrase search terms. They are the opposite of “head” terms, which are usually popular, singular keywords. A long-tail keyword can have three or four terms, or be as long as a normal sentence.
Market Research
Market research is the process of aggregating data on a company's potential and existing customers. The purpose of market research is to gather information on the market's desires and needs and to use that information to gauge demand for a product or service.
Market Segmentation
Market Segmentation is the process of dividing a market of potential customers into groups, or segments, based on different characteristics. The segments created are composed of consumers who will respond similarly to marketing strategies and who share traits such as similar interests, needs, or locations.
Marketing Attribution
A marketing attribution model determines how your organization credits leads across multiple campaigns and buyer touch points. It typically takes multiple touches along the buyer journey for a consumer to request information and actively "shop" for your product or service. A marketing attribution model stores credit for these touch points so that marketers can understand which campaigns contribute to sales and revenue.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is done through the use of software with the purpose of automating certain repetitive aspects of the marketing process. It assists marketers with tasks such as customer segmentation, customer data management, and campaign management.
Marketing Influencer
Through their insights and innovative thoughts, marketing influencers have established themselves as experts in the marketing industry. Usually they are marketers who have achieved a high level of success, such as a CMO at a popular brand, or they could have created methods and tactics that changed the way marketers think.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
A marketing qualified lead is a prospect that has come through expressing interest in one's product and then converting into a lead. This lead fits the qualifications, or standards, that a lead must possess as determined by marketing.
Marketing Spend
Marketing spend represents the amount of money a marketing department spends on initiatives such as, content marketing, paid advertising, SEO, social media, trade shows, etc.
Marketing Vehicle
A marketing vehicle is a specific tool for delivering your advertisement to a target audience. They are particular channels within a medium that you use to get your message across. Marketing vehicles are contained within marketing mediums.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are HTML elements that search engines use to index web pages and determine search result rankings. These tags provide some insight on the content of a page. There are several kinds of Meta tags, with each serving a unique, descriptive purpose. The most important and most used of which are the description Meta tag, the keywords Meta tag, and the robots Meta tag.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is advertising that is specialized and optimized for mobile devices. Any marketing that is intended to reach consumers on personal mobile devices falls under the category of mobile marketing. Mobile marketing has evolved over time from SMS marketing, to MMS marketing, to app-based marketing.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is an advertising strategy that involves creating and positioning content so that it matches the context of the user’s experience.
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language refers to the language spoken by human users. Computers take the natural languge that users type and convert it into a programming language so that the computer can read and process the input.
Niche Marketing
Niche Marketing is a very concentrated form of marketing. Unlike some other forms of marketing that target a broad range or large group of consumers, niche marketing involves targeting a very specific, well defined segment of the market.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO is the combination of SEO factors that cannot be directly controlled by the creator of a website, because they are located “off the web page” These factors are influenced by third party websites and have a large impact on SEO rankings.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the combination of SEO factors that can be found “on the web page” that web designers have direct influence over.
Opportunity
Opportunity are leads who has been qualified as being in need of your product or service.
Opt-In
Opt-in is when somebody expresses consent to receive something from a company. Providing the option for a consumer to opt-in to something is usually part of direct marketing campaigns. The offer can be sent through email, direct mail, or other forms of marketing messages.
Opt-Out
Opt-out occurs when a consumer expresses his/her desire to discontinue receiving messages from a company. After opting-in to receive something from a business, a consumer is usually offered the option to opt-out at any time.
Optimizing
Optimizing means creating content, an advertisement, or any other marketing material in the most efficient and effective way possible.
Outreach
Outreach is the process of spreading awareness of your business by actively distributing information to find potential leads. Businesses perform outreach by presenting at industry events, giving demos of their product, giving sales pitches to potential customers, etc.
Page View
A page view is the individual view of the pages and/or content on a website.
Pinterest is a social media platform that was founded by Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp and it launched in private beta in March 2010. Later Pinterest released invitations for an open beta. Pinterest is a highly visual platform that has a pin-board style and users can share photos and images through collections they create.
Podcasting
Podcasting is the process of distributing information digitally in an audio format. People will often confuse podcasts with other forms of media, such as vlogs and webcasts, however distinct differences exist between them all. Unlike vlogs, which combine both audio and visual mediums, podcasts generally favor audio.
PPC
Pay-Per-Click is an advertising model employed by marketers to generate website traffic and is used to describe the overall strategy of paying for clicks.
Proactive Marketing
Proactive Marketing is a form of marketing that allows for marketers to be agile, real-time, data-driven, and adaptable to the ever-changing space of what their customers could be seeking. It encompasses all forms of marketing, but shows marketers the direction to head in to secure the most benefit before performing the actual campaign.
Product Placement
Product placement is the practice of businesses paying to have their products featured in movies and television programs. By showing the products in the film or shows, companies can gain exposure for their product.
Prospect
There are several definitions out there for the term Prospect as it relates to sales and marketing. Some define it as a lead that has shown interest in your product. Some define it as a person further down the sales cycle who is likely to buy your product.
Ranking
Ranking refers to your placement within a search engine results page.
Real Time Marketing
Real-Time Marketing is marketing that is based on up to date events. Instead of creating a marketing plan in advance and executing it according to your own schedule, real-time marketing is creating a strategy focused on current, relevant trends and immediate feedback from customers.
Relationship Marketing
Relationship marketing differs from other forms of marketing because it approaches marketing from a different angle. Unlike most other marketing methods, relationship marketing understands the benefits that arise from long-term satisfied customer relationships. It attempts to establish a relationship with customers that exists outside of sales transactions.
Remarketing
Remarketing is similar to retargeting in that they both seek to bring a previous visitor back to your website. The difference between the two is that whereas retargeting focuses on display ads and their positioning, remarketing deals more with emails. In a remarketing campaign, after someone visits your website and leaves, you can send emails that are personalized to the interests of the visitor.
Response Rate
Response rate is a measurement of the amount of people who respond to a certain call-to-action. When marketers want to solicit a response from consumers, they will distribute an offer to the consumers.
Retargeting
Retargeting is used to attract people who have visited your site. Using cookies, strategically placed ads can be customized based on browsing history.
Retention
Retention is all the activities that a company performs in order to retain its customers. This process begins with initial contact with a customer, and continues throughout the customer’s lifecycle. Retention is influenced by several factors, including the quality of a company’s product or service and the efficiency of a company’s customer service.
Rich Media
Rich media is an online advertisement that interacts with web page visitors. It deviates from traditional text and display ads in that it provides a visitor with a much more engaging experience. Rich media ads can contain graphics, video streams, games, expansions, etc.
ROI (Return on Investment)
Return on Investment (ROI) is a measurement of the value that an investment provides.
RSS (Rich Site Summary)
RSS (or Rich Site Summary) is an XML-based method used to quickly and automatically deliver content to a user on a website. It delivers information to an RSS feed, which can be published on a third-party website.
Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)
This is an MQL, Marketing Qualified Lead, that has been reviewed and handed off to the sales team to begin sales process with the Sales Accepted Lead (SAL), or opportunity.
Sales Cycle
The sales cycle is the process that companies undergo when selling a product to a customer. It encompasses all activities associated with closing sale. Many companies have different steps and activities in their sales cycle, depending on how they define it.
Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting is the process of estimating future sales. Accurate sales forecasts enable companies to make informed business decisions and predict short-term and long-term performance. Companies can base their forecasts on past sales data, industry-wide comparisons, and economic trends.
SEM
SEM is a form of marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process in which a marketer tries to gain visibility about their brand and/or company on a search engine's results page. Typically, higher ranked and more frequented pages will rank higher on a page.
SERP
After a web user enters a query, a search engine executes search algorithms and returns the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) to the user.
Social Listening
Social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand and industry online. Marketing teams primarily use social listening for community management, such as identifying customer pain points and providing direct consumer response to questions, complaints, and comments. Marketing teams also use social listening to surface feedback that could help to differentiate their brand, product, or service.
Spam
Spam is when messages are sent to a large amount of recipients regardless of the messages’ relevancy or appropriateness for the recipients. Spam is most common with email, where companies gather big email contact lists and indiscriminately send messages or advertisements to all contacts on the list.
Submission Rate
Submission Rate is the rate at which a prospect views a website and submits a form from a call-to-action to then become a lead and/or a contact.
Targeting
Targeting is a strategy used in advertising to reach a particular audience.
Template
Templates are guides for creating new documents. They are formatted in a certain way and act as a base for any new file you create. Templates often show where things should be positioned on a document so that all documents you create are in the same format.
Testing
Testing is a function in marketing that experiments with components of different aspects of marketing to determine a more predictable outcome.
Text Ad
A text ad is a form of online paid advertising that is typically just text with a link to your site and copy with a description of the promotion on is offering. Text ads are generally offered through search engine advertisers like Google and Bing.
Tone
Tone is the attitude of an author’s writing. The tone should be appropriate for the target audience. Unlike Voice, which cannot be easily changed, tone is an aspect of writing that can, and should, be manipulated as needed.
Top Of The Funnel
The top of the funnel represents the upper most portion of the marketing funnel. Top of the funnel includes all inbound efforts such as, email, social media, blog posts, SEO, traffic, paid advertising, white papers, free trials etc.
Traffic
Website traffic is a metric used to measure the amount of visitors your site receives. Anytime someone accesses one's site, whether its from entering their URL, clicking an advertisement, or opening a link in an email, it will go towards their website traffic. Essentially it is determined through the number of visitors and the number of pages they view during their visit to the website.
Twitter is a social networking platform that was launched in July 2006 after it was created in March by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone. On November 6th, 2013, Twitter went public setting their IPO price at $26 a share.
Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. It is the identifier for any website or webpage on the Internet. Each individual webpage has its own unique URL that will only direct to that webpage when entered into a search bar. A URL is composed of three parts.
Unique Visitor
Unique visitors are individuals who are visiting a website for the first time within a predetermined time period. Multiple visits by an individual within that predetermined time period will result in only one registered unique visitor.
Upselling
Upselling is the process of trying to entice a customer to make a more expensive purchase. This could involve offering a more advanced version of a product, additional upgrades to a product, or add-ons that would drive the price of a product up.
Value Drivers
Value drivers are anything that can be added to a product or service that will increase its value to consumers. These differentiate a product from that of a competitor, and provide a competitive advantage to a business.
Velocity
Velocity is the rate of change of the state of a prospect to lead or to contact, opportunity and then to customer. Velocity can also represent the rate at which a person moves through the funnel.
Visitor
Visitors are the individuals that visit a website. Regardless of how many visits an individual has, he/she will still be considered a visitor whenever they “visit” the website.
Vlog
A Vlog, as the name suggests, is considered a combination of either the terms video and blog, or video and log. This is a blog in which the posts are done through video. The video installments can be combined with supporting text and images, but video is the primary medium.
Voice
Your voice is your style of writing. This is what differentiates your content from other content.
Warming
Warming is the process of maintaining contact with a potential customer. It involves following up with a customer after prior contact. Warming is a more personalized approach to nurturing a possible customer relationship.
Web Crawling
Web Crawling is the process of search engines combing through web pages in order to properly index them. These “web crawlers” systematically crawl pages and look at the keywords contained on the page, the kind of content, all the links on the page, and then returns that information to the search engine’s server for indexing.
Web Hosting
Web hosting is the process of providing server space for a website to be published on the World Wide Web. When an individual or business does not have their own server, space on a web host’s server can be purchased for them to publish their website or web page.
Webinar
A webinar, as can be derived from the name, is a combination of "web" and "seminar". Therefore, a webinar can be defined as a seminar given over the web. A webinar can be on any topic and can promote a company’s product or discuss relevant industry information.
Whitepaper
A whitepaper is a report or guide on an issue that provides important and definitive information that holds value for the readers.
Word Of Mouth Marketing
Word of mouth marketing is a form of marketing that flows organically amongst consumers. This method does not focus on directly pushing an advertisement onto consumers to get their attention, but rather on indirectly using consumers as advocates of a business.
Youtube
Youtube is a video-sharing social media platform that was created in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. It was then acquired by Google in 2006. The videos on YouTube are all user-based and are displayed through Adobe Flash and HTML5. Over one billion unique users visit YouTube and over six billion hours of video are watched each month.