A snapshot guide to key marketing language and lingo
Calling all businesses! When your marketing team or agency starts throwing around initialisms like ‘PPC’, phrases like ‘search engine optimisation’, and words like ‘engagement’, do you feel a little in the dark? Don’t worry, you’re not alone! The world of marketing is extremely fond of acronymising any phrase it can get its hand on, as well as stripping lengthy terms to their bare bones. To counteract this guilty trait, we’ve pulled together the meanings of some of the most common lingo in digital marketing (we’ve defined that, too!) to ensure you’re speaking the same language as your marketing collaborators!
Nail the basics
Some words and phrases will be flying your way day-in, day-out, so it makes sense to start with those!
Call-to-action (CTA)
‘Click here!’, ‘Book now!’, and ‘Register your interest’ are all examples of calls to action. They’re a direct invitation to the reader to respond to a query or perform a desired action. You’ll likely notice them cascaded throughout a website or integrated in emails. Read more about digital marketing! See what we did there?
Landing page
First things first, it’s different to a webpage (like this one you’re reading). Landing pages stand alone and are designed with a specific target in mind. Users ‘land’ on a page with content tailored to aid the delivery of information about that particular subject. Landing pages help to target certain pain points and deliver super-relevant information to that user.
For example, we have a landing page dedicated to our company culture. If you’re browsing our website, you wouldn’t be able to navigate to this page. However, when we drive recruitment campaigns, for instance, we link our adverts to this bespoke page and/or distribute it via a targeted email list.
A/B testing
Usually deployed during email campaigns/advertisements, A/B testing is a method to determine which variable, A or B, garners the best results. For instance, in our strategy-related email, we could test which of the following email subject lines has the best open rate:
A ‘Did you leave your marketing strategy in 2021?’
B ‘Got questions about strategy? It’s our speciality. Hit reply and ask away!’
Open rate
The number of opens your message gets as a percentage of all delivered messages. Say you deliver 100 messages and 10 get opened, your open rate is 10%. For context, the average OR in 2020 was 18%. Short and sweet!
SEO (search engine optimisation)
We’ve put the initialism first on purpose, because the actual words are used as often as you post to LinkedIn at midnight on a Friday… Not very often! SEO is a vast area of expertise in itself. Stripped back to basics, SEO incorporates techniques to help get your website ranking as high as possible in search engine results. It does this in a manner of ways; the most well-known tact is to include specific keywords across all website content, though this is estimated to only account for around 15% of Google’s ranking algorithm.
For example, our own website targets keywords and phrases like ‘B2B marketing’, ‘Leeds marketing agencies’, ‘PR strategy’ etc. By incorporating these relevant and popular search terms, you help to establish your website as a source of authority. This, in turn, influences other websites to link back (see ‘backlinks’, below) to your website because it’s developed a reputation as a trusted source of information.
In a sentence, all you really need to know about SEO is that if your agency is talking about it, it’s a good thing – they’re strategically developing content that works to increase your site’s visibility online.
Quickly, then…
Keywords
These are the buzzwords that you should look to include in your website copy to make it as appealing to search engines as possible. Effectively, they are the words and phrases that people enter into search engines to get answers. See what happens when you type in ‘Halston Marketing’, for instance…
Backlinks
Basically, backlinks are the internet’s version of referencing. They’re the links from a page on one website to a page on another, and account for a big slice of the SEO pie. The more backlinks there are to your website, the more dependable search engines view it as a source of information. And so, the theory goes, the higher your website will rank, and the more people will see it.
Coming for 2022
Now that you’ve got a few more of the essential definitions down, it’s time to introduce the words and phrases looking to trend during 2022!
Digital marketing
A term that’s no way ‘new’ for this year but is definitely increasing in prominence. Digital marketing is simply all occurrences of marketing on digital platforms, like apps, emails, and websites. It’s fast becoming a specialist area of its own, with many agencies dedicating more roles and resources to digital over traditional marketing methods (e.g print).
Persona
Again, not strictly exclusive to 2022, but certainly something to reconsider this year! When you conduct market and consumer research, you’re helping to develop your business’ personas, i.e. your ideal customer and their unique pain points.
Personas lie somewhere between the realms of fiction and non-fiction, and they should be considered at every stage of marketing strategy evolution. After all, a lot has changed in the last couple of years, and your target market’s needs are probably up there!
Omnichannel marketing
Move out of the way multi-, there’s a new prefix in town! ‘Omni’ is defined as ‘all; of all things; in all ways and places’.
In theory, omnichannel marketing is the combination of a variety of channels (like physical and online stores) used by a business to communicate and interact with its customers. The aim of this practice is to establish and maintain a positive, consistent brand experience for the consumer that helps to catalyse other opportunities for fulfilment.
In practice, omnichannel marketing could look as simple as:
- Consumer browses and purchases goods online (channel one)
- Consumer picks-up in-store (channel two)
Or as complex as:
- Consumer sees advert for company’s new product on a billboard.
- Consumer searches company’s website for new product.
- Consumer is encouraged to download company’s app to purchase new product (increasingly incentivised, e.g. product discount).
- Consumer makes purchase via the app and collects the order in-store.
And there you have it! A short introduction to some of marketing’s most well-used and persistent key words, phrases, initialisms, and ideas.
Did we miss out on something that you struggle to understand? Let us know!