Digital Marketing Demystified: A Glossary of Terms

The Digital Marketing Industry is filled with jargon, acronyms and commonplace words meaning completely different things. So to help you wrap your head around what all of these digital era terms we’ve compiled a list of the Top 10.
 

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is used to establish your brand personality, company profile and value-proposition in the online marketplace.

1.     Brand

Your distinguishing factors, i.e. logos, symbols, names. Whatever it is that your customers recognise your company and how you stand out from the rest. The combination of these factors establishes the brand personality your customers recognise and value.

2.     Target Audience

Who you want to touch with your marketing activities. The group of people who are most important to you and would be the most interested in interacting with your brand.

3.     Reach

The potential audience you’re able to touch with your message, based on the size of your following. 1,000 Facebook Followers = 1,000 potential sets of eyes and ears for your message

4.     Exposure

This is where your brand has the power to grow. Your immediate followers are your reach, but your followers’ followers are a new market for you to connect with and expose to your brand.

5.     Hit

No, we’re not in the industry of violence… Your hits are simply the number of people who have visited your website.

6.     Impression

As within the offline world, first impressions count. So you want to ensure your message is powerful enough to drive engagement, a high impression count means nothing if people aren’t driven to interact with your brand.

7.     Conversion

Conversions are a measure of your brand’s success in engaging customers to take action. If a customer chooses to purchase, subscribe or contact you, you’ve achieved 1 conversion. Conversions aren’t everything, but they are a good indicator of how strong your Call To Action is.

8.     Call to action

This is your selling point that will drive conversions. Customers should be driven by an offer or appeal to take action and interact with your brand.

9.     Landing Page

The face of your brand. A customer arrives at your landing page after engaging with your ads or content. Your landing page should sell them on what you have to offer and drive them to further engage with you.

10.  Paid, owned and earned media content

Paid content includes print ads, TV ads and sponsored posts

Owned content belongs to and is controlled by your brand

Earned media is the free publicity generated by your fans

 

Online Marketing

Online Marketing is an avenue to strengthen your brand and build your brand personality through social platforms.

1.     Engagement

How much and how often users interact with you and your content

2.     Likes, Shares, Comments

These are the metrics that showcase audience action. They identify the level of active engagement you have on your content.

3.     Page views

Refers to the number of times a web page is viewed during a certain time period.

2.     Trending topics

What’s hot and what’s not online. Certain social and environmental events will spark conversation online that allow users to join the conversation.

3.     Tag

Tags link photos and posts back to your brand. The strongest brands have a community of users who tag their company in personal photos which increases brand exposure.

4.     Hashtags

A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by a “#” that is used on a variety of social media networks as a way to annotate a message and categorise information for searchability.

5.     Viral

Content that is exposed to large numbers of people online. Content goes viral when users share and engage with it quickly and frequently.

6.     Follower/Subscriber

A customer who has engaged with your brand and want to be filled in on business updates and changes.

7.     News Feed

Feed of news that is constantly refreshed with the latest posts, i.e. the newspaper in a virtual sense.

8.     RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

Delivers content to users without them having to visit individual sites.

9.     Crowdsourcing

Utilising your online community to product ideas, content or services. It is an ideal way to engage users and find out what they need and want from your brand.

10.  User-generated content (UGC)

Content your customers create. Using this content in your own marketing builds a sense of community and keeps customers engaged with your brand

 

Search Engine Marketing

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) respectively bring in customers organically searching your brand and customers who need what you have.

1.     Big data

Online brands have the ability to track a multitude of things relating to their website, how it’s used and how their customers are acting online which creates a massive volume of data. This ‘Big Data’ can then be analysed and broken down to reveal insights.

2.     Analytics

Revealing Big Data insights is the process of deriving patterns and trends, i.e. analysing your data often through Google Analytics.

3.     Traffic

The number of visits a website or page has at any given time.

4.     Index

The collection of data and websites obtained by a search engine, also known as ‘search index’.

5.     Keyword

Words and phrases that your target market uses to find your brand.

6.     SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

The collection of web results offered by a search engine based on the keywords used.

7.     Algorithm

Every site has its own algorithms to order and filter content. These take time to be established so it’s important that in the initial stages of your campaign you are critical of your content and ensure correlation across all communications platforms.

8.     PageRank

A specific algorithm developed by Google’s Larry Page and used by Google to rank the relevancy of websites based on the number and quality of links the website has from other websites.

9.     Organic, natural or earned search results

These refer to the search results from an unpaid search based on their relevance to the keywords associated with your campaign, often one of the most common sources of traffic to websites.

10.  Paid search results

Paid search can drive traffic to your website in high volumes if you are connecting with the right market. Your ad appears above ‘organic’ search results to channel traffic to your website.

 

Need a little more help with digital marketing? Our marketing team strives to provide the best quality marketing strategies for our clients. We also provide tailored marketing workshops to teach the skills needed to implement the same high-quality marketing in your business. Contact us to know more about our marketing services or workshops.