Marketing Buzzwords: 13 Basic Marketing Terms to Help You Get Started

When you look into creating a digital marketing campaign for your business, it’s essential to know marketing buzzwords that will help your campaign succeed. These essential marketing terms are valuable in helping you create and better understand your campaign. In this post, we’ll cover 13 important marketing terms to know as you create your digital marketing strategy.

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1. Brand identity

Definition: Your business’s persona, style, and reputation online.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: When designing your website or running a social media campaign. As you look at different marketing jargon, you’ll come across the term brand identity. Brand identity is your business’s persona, style, and reputation.

Your brand identity is how you establish your business to your customers. You want your business to be unique and stand out from your competitors. Having a brand identity allows you to determine what’s unique about your business.

You can build your brand identity through:

• Page copy
• Logo
• Web design choices
• Imagery

Brand identity is vital to your business because it influences your audience’s impression of your business. If you build a strong brand identity, your audience will get a sense of who you are and your business’s values.

2. Clickthrough rate (CTR)

Definition: How many clicks your ads receives per number of impressions.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: When running ads, optimizing for search engines and running email campaigns. Clickthrough rate (CTR) is an important metric when you’re running advertising campaigns. CTR is the ratio of people who click on your media compared to those who view it.

This metric is crucial for your business because it helps you see the effectiveness of your campaign. Your CTR enables you to know if you effectively drive people to click on your content.

3. Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

Definition: Improving the percentage of web users that turn into paying customers.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: Whenever you use a strategy that helps you earn conversions, like PPC or email marketing. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) helps you improve your conversion rate to earn more sales. If your projected conversion rate is low, conversion rate optimization can help you refine the conversion process to drive more sales for your business.

Let’s say you’re running a PPC campaign and find that your ad is earning conversions as you expected. Upon analyzing your ad, you may find there are certain features on your ad that deter leads away. By using CRO, you optimize your ad to alter these elements and improve your conversion rate.

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4. Customer relationship management (CRM)

Definition: Software that helps you track customer information and interactions with your business.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: When you’re starting to create campaigns for digital marketing strategies and want an easy way to manage information about your audience. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a common term you’ll hear when you run a digital marketing campaign. This software helps you get to know your customers better so you can create digital campaigns that resonate with them.

When you invest in CRM software, you track information about your audiences, like demographics and socioeconomic status. You also track how they interact with your business. These actions can be clicking through an email or browsing through your site.

CRM software is essential for helping you understand your relationship with your audience. It’s a great way to better understand your audience and their process through the buying journey, as well.

5. Geofencing marketing

Definition: Location-based marketing that uses invisible barriers that allow you to target people directly.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: When creating any local marketing strategy, like local SEO. Geofencing marketing is an essential piece of marketing jargon. You’ll often hear this term when people discuss creating a local SEO campaign. When you use geofencing, you create an invisible fence around your business or a competitor’s business.

After you create the barrier, you can send users text messages, deliver in-app notifications, or show social media ads. You do this when a user enters or exits the virtual fence. This strategy allows you to deliver relevant information directly to your audience.

You can share information that gets your audience to visit your business. The only catch with this strategy is that people must turn on their location on their mobile device. Geofencing has grown increasingly popular with apps like Facebook.

It’s important to know this marketing buzzword as it becomes a more integral part of local marketing.

6. Earned media

Definition: Media that others write about your business, but you don’t pay for it or create it yourself.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: In blogging or social media marketing. When you’re running a digital marketing campaign, you’ll encounter multiple types of media. There are three types of media: owned, paid, and earned.

While owned and paid media are relatively self-explanatory, many people aren’t clear as to what earned media is. Earned media is any marketing done for your business that you aren’t involved in creating. Many people consider earned media to be “word of mouth marketing.” It relies on other people telling your audience about your business.

Some examples of earned media include:

• Social mentions
• Social shares
• Reviews
• Reposting content

With all of these actions, your audience voluntarily shares your business or your information with their friends and family. It’s an excellent way for you to gain brand exposure and reach more people interested in your business. This term is one of the most critical marketing terms to know because of how it impacts your audience.

People consider earned media a trusted source of information about your business because it’s coming from other people. As you build your marketing strategy, get familiar with earned media.

7. Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Definition: Important metrics that determine the success of your campaign.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: When you use any digital marketing strategy; all of them require choosing KPIs to indicate success. If you’ve ever met with a digital marketing company, you’ve probably heard them use one of the most popular marketing buzzwords: key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs allow your business to see where your campaign succeeds and falls short.

Some common KPIs include:

• Organic growth
• Clicks
• Conversions
• Downloads

These KPIs help you understand if people like your campaigns and how they interact with your content. You can analyze these KPIs to see if you need to make improvements to your campaign and where you can make those improvements. If you’re going to run a digital marketing campaign, you must know basic marketing terms.

KPIs is a primary marketing term that will help you better understand your campaign and how it drives results for your business.

8. Marketing automation

Definition: Software that enables you to systematize certain marketing processes to save you time and money.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: Any time you run a digital marketing campaign. Marketing automation is an essential marketing buzzword you’ll learn. When you invest in digital marketing, you’ll quickly learn how involved and intricate it is.

You won’t have enough manpower and resources to manage every aspect of your campaigns. This part is where marketing automation comes into play. Marketing automation allows you to perform crucial key marketing functions without having to dedicate the manpower and extra resources.

This software helps you do processes such as:

• Customer segmentation
• Email automation
• Campaign management
• Analytics
• Reporting

Instead of putting in the time and resources, you’ll save both of those by using marketing automation software. It’s important to know this powerful marketing jargon because it strongly impacts how you run your campaigns. At WebFX, we offer our marketing automation software, MarketingCloudFX, to help you manage your campaigns.

If you want to learn more about MarketingCloudFX, contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about how MarketingCloudFX can help you simplify the marketing process.

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9. Mobile optimization

Definition: The process of optimizing media to appear and function well on mobile devices.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: When building your website’s design Mobile optimization is an integral part of your digital marketing plan. People use their mobile devices more than ever to conduct searches, find businesses, and buy products. If you want to appease these customers, mobile optimization is the key.

This digital marketing buzzword focuses on helping your business create more mobile-friendly pages. One example of mobile optimization is a responsive design. Responsive design enables your site to adapt to whatever device a user uses.

This process means that your website will adjust to fit the mobile user’s screen, creating a better experience for your audience. Mobile optimization also includes integrating mobile-friendly features and elements into your design.

10. Personalization

Definition: Providing your audience with a unique experience by creating marketing materials that appeal to specific groups.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: When you’re creating an email marketing campaign. Personalization is one of the most critical marketing buzzwords you’ll come across in digital marketing. With customization, you take the approach of creating a unique experience for different members of your audience.

People aren’t interested in your business for the same reasons. If you owned a photography company, you’d have people interested in engagement photo shoots, wedding shoots, maternity shoots, and more. People want your products or services for different reasons, so it’s essential to tailor the experience to what your audience wants.

In this case, your company would personalize the experience for your audience by only sending them pertinent information that’s relevant to their interests. If someone were interested in your wedding photoshoots, you could send them information about your affordable wedding packages. You could also send your portfolio of previous wedding shoots or information about how to hire the right photographer for your wedding.

11. Retargeting

Definition: Showing users ads for products or services they viewed previously to get them to convert.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: When running paid advertising campaigns, such as PPC ads and social media ads Retargeting is one of the primary marketing terms that has a substantial impact on your business’s conversion rate. This strategy helps you obtain conversions you may have otherwise lost. Retargeted ads show products or services to users they viewed previously.

Many people will see products and need more time to consider. In this process, many users forget the product they were looking at, which can result in loss of conversions. With retargeting, the ads encourage people to think about your product or service again.

If they’re close to conversion, it could be the final point that gets them to convert.

12. Return on investment (ROI)

Definition: The money your business gets back from investing in digital marketing strategies

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: Any time you run a digital marketing campaign. Return on investment (ROI) is a common marketing buzzword you’ll hear whenever you run a digital marketing campaign. ROI focuses on how much money your business receives after investing in different strategies.

Your ROI is a crucial indicator of your business’s success. If you have a high ROI, it means that you’re getting more money back than how much you’re investing in to help your business grow. A low ROI indicates you’re spending too much to market your business, and your profit suffers as a result.

13. User experience

Definition: How your audience positively or negatively interacts with your business online.

Where you’ll commonly hear this term: You’ll frequently hear this term when designing your website, but it applies to all aspects of your digital marketing campaign. User experience is a critical component of success for your digital marketing campaign. This term is one of the marketing terms that focus on improving your audience’s experience on your site.

If users don’t have a positive experience on your website, you could risk losing them to the competition. To keep users engaged with your site and excited about your content, you have to provide them with a stellar user experience. You influence user experience through graphics and videos on your pages, your ease of navigation, or even the number of internal links you feature on your pages.

These site elements work together to create an experience that users will remember and enjoy. This marketing jargon is essential to note because it helps you create more refined campaigns that please your audience.

Want to learn more marketing buzzwords?

There are dozens of more marketing buzzwords that are important to your business and building your online presence. Understanding these terms helps you create a better digital marketing campaign for your business.

If you want to learn more about marketing buzzwords and Internet marketing abbreviations, contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about how you can use marketing buzzwords to create more effective digital marketing campaigns.