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Digital Marketing Terminology: Your Introductory Guide

In this video, Alicia from the WebFX Social Media team will cover 28 of the most basic marketing terms to know. Keep reading to learn more!

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Transcript:

Hello, friends! Believe it or not, in this video, we are talking about digital marketing. I bet you didn’t see that one coming.

More specifically, we’re going to take a safari through 28 common marketing terms. So, next time you see a bunch of seemingly-random letters squished together in the wild, you may actually be able to decipher them.

Ahh, I think I see our first one.

1. Digital marketing

Let’s start by defining digital marketing. Digital marketing is where you promote your business through any sort of digital channel, like a website, an online ad, a search engine, or social media.

Now that we’ve defined digital marketing, let’s get into some more specific marketing terms. First, let’s check out some terms related to the marketing funnel.

2. Marketing funnel

What is a marketing funnel? Basically, it’s a visualization of the way people become customers.

Picture a funnel, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. At the top of the funnel, you have a lot of prospects who are just getting to know you. Eventually, some of those prospects move to the bottom of the funnel and become customers.

3. Top of funnel (TOFU)

A top-of-funnel user, or TOF or TOFU, is a cold audience that doesn’t know you yet and the goal of the campaign is to introduce these people to your brand, product or service. They’re most likely not ready to buy yet.

4. Middle of funnel (MOFU)

A middle-of-funnel user (often abbreviated to MOF and MOFU)  is someone in the middle of your marketing funnel. They’ve gotten to know your business a little bit, and they’re kind of starting to think about buying, but they’re still not ready to become a customer yet.

This is a great trust building phase where you can establish thought leadership with these users and expand your relationship with them so that when they are ready to buy they will choose you.

5. Bottom of funnel (BOFU)

And at the very bottom of that funnel, BOF (abbreviated) or BOFU. These are the people who are ready to buy — all you have to do is convince them to take action. You want to retarget these users with marketing that directly encourages them to buy, such as a promotion.

6. Brand awareness

Our sixth term is brand awareness. Brand awareness is basically how familiar people are with your company. When you market to users at the top of the funnel, you’re usually trying to increase brand awareness.

7. Lead

A lead is someone you have a name and contact of in your database, but hasn’t actually decided to buy from you yet. Someone might become a lead by signing up for your emails, downloading a guide, or trying out a free product demo.

There are two basic types of lead.

Marketing-qualified lead

A marketing-qualified lead or MQL is someone who you have contact info for but they are not ready to dive into a demo or even consider purchasing your product or service.

Sales-qualified lead

A SQL is a sales-qualified lead, this is a higher qualified lead who is primed to purchase and is ready for a demo or phone call or to talk business.

That leads us right into our next term, lead generation.

8. Lead generation

Lead generation is a type of marketing designed to turn people into leads.

There’s also lead nurturing, which is where you try to encourage your leads to become customers.

9. Conversion

A conversion is basically whenever someone completes an action that you wanted them to complete. Often, that means buying something. But signing up for your email list or trying a product demo could also count as a conversion.

Now let’s move on to talking about six different digital marketing strategies you can use to drive leads and conversions.

10. Search engine optimization (SEO)

First up, we have search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is a strategy where you try to get your website ranking in Google search results.

The goal is for people to find your site when they search for stuff related to your industry. Then they visit your website to learn more, and they end up getting interested in what you sell.

11. Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

Another digital marketing strategy is pay-per-click advertising, or PPC. PPC is where you run paid ads online and pay for each click on these ads (hence the name pay-per-click).

Sometimes those ads are on third-party websites, and sometimes they’re at the top of Google search results.

12. Social media marketing

Social media marketing is where you promote your business and engage with your audience on social media. You can create an account for your business and post content there.

You can also run social media ads to get in front of your target audience, even if they don’t follow you.

13. Web design and development

Next, let’s talk about Web design and development, which is building and maintaining your website.

Since all your other marketing leads to your website, it’s important that your site is helpful to users and pleasant to look at. Web design focuses more on the way your site looks and feels. Development is more focused on how your website functions, although it can overlap with design in several areas.

14. Content marketing

Content marketing is a strategy where you create content on your website to help users learn about topics related to your industry or your business.

That content could include things like blog posts, infographics, and videos. The goal is to use it to draw people to your website and move them through the marketing funnel so they become your customers.

15. Email marketing

Email marketing is a strategy where you send out mass emails to promote your business and your content. You don’t just send emails to anyone — you let people sign up for your e-newsletter on your site, and then you send the emails to those people.

Now that we’ve covered six major marketing strategies let’s look at some digital marketing jargon related to helpful tools and tactics you can use.

16. Marketing automation

First up we have marketing automation. Marketing automation uses tools that will perform certain marketing tasks for you automatically.

For example, you can get tools that will automatically send out emails instead of you having to do it manually.

17. A/B testing

Next is A/B test where you try out two different versions of something to see which performs better, often comparing a new version to one that you’ve already been using.

For example, you might run two different versions of an ad to see which one drives more conversions. Whichever one does, you’ll probably want to use that one going forward.

18. Programmatic advertising

Next term on our list is programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising is a form of advertising where you use automated tools to help you buy or sell advertising space.

There are tools that will match up advertisers and publishers and help them make deals on ad inventory. It’s a great way to help you advertise on third-party websites.

19. Marketing technology

Marketing technology, or martech, is pretty much just what it sounds like. It’s technology that helps you streamline and enhance your marketing.

That could include things like email automation software, personalization software, or tools that store and organize customer information, like a CRM.

We’ve just talked about how important it is to analyze your marketing results.

For that reason, let’s wrap up this list of marketing terminology by quickly defining some key marketing metrics to know.

20. Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate, or CTR, it is the percentage of people who, after seeing your marketing content, actually click on it.

21. Conversion rate (CVR)

Conversion rate, CVR for short, is the percentage of people who take a desired action from your marketing campaigns, like making a purchase or calling you.

22. Cost per lead (CPL)

Cost per lead, or CPL, is the amount that you pay for each lead you earn.

23. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is how much monetary value you can expect a customer to bring to your business over their lifetime.

24. Return on investment (ROI)

Next, we have return on investment, or ROI. ROI is a metric for evaluating how much value you get for what you spend on your marketing.

Marketing costs money, and ROI helps you see if you’re earning back the money you spent with a decent-sized profit.

25. Return on ad spend (ROAS)

Return on ad spend is how much money you earn for your investment in paid advertising.

26. Advertising cost of sales (ACoS)

Advertising cost of sales is how much money you spend on advertising for each dollar of revenue you earn.

27. Key performance indicator (KPI)

Key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that helps you see how effective your marketing is.

A lot of the metrics we just discussed are KPIs, like cost per lead and ROAS. Those numbers give you a sense of how successful your campaigns are.

28. Objectives and key results (OKRs)

Objectives and key results (OKRs) These are specific goals you set for your marketing campaigns, along with the metrics you plan on using to measure them.

So, you might set a goal of earning more valuable clients, and you plan to use customer lifetime value and CPL to help you measure the success of that goal.

Well, that’s all the marketing terminology we’ve got time for in this video

If you want to learn more about any of those marketing terms, or if you want to find out about new ones, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, or to our email newsletter.

Thanks for watching, and joining me on this safari! I will see you next time!

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