Sometimes trying to keep up with a marketing conversation can feel like alphabet soup! This digital marketing jargon dictionary is designed to help you understand all the wacky acronyms and buzzwords thrown around in sales and marketing these days.
Use the table of contents below to jump around to different sections or read through the entire resource to brush up on your marketing knowledge! Have a term you want us to define? Let us know at hello@zealousadvertising.com.
A/B testing is a marketing strategy where you test two versions of the same content to see which is more effective. A/B testing can be used to optimize emails, landing pages, forms, and more. Explore best practices for A/B testing.
Account-based marketing. ABM is a marketing strategy that focuses on targeting top accounts with specific messaging and outreach.
Instead of being blasted to thousands of prospects, account-based marketing campaigns are typically limited to 50 contacts or less. ABM content is typically personalized with contact and account details for a more engaging and frictionless buying experience.
Above the fold
Above the fold refers to a section on web pages that is visible before scrolling. It’s essential to get your key information above the fold to encourage viewers to stay longer and reduce friction in the buying process.
Affiliate marketing is a strategy where individuals promote products and services on their website or social media. Then, if someone in their audience clicks through and makes a purchase, the individual gets a small kickback.
This is a mutually beneficial strategy, where the individual is incentivized to promote your brand and you get a promotion that only costs if it works.
Algorithms are the science behind how social media platforms decide which posts to show in what order. Social media platforms frequently refresh their feed algorithm, which changes what you need to do to be successful online.
Alt tags are used to describe an image on your website, blog, or social media. This description makes it easier for line readers to understand images so your content is more accessible to all users.
Alt tags also offer a significant search engine optimization benefit. Since Google can read or interpret your images, creating alt tags gives Google a way to understand the content on your website.
It’s important to keep both use cases in mind when developing your alt tags. Utilize keywords that are relevant to the image and content on the page
Analytics is the analysis of data. Good marketers will spend digging into their analytics, understanding the drivers, and optimizing future content with their data learnings.
Google Analytics is a website add-on tool that lets you see your website analytics, while each social media and email platform typically has their own analytics dashboards.
Business to business. These companies sell products or services to other companies. While the end-user may be a consumer, the buyer is a company.
Business to consumer. These companies sell products or services to consumers.
Business to government. These companies sell products or services to local, federal, or international government entities. Similar to B2B companies, while the end-user may be a consumer, the buyer is a government entity.
A backlink is a link on someone else’s site back to yours. You want to earn backlinks from authoritative domains in order to boost your traffic and bolster SEO.
This is a section on your website where you can publish blog posts. A blog post is typically 500-700+ words focused on educating your audience. Blogs should never be sales-oriented and should always be a way to provide value to your audience.
When an email bounces, it was unable to be delivered to the intended recipient. A hard bounce means that the email address was likely incorrect or the recipient blocked emails from your domain. A soft bounce typically means the email address is valid, but the email couldn’t be delivered at the time of sending due to the server being down or other technical issues.
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that exit after visiting the first page. A high bounce rate signifies that your website may be uninteresting or off-putting. If you get a high bounce rate from ads, you’re likely misrepresenting your webpage in the ad.
Bottom-of-funnel refers to the stage in the sales funnel where buyers are making a purchase decision. Here, buyers are educated about their problems and are ready to make a decision to purchase. Typically, bottom-of-funnel content includes sales sheets, case studies, and whitepapers that explore product or service specifications and provide compelling results from past customers.
Brand awareness is the concept of people being aware of and generally knowledgeable about your brand and offerings. Typically, startups have little-to-no brand awareness and need to work hard to get the word out about their company and what they do.
It’s important to develop brand awareness and establish your company. By doing so, you can begin to build trust with potential customers so when you do show up in their inbox or social media feed, they’re already familiar with you. Additionally, by developing brand awareness, your customers are more likely to think of buying from you when a relevant need arises.
Brand positioning defines how you position your company in the marketplace. Specifically, what benefits you choose to highlight and how you promote your products and services to target customers.
The buyers’ journey defines the adventure a customer goes on from first identifying a problem all the way to making a purchase decision to solve their problem. This journey can be dissected into four main steps:
1. Awareness – Your audience is just becoming aware of their problem.
2. Consideration – Your audience has defined their problem and is beginning to consider different solutions to alleviate their various pain points.
3. Decision – Your prospect knows what their problem is and how they want to solve it.
4. Retention – Your prospect is now a customer, and the relationship needs to pivot from sales to retention.
There are various chatbot softwares available that give the feeling of a virtual assistant on your website. A chatbot will typically appear as a chat window at the bottom of your screen. These typically will pop up offering help after a certain amount of time or on mouse-over.
Chatbots can be pre-programmed to run through a sequence of messages to either qualify your prospect for sales or help them find what they need on your website. Implementing a chatbot can be a great way to keep your website visitors engaged and start qualifying for purchase right away.
Churn is the act of losing customers. Customer churn rate is the frequency at which customers discontinue service.
Clickbait is the act of “baiting” users with unbelievable statements in a headline, then not delivering in the article. This is a very popular strategy used by news organizations and other publications. While it can be effective in driving clicks, it’s often an ineffective strategy for driving engagement and you’ll begin to lose trust with your audience if you don’t deliver on promises.
Cold calling is the act of calling prospective customers out of the blue, without having a previous conversation with them. This is a difficult way of selling as many individuals are uninterested in outbound sales techniques.
Similar to cold calling, cold emailing is the act of emailing prospective customers without having a previous engagement. Cold emailing can be more effective than cold calling since you typically get more of an opportunity to demonstrate your value.
Your competitors are other companies or options that prospective customers could choose instead of you to solve their problems. A competitor doesn’t always have to provide the exact same service that you do, they just need to alleviate the same pain points.
It’s important to check-up on your competitors and see what they’re doing online. Look at their website and digital marketing efforts to see if there’s anything you can learn from them. You might discover a new way to target customers or an alternative way to promote your services. Sometimes it’s helpful to see what you don’t want to market like and go from there.
Your competitive advantage is the leg up you have on your competition. Typically this is something that sets you apart from others in the market or provides even more value to your customers.
Competitive density refers to how dense the competitive landscape is for this keyword. If the keyword has lots of high-quality search results from authoritative sources, it will have a high competitive density. The higher the competitive density, the more difficult it will be to get new content to rank for the term.
When using tools like SEMRush, a competitive density of less than .6 is ideal.
A stage in the buyers’ journey where your audience has a better understanding of their problem and is beginning to consider different solutions to alleviate their various pain points.
Content is a very broad term which can make it confusing to follow. Content is essentially any type of media on your website, social media, or email. Content could be a blog post, a social media post, a piece of copy for your website.
In a content audit, an individual or team goes through all the content a brand has and reviews it. This would include blog content, downloadable resources, sales materials, email sequences, drip campaigns, and more.
Typically the team running the content audit would have a specific goal, such as developing a cohesive brand, optimizing for search, or just getting an overview of the content that exists.
Content curation is a distribution strategy that focuses on taking blogs and articles written by other brands and compiling them. Content curation can be a good strategy for filling your social media feed with relevant content.
Content syndication is a distribution strategy that essentially links to platforms. When you syndicate content, any posts published on one platform will also be published to the syndicated platforms.
Contextual advertising is a strategy that utilizes context to make ads more relevant and engaging.
Conversions
A conversion refers to an action a visitor takes. This can include “converting” into an email subscriber, blog follower, or even customer. Content in the decision phase of the buyer’s journey should be optimized for conversions.
Your conversion rate is the ratio of viewers of a certain piece of content to conversions that happen from that content. For example, an email that was open 10 times and resulted in 5 purchases would have a 50% conversion rate.
Copywriting refers to the development of copy for websites, blogs, sales materials, social media posts, and other marketing resources. Copy is the words that make up those materials. Copy can define anything from a simple tagline to a full ebook.
Copywriting has nothing to do with patenting or trademarking, which is called a copyright.
Content management system. This is a platform that manages your content. HubSpot and Zoho are popular content management systems that help you house all your blogs, website content, email marketing, and social marketing in one tool.
Cost per click. This is related to advertising spend. When you run an ad on social media, the platform will typically provide analytics on the average cost per click for your ad. In Google search, keywords have a predetermined average CPC.
Cost per mille (thousand). This is related to advertising spend in terms of impressions. The CPM for an ad refers to how much it costs to get 1,000 impressions.
Creative refers to any graphic assets for a campaign. These can include images, infographics, and even videos.
Customer relationship management. A customer relationship management tool acts as a virtual Rolodex. Different tools have different levels of capabilities, but at a bare minimum, every CRM has the ability to house contact records with contact information and interaction notes. Salesforce, HubSpot, and ConnectWise are all popular customer relationship management tools.
A CRM platform is a great way to keep track of all your contacts, no matter how far along they are in the sales process. Typically, CRM tools also make it easy to set reminders for sales activities and follow-up.
Call to action. This can be a short line of copy or a designed button, but the purpose of a call to action is to direct a visitor’s next step. On a blog, encourage a visitor to check out more content. On a product page, encourage a visitor to reach out for a demo.
Click-through rate. This is the number of clicks received, divided by total views. Essentially, the percentage of viewers who clicked on a link in an ad.
Customer acquisition cost defines how much it costs your business to convert a prospect into a customer. This includes ad spend, time spent, and any other investment that goes into closing a deal.
A lower customer acquisition cost makes your relationship more profitable. Larger deals will typically have a larger customer acquisition cost as they’re associated with longer and more complicated sales cycles.
Data-driven marketing relies on analytics to drive action. Through the analysis of past efforts, future outreach can be made more effective.
Deep linking is the act of linking a site page within a subpage of your website. Deep links are not accessible via the homepage and can only be accessed by clicking through multiple pages.
Demographics define specific qualities for your target audience. Demographics include gender and age skew, job titles, education experiences, and location.
Your domain is your website’s name or address. It will need to be unique and should incorporate your company name or services you offer.
Domain authority is a way that Google measures how reputable a website is. The more trustworthy you are, the higher your domain authority will be. Older sites, sites with lots of great content, and sites that get linked to often are seen as the most trustworthy to Google.
Drip marketing is a strategy where sales outreach is “dripped” on a contact overtime.
For example, a drip marketing workflow could send an email to a list of contacts once every two weeks for 6 weeks. If at any time the contact engages, the workflow stops, and your sales team is involved. If not, the workflow continues to drip content until the end of the workflow.
Typically, a workflow should end with a “break-up” email letting the contact know this is your final attempt and you won’t be reaching out again.
Dynamic content changes depending on who is viewing it. This could include a headline, blurb, or entire layout of a blog post or website page. Depending who is looking at the content, the text, image, or layout could adjust. This is valuable when you have audiences in different countries or states that need slightly different content. Dynamic content can also make content more applicable across the board for your different buyer personas.
Earned media is organic media coverage that has not been paid for. Typically, this comes as a result of an event that is announced with a press release. From there, local or industry publications may pick up on the story and distribute it further.
An email list is a segment of contacts who have given you permission to contact them. While in the past, it may have been easy to spam email lists with your marketing, today you need explicit permission from your contacts before you can send sales content.
Emailing contacts without their permission, spamming emails, and getting too high of an unsubscribe rate can reduce your deliverability rate which can be impossible to fix.
Engagement is any interaction on your content or posts, such as a like or comment. The more engagement your social media posts get early on, the more platform algorithms will favor them, ensuring they get distributed to a larger network.
An external link on your website is a link that goes to another website. This is beneficial for search engine optimization — the higher domain authority a site has, the more beneficial your link will be.
It’s recommended to include an external link every 200 or so words. Case studies and research reports are some of the best external links.
Evergreen content stays relevant long after it’s posted. This is great because you can continue promoting evergreen blogs for months or even years in the future.
After a few years, it’s a good idea to revisit your old content and revamp it if it’s still relevant. You should add additional sections, incorporate new internal and external links, and refresh imagery. Be sure to do keyword research and incorporate newly identified target keywords in your refreshed content.
Gated content requires viewers to provide specific information or payment before viewing. Gated content can be an effective way to gather email addresses in exchange for high-quality downloads you’ve developed. Typically, gated content is housed on a landing page with a download form. Once a visitor fills out the download form, they can either download the resource immediately or wait for it to get sent to their email.
Typically gated content is good for the top and middle of the funnel. Bottom-of-the-funnel content should be left ungated to reduce friction in the sales process.
A guest post is an article you write on someone else’s blog. The benefit of guest posting comes from being able to link back to your own website. Backlinks from reputable, relevant websites can improve your website’s ranking on Google.
A hashtag (#) is used on social media to categorize posts. When browsing different platforms, you can search for hashtags and see all the posts that users have tagged with that phrase.
It’s a best practice to use about 3 hashtags on each social media post. These should be relevant to your post and business. Be sure to look at what else comes up for a hashtag on a specific platform before using it and how popular it is. You want to aim for hashtags that are fairly popular but aren’t drowning in posts.
Refers to a view on a website page, social media post, or another piece of digital content. Typically multiple views by the same user are counted as multiple impressions.
Inbound marketing is a modern form of marketing where the buyer leads. Instead of a salesperson making promotional outreach, the buyer is able to peruse educational resources on their own to learn more about their problem and potential solutions. From there, the buyer can choose to engage with the company and continue the sales process.
This reduces the burden on a company’s sales team and often reduces friction in the sales process.
An influencer is an individual who uses their website or social media pages to “influence” their audience. Typically, influencers encourage their followers to buy products or follow specific brands.
Influencer marketing is a strategy where brands pay influencers to market their products. Influencer marketing can be extremely beneficial when your product is closely aligned with the influencer and their audience.
An infographic is a type of graphic created to visually represent numbers. Typically, they feature different color-coded charts and graphs to display data. Infographics do well paired with blogs and shared on social media.
Intent has to do with an individual’s goal. Today, intent is a key consideration when developing content for search engines. While keyword stuffing used to be the only way to improve your ranking, now it’s imperative to consider your audience’s goals when searching for your content and help fulfill their intent.
Interactive content is non-static content your audience can engage with. This can include quizzes, responsive design, and editable resources. Interactive content is a great way to drive engagement with your audience, especially when you’re providing value.
An internal link is a link on your website pointing to another page on your site. A healthy mix of internal links and external links alike is key to a strong SEO strategy. Aim for one internal link for each paragraph of blog copy.
This refers to a search term. Keywords can be long- (multiple words or a full-sentence) or short-tail (1-3 words). Typically, long-tail keywords are more specific. Each webpage you develop you have a specified target keyword, including blog pages.
Keyword difficulty refers to how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. When using tools like SEMRush, a keyword difficulty under .75 is ideal.
Keyword research is the process of looking into specific search terms, identifying terms to target in your content, and deciding how to target them.
Start by finding keywords you want to target. You can use Google or a tool like SEMRush to identify search terms. From there, use a tool to find the search volume and difficulty for the keywords you’ve pulled. You want to aim for keywords with a difficulty under .75 and a monthly search volume over 50.
Keyword stuffing is the act of loading a website page or blog post up with the same keywords. This used to be the best way to get content to the top of search results, but since it provides a bad user experience, Google now punishes sites instead of rewarding them.
Today, senselessly including tons of search terms in your content is a good way to get it to rank lower, not higher. Instead, focus on developing content that satisfies your searcher’s intent and answers their questions. Keywords should still be incorporated into content, but strategically within headings, subheadings, and hyperlinked text.
Key performance indicators. These are goals set that, when accomplished, denote success. It’s important to set key performance indicators at the beginning of projects so you can measure the success of your efforts.
A landing page is a website page designed for users to hit. Typically, landing pages are developed as part of a campaign. For example, a specific ad campaign may lead to a landing page on your site. From there, the landing page provides more information and typically offers something like a download or a tool.
Gated resources on landing pages will have forms that need to be filled out in order to receive the resource, while ungated landing pages provide the resources without requesting any personal information.
A lead is a contact who fits specific criteria for being a sales opportunity. Different companies define leads differently and leads are often qualified both by sales and marketing.
Lead generation is the act of gathering new contacts either with gated resources, ads, or other sales and marketing tactics.
Lead nurturing is a strategy of warming leads up so they’re ready to take the next step in purchasing. Typically, this involves sending over valuable, educational resources they can peruse on their own time. Nurtured leads are handed over to sales as marketing qualified leads.
Automated email workflows are a great way to streamline your lead nurturing by developing a series of outreach that reaches out with the right content at the right time.
Lead scoring is a lead qualification strategy where customer opportunities are rated based on how viable of an opportunity they are. Typically, leads get “points” for certain activities, like opening an email, reading a blog post, or liking one of your social media posts. Different activities are worth more or less depending on how they tie to the quality of a lead. Once a lead hits a certain threshold, they may be added to lead nurturing workflows or passed along to sales for additional outreach.
Lead qualification is the practice of determining how viable of an opportunity a specific contact represents. Typically this is done by both sales and marketing teams with a set of specific qualities a lead should match to qualify.
Lifetime value defines the total revenue a customer generates for your business over the course of your partnership. Customers who stick around for longer and buy more have a larger lifetime value.
By analyzing the lifetime value of your past clients, combined with their demographics and psychographics, you can begin optimizing your efforts to specifically target leads that align with other high-lifetime value clients.
Link building is the ongoing strategy of getting other websites to link back to your website. Offering reciprocal links is a good way to develop strong backlinks. However, you’ll need high-quality content no matter what — people don’t want to link to content that isn’t valuable.
If you search the exact same term in Chicago and London, you’ll likely get different results. Google tailors search results to the geographic location of the searcher. Local SEO describes search engine optimization efforts targeted at improving geographical search engine rankings for your website. This is particularly beneficial for businesses with physical locations or who specifically serve customers in their area.
By optimizing for local SEO, your website will rise to the top of rankings for keywords when individuals are searching in your area.
A lookalike audience is a segment of contacts designed to mimic the qualities of contacts on another list. Typically, lookalike audiences are used when advertising. You provide your advertising platform, like Facebook, with a list of contacts you’ve had success engaging and the platform will develop an audience to target that has the same demographic and psychographic qualities of your initially provided list.
A market segment describes a vertical or portion of an industry you’re targeting. By refining your audience to a market segment, you can more effectively tailor messaging and target prospects.
Marketing automation is a strategy that uses technology to streamline marketing efforts such as blog posting, email sending, and social media publishing. Typically, marketing automation tools allow a user to schedule content to go live on a certain day, set up recurring activities, and more.
Marketing automation can save marketers and entrepreneurs tons of time in their day and help ensure publishing consistency.
When your website shows up in search results, Google pulls about 260 characters to display with the page title as a preview for the page’s contents. If you don’t define a meta description, typically Google just pulls the first 260 body characters.
We recommend defining your meta description on your website. Keep it under 260 characters and use it to promote your page. Keep in mind the context in which an individual would be searching for your content and use that to develop content that entices the reader enough to click and read more.
MDF
Market development funds. These are funds distributed for partner marketing.
The middle of the sales funnel is the secondary stage of the sales cycle. In this stage, prospects are more familiar with their problem and are exploring different solutions to fix it. Resources that explore the pros and cons of your solutions make great middle-of-funnel content.
Mobile optimization is the act of setting your site up in a way so it automatically adjusts for mobile viewers. Typically, mobile optimization needs to take into consideration layout adjustments, font sizes, image adjustments, and button placement.
It’s important to always test your website on desktop and mobile before fully launching.
Marketing-qualified leads. These are leads that the marketing team has considered “qualified” for prospecting, meaning they are ready for further sales outreach. Typically, there will be a list of requirements leads must meet in order to be considered “qualified”.
Minimum viable product. Startups and growth hackers typically define their minimum viable product before beginning development efforts. This is a way to set a hard milestone and specific guidelines for launch
Net promoter score. A company’s net promoter score defines how loyal and satisfied their customers are. A 10 is perfect, with customers 9+ considered promoters. Individuals scoring 7 or 8 are considered passive fans, while individuals with a score of 6 or less are detractors.
A no-follow link is a link you tell Google shouldn’t be followed. By doing this, it won’t be indexed by the search engine and will not “count” as an official SEO link. It makes sense to use no-follow links when you want to cite a source that has poor domain authority.
Off-page optimization refers to search engine optimization efforts that happen outside of website content. These can include:
• News mentions
• Backlinks
• Guest posting
• Social networking
• Brand awareness development
An offer is a broad term describing any valuable piece of content that is available for download. These often include, but aren’t limited to:
• Ebooks
• Checklists
• Buyer’s guides
• Quizzes
Omni-channel marketing is a marketing strategy that spans many platforms. Today, omni-channel marketing strategies are very common and often a necessity. Almost every brand is on multiple social media channels, in addition to using social media marketing, and other marketing platforms.
On-page optimization refers to search engine optimization efforts within website content. These can include:
• Focus keywords
• Page titles
• Subheadings
• Hyperlinks
• Image alt tags
• Body copy
Open rate describes the percentage of individuals who opened an email out of the total who received it. For example, an email that was sent to 2,000 individuals and opened by 500 would have a 25% open rate.
An opt-in is an action taken by a contact. By opting-in, a contact elects to receive marketing communications from you, typically via email or text. Today, it’s very important to opt-in contacts before contacting them. If you reach out to contacts who have not opted-in, you risk violating privacy laws.
Organic reach describes how far your content gets without paying for advertising. Typically organic reach is limited as social media platforms want to encourage ad spend. Hashtags, optimizing timing, and incorporating the right mix of engagement can all extend the organic reach of your content.
Outbound marketing is the opposite, more traditional approach to inbound marketing. In this strategy, a company’s sales team must make promotional outreach to prospective customers. Typically, outbound marketing will include strategies like physical mailers, email marketing, and cold calling.
Page views define how many times a page of your website has been seen. Typically, page views count every single view. This means if someone goes to your website 15 times, it counts as 15 page views, even though it was only one unique visitor.
Partner marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on teaming up with another relevant brand to provide better offerings to your customers. It makes sense to run partnerships with companies that have an overlapping target audience, but no overlapping product or service offerings.
One popular partner marketing method is running joint social media giveaways. Typically, two or more brands partner up to provide a prize, then request entrants to follow all the accounts.
Paid distribution is a strategy where you pay in order for your content to be published on certain sites. This an effective way to drive views and can be good for influencing engagement.
It’s important to pay attention to the audience of the site you’re trying to be distributed by. You want to aim for publications that have an audience aligned with your own.
Paid search is a marketing strategy where you pay to be featured on the search engine results page for certain keywords. While paid search can be a quick way to get your site to the top of results, it’s often very costly and users are less likely to engage with paid results than they are with organic results.
This marketing strategy involves an individual developing a brand for themselves. Today, as consumers seek more organic interactions with brands, encouraging your employees to develop personal brands can effectively drive engagement and sales.
Personalization is a marketing strategy involving customizing content based on your audience’s demographic or psychographic information. Sending emails with your audience’s first name in the subject line, a special birthday message, or even abandoned cart reminders are all examples of marketing personalization.
Using personalization can continue a conversation for a more natural experience. Whenever you implement personalization, your goal should be to encourage engagement and drive a deeper relationship with your prospects.
Pillar pages are all-encompassing guides on your website. Pillar pages are designed to be SEO powerhouses, featuring in-depth content and a surplus of internal and external links. Your pillar pages should be supported by related blogs and featured prominently on your website.
A pop-up is a small window that opens or expands either when you enter a website, spend a certain amount of time on a page, or go to leave. Typically, pop-ups will advertise email list sign-ups in exchange for an exclusive deal or some other relevant offer.
When pop-ups are used well, they can make it easier for viewers to successfully view your site. When used poorly, they can cause a negative viewing experience and cause a visitor to leave.
Positioning describes how you present a certain concept to your audience. Typically, good positioning takes into account your audience, their desires, demographics, fears, and pain points to develop messaging that an individual can connect deeply with.
Pay per click. This is related to advertising spend. When you run an ad on social media, you can select to pay per click on the ad. When selected, you’ll be paying for the results of your ad. Typically, the cost per click for an ad will differ on social media.
Pay per mille. This is related to advertising spend in terms of impressions. When you run an ad on social media, you can select to pay per 1,000 impressions on an ad or PPM. When selected, you’ll be paying for impressions of your ad.
Public relations (or PR) in a vertical of marketing focused on the public-facing image of the brand. Typically, PR is responsible for developing press releases to announce mergers or acquisitions, handling reputation clean up in a negative news situation, or landing publication features.
Reciprocal links are links you offer another website in exchange for linking to your own. This is an effective way to build backlinks and improve your SEO.
Remarketing is a strategy where you target individuals you’ve previously marketed to before. Typically, this is done with social media or Google ads and can mention past interactions an individual may have had with the brand.
Remarketing is an important component of an effective marketing strategy because it can take over a dozen brand interactions before an individual is ready to make a purchase.
Reputation management is a segment of public relations focused on maintaining a positive brand image. In times of negative press, reputation management may be necessary to clean up a negative image.
Responsive design refers to the development of web pages that change dynamically when a user interacts with them. For example, tiles could flip on mouse over, icons could become animated upon scrolling, and more.
Return on investment. This refers to the benefit that is gained by investing.
To calculate your ROI, take the total revenue driven and subtract your initial investment, then divide that number by your initial investment. Multiply your result by 100 for easy percentage conversion.
For example, spending $50 on ads that drive $250 in revenue results in a 400% return on investment:
$250-$50=$200
$200/$50=4
4*100= 400%
Sales enablement can refer to materials or team efforts. Sales enablement materials typically include sell sheets, case studies, and whitepaper that a sales team can use to assist their sales efforts. A sales enablement team typically does activities like create those materials, score and qualify leads, and develop lead nurturing sequences.
The sales funnel is a way of defining the journey customers go through when making a purchase. The concept of the funnel comes from the idea that more prospects are involved at the beginning of the sales process and individuals are filtered out at every stage, until there are the fewest at the end.
At the top of the sales funnel, customers aren’t super interested in any one solution, they’re still wondering what their problem is and how it can be solved. By the middle of the sales funnel, a prospect has defined their problem and is beginning to narrow down a few different solutions. Once prospects hit the bottom of the sales funnel, they’re pretty sure which direction they want to go and are likely just choosing between a few providers.
The sales funnel coordinates directly with the buyers’ journey.
Segmentation is a strategy of dividing your email list or other audience in order to provide more specific marketing. It can be extremely beneficial to segment your email lists by buyer persona, sales cycle stage, and more.
The more segmented your audience, the more targeted your outreach can be, which ultimately leads to increased engagement.
SEO
Search engine optimization. This is the act of optimizing your website pages and content for search engines. Today, it’s important that all your content is search-engine-optimized so you can rank as high as possible in search engine results, getting the most clicks.
Search engine results page features. These are the results featured at the top of a search engine results page. Typically, they will feature pulled quotes, a map, imagery, videos, or reviews.
It’s a good idea to aim for keywords with SERP features and aim to get your URL featured. Since featured results are promoted more prominently by Google, they get increased engagement and results.
Short links are shortened URLs, typically designed to be easier to use. Short links are particularly advantageous for social media platforms with character restrictions, allowing you to fit more copy in with your link. Bit.ly a popular URL shortener.
A sign-up form is a series of questions on your website. After a user answers the questions, they might get a download, an email, or registered for a waiting list. It’s a best practice to keep your questions to a minimum and make them easy to answer.
SMART goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. An example of a SMART marketing goal would be: our team wants to improve email opens by 2% this quarter. Increasing email opens 2% is an achievable goal and completely measurable: the company either hits it, or they don’t. By focusing on email opens, they’re setting a goal that’s relevant to their business’s sales efforts. Finally, the goal has a time-constraint of within the quarter.
You’re more likely to achieve the goals you set for yourself when you make them SMART. By setting unrealistic, unattainable, or unclear goals it’s hard to know if you’re making progress toward success and it can be disheartening never getting there.
Small- and midsize- businesses. These are businesses that are smaller to medium-sized. They are not corporations but are larger than startups. Typically these businesses have between 20-50 employees.
Subject matter expert. A subject matter expert is an individual who knows a lot about a specific topic. This individual may also be an influencer or thought leader.
Social proof describes the validity products or services get from users promoting them. Social proof can also come in the form of case studies and white papers.
Social selling is a strategy that utilizes social media to sell online. This can include posting on company pages, personal pages, and messaging prospects via social media messaging tools.
Spam is unwanted sales or marketing outreach. Today, spam typically comes in the form of unsolicited emails or social media messages. These can sometimes be scammy or other times just a poor attempt at selling.
Sales-qualified leads. These are leads that the sales team has considered “qualified”, meaning they’re ready for the next step in the sales process. Typically, there will be a list of requirements leads must meet in order to be considered “qualified”.
This is a document that outlines certain design stands for your brand or website. Typically, a style guide should cover the use of logos, primary and secondary colors, font preferences, and standard text formatting styles. Implementing and using a style guide is an effective way to ensure branding consistency and cohesion across platforms and team members.
Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s essential to regularly complete a SWOT analysis of your business and your business’s marketing. This is key to analyzing the effectiveness of your past efforts to optimize your future endeavors
Your target audience is a segment of individuals who you identify as potential prospects. They should fit the demographic and psychographic outlines you’ve made for your ideal buyer.
A thank you page is the landing page visitors are sent to after submitting a download form. Typically the thank you page will offer access to the download, as well as promote other related content.
A thought leader is an individual who is considered to be an expert in their industry or category. They will often have a high following on social media and others in the industry will mimic their actions and topics.
The top of the sales funnel is the earliest part of the sales cycle. Here, prospects are beginning to become aware of their problem, but aren’t quite sure what it’s called or how to solve it.
A tracking pixel is a piece of code you install on your website in order to track conversions and actions after someone clicks through an ad.
Website traffic is viewers to your site. Traffic combines both unique visitors and repeat visitors. It can be difficult to drive traffic to a brand new website. Improving SEO can help drive more visitors, as can promoting your content on social media.
Ungated content is content on your website that is freely accessible without viewers needing to provide any personal information. Blogs and pillar pages are examples of ungated content.
This is what sets you apart from other competitors in the industry. Your unique value proposition should be a succinct statement that captures why buyers would purchase from you.
A unique visitor refers to an individual who views your site. If that individual comes back multiple times or visits multiple pages, they only count as one unique visitor.
User-generated content, or UGC, are photos and videos developed by your customers or users. When users love your product or service, they’ll be inclined to promote it themselves.
User-generated content can be a strong marketing tool. Utilize the photos and videos your users develop to fill your social media feed with engaging content that showcases your product or service.
Your value statement describes the value you bring to your customers. It should highlight your benefits, as well as your unique value proposition.
Value-added reseller. A value-added reseller resells another company’s services with additional value. It can be beneficial to develop partnerships with VARs who promote and sell your services.
Word-of-mouth is a strategy in which your customers talk to their friends and family about your products or services. When you have customers that love what you do, this can be an effective way to drive new business.
A workflow is a sequence of sales or marketing outreach activities. These activities could include emails, LinkedIn private messages, phone calls, and even text messages.
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