Learning Hub | Digital Marketing Basics

Step Up Your Web Marketing Game With 45 Terms

September 29, 2015 | Jon Teodoro

The following list of digital marketing terms won’t cover everything. After all, the convergence of web technology, buyer psychology, and business strategy takes some time to master. That said, we’ve compiled a list of the terms that you should know to better demystify the path to a profitable web presence. We’ve separated this post into the five following major categories.

[CATEGORIES : The Basics | Web Marketing Tactics | Content and Social Media | Performance Indicators and Stats | Important Tools |

The Basicsstep up your digital marketing game with 45 terms

  • Content – Content is a website’s “meat” in visual, text, interactive, and/or downloadable formats. Especially in web marketing, it is the fundamental stuff that is created to attract possible customers.
  • Search engine optimization (SEO) – A dynamic body of web practices that are largely tailored toward achieving a high search engine rank to more quickly and consistently draw viewers from queries.
  • Keyword – A word or sequence of words that, if implemented according to ideal SEO practices, will connect a website to a high ranking when it is entered as a query
  • Blog – A continuing series of content posts (largely written) that are created to address a specific topic or event. In web marketing, blogs entries are generally considered one of the first crucial points of contact with potential customers.
  • Analytics – A collection of statistics, data, and general information that, for web marketing purposes, can be used to evaluate a web strategy’s degree of success.
  • Metadeta – Text “breadcrumbs” that help search engines better evaluate and process websites into search engine rankings, especially those with images. Visual elements cannot be translated into binary data.

Know the game before you make a playbook

Web Marketing Tacticsstep up your digital marketing game with 45 terms

Web marketing incorporates a whole smorgasbord of concepts and nifty tricks to both please search engines and attract potential buyers. Although implementing many of these practices is ideal, it is important to evaluate how effective they will be for each particular business. Not all companies are created equal, but with the right strategy, businesses can level the playing field against their competitors.

  • Local SEO – An aspect of search engine optimization that focuses on localizing web traffic to a business’ physical location.
  • Google AdWords – A service which monetizes viewer interactions (i.e. clicks, views) through strategic digital ads that businesses pay for, to have favorably placed.
  • Content marketing – Currently the dominant focus of the digital marketing world, content marketing involves attracting customers toward a business’ sales cycle with original, informative material that may give form to their needs and desires.
  • Buyer persona – Fictional profiles which incorporate the buying habits, professional standings, challenges, and other factors that play a significant role in the decisionmaking mentality of the actual buyers reflecting these personas.
  • Long-tail keyword – Multi-word keywords which are crafted in such a manner to distinguish themselves from shorter, more generalized keywords in searches. If used properly, these keywords can tiptoe around shorter, more competitive keywords and still get an equal, if not greater amount of search engine hits
  • Inbound marketing – A philosophy of marketing that relies on attracting customers with informative content instead of traditional interruptive advertising/marketing.
  • Inbound Methodology – Attract Strangers, Convert Visitors, Close Leads, Delight Customers.
  • Outbound/Inbound link – A link within a website’s content that leads to another website (and vice versa), often used to foster networking and credibility between industry peers.
  • Organic – In web marketing terms, organic means that a website is generating views through sound SEO practices rather than through paid advertising.
  • Lead – In web marketing, a lead is a viewer who has looked at a form of content that has a contact form but hasn’t necessarily submitted it with his or her information.
  • Lead conversion – Successfully getting a lead to submit their contact information for advancement into the sales cycle.

#ReachOut

Content and Social Mediastep up your digital marketing game with 45 terms

The cool kids these days are saying that “Content is King.” But it’s like Game of Thrones in the kingdoms of Google and Bing. These words will help you prepare for battle…with your competitors on page rankings, that is.

  • Content strategy – The holistic arrangement of a website’s content and its application to the overall technical design.
  • Podcast – An audio recording that is commonly used within marketing along the same lines as a lecture or seminar. It is a common form of content.
  • eBook – A downloadable digital book which covers a particular topic in-depth.
  • Whitepaper – A document which focuses on a particular topic and presents an authoritative report, guide, and/or opinion on it. It is created to establish a company’s philosophical stance and better inform readers making a decision.
  • Case study – A detailed report which chronicles the actions undertaken by an organization to achieve a goal (in marketing, often to meet a client’s goals). It is written to best illustrate the organization’s detailed approach toward a particular case or client so that prospective clients can understand its methodology.
  • Influencer – A thought leader on web marketing. Marketers generally seek recognition from influencers through backlinks and social media nods.
  • Webinar – Usually held online through voice-over-internet-protocal (VOIP) programs like Skype and Google Hangouts, webinars are live lectures and discussions that multiple people can attend digitally.
  • Hashtag – (#) A social medium element that, when prefacing a word or phrase, will connect the post that it is used in to a newsfeed of other social media posts hashtagging the same phrase/word.
  • Twitter – A social media hub that has built a worldwide network connected through #hashtags and @tags. Posts are limited to 140 characters and can feature custom links and images.
  • Facebook – A personal profile-based social media hub which also serves as a newsfeed that aggregates advertising, user updates, and trending news topics.
  • LinkedIn – A personal profile-based social media hub that focuses on professional networking. Users can share industry links and post updates to a newsfeed as well as detail their career info.
  • Viral – A trending phenomenon which is normally attributed to social media posts that become wildly popular within a short period of time.

By the numbers

Performance Indicators and Statsstep up your digital marketing game with 45 terms

Creepy as it is, web technology monitors the behavior of visitors to a website (i.e. time spent on a page, number of pages browsed on a site) and can report it back to website owners as statistics. These often are accompanied with elaborate insights as to who is visiting their site to better inform them on how to possibly improve on their web strategy. This is especially important for business owners who want to draw in more online customers.

  • Click-through-rate (CTR) – The percentage of people who see a link and actually click on it.
  • Pay-per-click (PPC) – A web advertising method that places ads for businesses next to organic (naturally ranking) search engine results. Businesses are assessed a fee based on the popularity of the keywords that are central to the ads.
  • Impression – The basic page visit statistic – the website visitor has viewed a page but hasn’t necessarily clicked any buttons or moved around the website itself.
  • Bounce rate – The percentage of all website visitors who view only one page on a website and leave without viewing any of the site’s pages.
  • Pagerank – Page rankings numerically refer to how high/immediate a particular website will appear in a search engine query. The search algorithms which determine these rankings are closely guarded and continuously changing.
  • Return-on-investment (ROI) – The margin of positive return (usually cashflow) gained after a business makes an investment of money, time, and/or resources into achieving a goal.
  • Cost-per-acquisition – Total cost of a pay-per-click campaign.
  • Conversion rate – The percentage of generated leads that successfully transition from the marketing cycle to sales cycle (often signified by receiving a potential buyer’s contact info through a contact form).

Tools of the trade

Important Programs/Web Elementsstep up your digital marketing game with 45 terms

These are some programs and definitions that will get help you walk rather than crawl through the tougher technical aspects of web marketing.

  • Responsive Web Design – A web design format which allows websites to fit into any screen resolution including phones, tablets, and desktops.
  • WordPress – A popular content management system (CMS) platform for blogging. It is compatible with a library of plugins that assist with SEO, analytics, and general content management.
  • Content management system (CMS) – Software that can store, create, and organize content for the sake of operating efficiency.
  • Dashboard – A compilation of (website) data that is consolidated into more comprehensive infographics and statistics delivered through a user-friendly module.
  • Meta-description – Brief summaries of the webpages that appear in search engine results. If SEO optimized, the descriptions are ideally less than 156 characters.
  • Alternate text – Text used to describe visual content. It assists search engines in categorizing a website’s various elements for SEO.
  • App – A small program that is downloaded onto mobile devices
  • URL – Uniform Resource Locator a.k.a. the full name for a website’s Internet address.