Often when we work with clients, especially new ones, we find ourselves speaking in marketing jargon without realizing they have no idea what we're talking about! Alas, it can be difficult in an industry that's constantly creating new terms for us to cram into our rolladex of marketing speak. Here are some of the top buzzwords we find ourselves using!
Marketing Automation:
A tactic that allows companies to nurture prospects using highly personalized, valuable content that helps convert these prospects into leads, and turn those leads into customers. Marketing automation is an important piece to your marketing puzzle that helps discover what’s working, and what isn’t in order to be more successful while utilizing tools and analytics to develop a deeper marketing strategy.
A/B Testing:
Compares two separate versions of an email, call to action, landing page, and tests with a definitive outcome as to which version performed the best, and it what areas need more work—or aren’t working altogether.
TOFU, MOFU, BOFU:
Refers to the different stages of the sales funnel. TOFU or “Top of the Funnel” offers are generally educational and are focused on people just getting started with offers like blogs, articles, or whitepapers. “Middle of the Funnel” offers are more focused, with CTA’s, landing pages, and forms for prospects to take action. “Bottom of the Funnel” offers are for qualified leads that are ready to take the next step, with offers like a free consultation or discounted promotion.
Calls-to-Action:
CTA’s are buttons, pictures, or variations of a link that persuades or directs your visitors through landing pages, often inciting interest using persuasive writing or engaging offers such as eBooks, Case Studies, etc.
Closed Loop Marketing:
The methodology tied to tracking every single lead and closed customer to the marketing channels, efforts, and campaigns responsible for their capture. By relying on information and analytics that focus on the lead and lead source, the marketing team is able to understand what’s working and what’s not in ways that aren’t possible without a closed loop approach. The ability to track prospects, leads and customers throughout the entire process (Attract, Convert, Close, Delight) helps organizations eliminate wasted time to capitalize on opportunities.
Inbound Marketing:
Assists lead generation through online search engines, thought leadership, website traffic, and more to increase revenue and pull interested prospects closer to your company or product line. Leads are generally more qualified as they’ve been led to your site through quality content that attracts, converts, closes, and delights customers and keeps them coming back for more.
Keywords:
The words or phrases indexed by search engines like Google to ensure your business can be found online. For inbound marketing, keywords are used strategically in order to increase your search engine rank to ensure your page is the in the top results for whatever keyword phrase you want to track for. Whenever you search for something, you’re using keywords—the trick is to specify which ones you want to be tracked for and which aren’t applicable.
Landing Page:
Website pages following a CTA that allow visitors to further engage with your business to promote lead generation. Landing pages contain forms that, once completed, provide an offer to the prospect letting them download an eBook, promotion, or valuable offer. It’s the barrier between website visitor and lead.
Buyer Persona:
A semi-fictitious set of characteristics that represents your business’ ideal audience. Buyer personas are based on real buyers who influence your market—including products, services, and solutions—based on customer demographics, motivations, and goals. These help to determine where you should focus your time and content.
Lead:
A person or business that has the interest and authority to purchase or engage with a particular product or service offering. Leads generally represent people in the beginning stages of the sales cycle and must be nurtured in order to convert from lead to customer.
Lead Nurturing:
Process of testing the quality of a lead, offering incentives that push them further through the sales cycle to ensure the lead is qualified, thus more likely to convert to a customer. Overall, lead nurturing provides continuous content to keep your leads engaged with your brand with the hope that they’ll see value in what you have to offer, and act on it.
Workflow:
A pre-established framework or procedural steps that help incentivize leads to take action based on what the workflows offering. For example, a prospect might click on a call of action, fill out a form, and become a lead. After they download that lead, they get a thank you page. A day after the thank you page, they’ll get an email asking them to engage further with another offer. That whole stepping-stone-process is the workflow.
Site Map:
A visual representation and hierarchy of any and all pages to be included on a website. Sitemaps also allow users to navigate through the website to find the information contained in a streamlined fashion. You can think of a sitemap as your website’s table of contents, telling you what’s housed and where to find it.
Wireframe:
A blueprint that visualizes how the content will be arranged and laid out including content, interface, navigation, imagery, and how it all works together. Wireframes generally focus on the who, what, and where of your site design, and helps organize everything together in a minimalistic framework.
SEO:
Search Engine Optimization is the process of arranging and repurposing content in order to be indexed through a popular search engine such as Google or Yahoo, with the end goal being a higher page rank in the search results. SEO is important for getting your website found, and can help promote your content’s reach farther than you could through traditional means.
Responsive Design:
The popular practice of creating a website that can adjust itself based on the screen size and format in order to access the site. Using flexible “media queries” (modules that render content based on conditions like page size, orientation, or screen resolution), the designer is able to format blocks (similar to a wireframe) that change format and size as the overall window is decreased or increased.
UI and UX:
UI, or User Interface refers to the way in which you and a website interact. UI is concerned with effective operation and control of the site from the user’s end and deals with the properties like navigation, buttons, and anything the user actually sees. UX, or User Experience refers to the interaction itself, dictating the design decisions based on your buyer personas and their emotional response to the site. Think of UX as the backbone—how the site works, not how it’s seen.
PPC:
Pay Per Click is an Internet advertising model that lets advertisers pay each time one of their ads is clicked through search engines, websites, social media, and other channels. PPC can help supplement your organic strategy, as you essentially buy visits to your site.
Buddy:
A term we use nonstop at Stratus Interactive to refer to anyone—regardless of race, age, or sex—in a casual, loving way… assuming we love you. Or even like you for that matter. So if you come to our office, and you someone calls you buddy, you’re on the right track. Now pal, that’s another story…
