Let’s face it, as time goes on, more and more companies start to invest their marketing budget on digital platforms. Whether it is a promoted article, or a media post, or even an email advert, you most likely won't see it on a billboard. That much is clear.
But what if you are learning the ropes. What if you went from customer marketing to business marketing or even vice versa. Where do you even start? The digital marketing glossary is immense, so instead of covering them all, we hand-picked the most used, and most important digital marketing terms (that aren’t exactly used all the time).
We’ll also do our best to describe how you can use these terms (not in a sentence of course) in your advertising campaign. Thus, there’s a lot to take care of, so let’s not dabble any further and dive right into things.
1. Split Testing
Digital marketing terminology is complex and requires a lot of reading before you can start using it to your advantage. So what better term to kick off our list than split testing. Also known as A/B Testing, the process involves comparing two versions of the same page to see whether the new variables positively affect the result.
Now how it works. Essentially, you place an advert on your website, send in people, and see how they respond to the new change. Once you have the data, you need to analyze it and determine which result suits your business objective better. Typically, such activity is done multiple times to validate the data, but if the result is qualitative enough, you can limit testing to two times.
2. Affinities or Affinity Marketing
If you take any digital marketing dictionary, almost all of them include the terms affinities and affinity marketing. Why? Both terms will help your next marketing campaign reach more people. The whole concept revolves around the idea of trade.
For example, you provide marketing services to a car rental business and serve a separate car repair company. Affinity marketing will allow you to access both markets in exchange for services. Say, the car repair company can provide discounts on parts for the car rental company in exchange for leaving promotion leaflets inside the vehicle.
Both companies will win from this partnership as one gets a discount and the other gains access to a new market. Here’s a pro-tip, the best way to form a partnership is to ensure that both parties are complementary in their activities and non-competitive in their audiences.
3. Double Opt-in
As the name implies, double opt-in is when a person not only opted to say, for a newsletter but verified his email address by following a link you’ve sent. Among all digital marketing terms, this one is often neglected when strategizing a new email campaign. Many marketers are citing the reason that users don’t like to re-register, and most will leave the process entirely, resulting in financial losses.
However, this is where you should stop and reconsider. No one shoe fits all scenarios in digital marketing. See if your business cannot stomach a single miss on short-term leads using a single opt-out scenario that might be optimal. Yet, if you have a lot of hard bounces, a double opt-in system can reduce those.
4. Smarketing
Some of you might think that this can’t be a real digital marketing term. But it is, and it has nothing to do with being a smarty-pants. In fact, it involves you matching and mixing your sales team and your marketing teams to empower their activities.
We’ve already covered how you can unite your support staff and sales team, so head over to our dedicated blog post about it to learn the details. But anyway, the idea of Smarketing is to allow both your marketing and your sales teams to have an integrated approach to customer acquisition.
To take advantage of Smarketing, both teams should communicate their ideas more frequently. As well as they should decide on a unified terminology that’ll later be powered using data. Having this symbiosis of departments will enable brand consistency, as well as more rounded service-level expectations.
5. Lead Magnet
The lead magnet is a highly powerful prospect generating technique you can use to make your proposals that much more effective and more important, attractive to new people. The idea is that you offer a free whitepaper, guide, and other material in exchange for the email address.
Now how is this going to work? Well, first off, you provide value. Plus, you already know what the person wants or needs. By the end of this transaction, you have the email and know what to offer in the future.
You can’t be sure that person liked what you’ve provided or whether it was what they were looking for. But on the flip side, you have a lead that is either hot or cold, regardless. In other words, you are certain and confident that the person is convertible or not.
The best way to execute such a strategy is to create a super helpful whitepaper but not give away all the key details. You can’t reveal all your cards at once as it would undermine your entire offering.
6. Customer Lifetime Value
Now this less of a marketing term but more of a business term. Yet, it doesn’t mean that you won’t see it among other digital marketing terms. CLV or Customer Lifetime Value is a term that describes the overall value of a single customer. The metric is higher the longer the customer is with you.
Typically, such terms are used during business meetings. However, marketers can use this metric to identify whether they should be targeting old customers. For instance, if a customer is 80 years old, and has been with you for 20 years, the customer’s value is lower as such customers will most likely spend less. This means that your marketing plan shouldn’t be focusing on such demographics as you can’t extract more sales from them. Why waste (usually) limited marketing funds, right?
7. Dark Post
This is a very niche social media marketing term. But you will refer to it if you plan on doing social media advertising. It is a kind of post that appears online on social media platforms. But once you follow the link to the page, you immediately notice that it is not there.
So how is this useful, and why would you want to use a dark post in your marketing campaign? Well, a dark post is excellent at luring potential customers to your main page where other products are listed. Dark posts help you do A/B testing and help keep your content page less spammy.
The most developed dark post system is on Facebook. They are the original creators of dark posts, and naturally, their offering has the most targeting options. Whether you want your post to pursue users using geodata or age and gender, there’s plenty of options you can pick to tailor your ad. The same can be said about Instagram as it is owned by Facebook too.
8. Newsjacking
Newsjacking is among the most used digital marketing terms on Twitter and for good reasons. It’s effective, and it brings in a lot of new people to your content. So what is it then? Newsjacking is when you piggyback on the biggest news to bring more attention to your content.
Essentially you have to create a piece of content around current (preferably popular) events and spread it as much as you can. The real challenge around this technique revolves around event searches. In other words, if nothing is happening, using this technique becomes impossible.
However, that doesn’t mean you can’t be reactive. We suggest that you set up a Google alert for specific terms. Moreover, make big use of Google Trends to see what people are searching and talking about. And finally, be sure to have a copywriter ready to assess the issue at hand.
9. Vanity Metrics
Some say that each metric you get access to is valuable. However, that is not always the case. Vanity metrics make you feel good without actually providing any insight or direction. Such metrics are often presented to make you feel as if your actions are bringing results.
Knowing how to differentiate vanity metrics from useful metrics will help you make better decisions. For example, impressions aren’t engagement or conversions this is just the number of people that have been presented with your ad in their feed. Nothing useful.
While we can’t help you make use of these metrics, we can help you stay clear from them. Among the most popular vanity metrics, these are the most useless: page views, trial users, likes, monthly revenue per customer. Instead, focus on actionable metrics such as conversion rate, converting users, and the aforementioned CLV.
10. Top - Middle - and Bottom - OFU
So top of the funnel is the very first thing your audience sees. This is the part of the content that targets the widest, most general audience. Such content should only be educational and should not include any kind of sales pitch or promotion. Why? This is where your potential audience might start to learn the basics about your business and offerings. If you bombard them with sales, they’ll leave and avoid you.
The second underutilized online marketing term is MOFU which stands for the middle of the funnel, and it is often used in conjunction with two additional terms. However, if your content has a lot of links to articles that can help them learn, even more, you effectively migrate them to the MOFU phase. This is the most important part of your funnel as this is where you have a ton of people ready to be qualified.
Your potential buyers learned the problem from you and are looking for a solution, which means you can do sales pitches. Don’t know how? A good case study can make a difference. The last part is BOFU, and this is where you have to promote your content. It is where you need to demonstrate in full force why your offering is the best one. Outline features, provide benefits and press on demos. A good way to present this in the form of content is a free trial, a testimony, a comparison.
11. Pillar Page
It is a page where you aggregate all your knowledge and lay the data as raw as possible. A pillar page is your building site. You use it as a place where you can create articles and content (on top of it) that are more in-depth.
For instance, you can create a long pillar page about Facebook’s power editor, what it is, and why companies use it. Inside this broad topic, you can provide hyperlinks to more advanced articles such as “How to make multiple adverts in power editor”. Pillar pages can be lengthy, but they should not cover anything in-depth as they are fundamental on which you can build cluster posts.
Use pillar pages to educate your audience. Your customers want value from you, and pillar pages can help them understand more sophisticated things. For example, you talk about social media advertising in a broad fashion.
That pillar page has links to a page where your users (knowing what they just learned) can see how some of your services can empower social media advertising even further. If you direct users to the more advanced page, they wouldn’t be able to evaluate the value of your service in full.
12. Drip Campaign
Also known as drip marketing, this advertising technique revolves around proper timing and message dispatch. You send emails to your customers using information about their actions and following their timeline.
For instance, when a user registers an account, you send a thank you message. Or when a user visits your site for the first time in a long time, you send them a “long time no see” email. So how is this marketing? Well, in eCommerce, for instance, when a user returns to the same product page over and over, an extra letter about the product can nudge them to buy it.
As you might have guessed, all this messaging is automatable. Popular help desk solutions, eCommerce platforms, and sale-oriented CRMs offer options to automate the entire process. Such software tools usually come with extra benefits too.
13. Style Guide
This digital marketing term is critical to your brand in that it ensures consistency. If you don’t have a specific style guide, your business will miss out on sales. A style guide is a set of communication rules and standards your company will use in all of its marketing material.
A well-developed style guide is the bedrock of your entire line of communications. A style guide helps customers recognize who you are and what you do. It can also serve as an indicator of quality.
To create a style guide your entire marketing department, along with the CEO of the company, should sit down and discuss the details. It takes time, but the more effort you put into it, the better results you can expect.
14. Readability
While deeply connected to writing, readability is a widely used metric in marketing. It helps you create content that is not only easy to read but helps convey the proper message. Readability is usually used in copywriting. But your adverts, your social media posts, all of this should be scanned by a readability checker as well.
Here’s a fun fact, all presidential speeches are made with this metric in mind. Whatever the president has to say, should be understood by 7-year olds. If your marketing is complex, has a ton of niche terminology, then in most cases, people wouldn’t even care to look into it.
15. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is a popular term. But just to be on the safe side, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a staple of digital marketing and it is essential if you plan on appearing on Google search pages.
So what is this optimization? It is a set of techniques and analyses designed to push your website to the top of the search query. Whether it is through written content or website-specific changes, SEO helps you reach the number one spot on the Internet.
16. Article-List (Listicle)
Continuing our digital marketing terms list is a listicle. It is a combination of words, namely article, and list. And as you might have guessed, it is an article that is a list that is empowered by marketing text to be viewed by most search engines as a single article.
Now, what makes this type of content powerful is that it is easily updatable. You can add extra numbers and you have enough leeway to move text from top to bottom. Moreover, such content type is perfect for briefly touching on key points but still having enough words to drive traffic through SEO channels.
Lastly, it is attractive to the user. Think about it, which of the two you will pick? “Top 7 Tips to start digital marketing” or “How to start basic digital marketing?” Probably the first option due to it having a finite number. When you see something without a number and broad in naming, you think it’ll demand a ton of time. This alone puts the first article on top.
17. Evergreen Content
Do you know what would be great? If your one ad performed as good as it is for the whole time it is running. Well. That is impossible, cause you know, everyone would be doing it. But you know what comes close to such performance? A well-written, properly researched, evergreen content piece.
Evergreen content is material that is relevant for eternity. Examples of such content are the aforementioned pillar pages. Or specifically, the basics you state there. When your fundamentals are clearly outlined and nicely written, they will always be evergreen, meaning people will always come back to you.
18. Cookie
Not to be confused with sweets. A cookie is a small file that gathers a ton of data for you about your visitors. It is also used to provide a personalized experience to your customers. Now we won’t be covering the technicalities, but the basic idea is that it will track what the users click, what they favor, and what they are viewing.
Based on that information, the website can offer more personalized content. Cookies also store data the user entered before. They contain data about ads that the user already saw. And this is why knowing the capabilities of a cookie for digital marketing purposes is key to successful retargeting and behavior analysis.
19. Domain Authority
When it comes to websites and SEO, domain authority is key to a high ranking. But what on Earth is domain authority? To put it bluntly, Domain Authority (or DA) is a custom metric that helps predict how a website will perform on SERP. Domain Authority was first developed by Moz. But as of right now, you can find it in many other search engine optimization solutions.
It helps you understand how well your website is doing. This metric can also be used to learn whether your search engine optimization practices are of any good. Speaking of which, the only way to make your DA metric better is to improve your entire line of optimization operations.
20. Phishing
Last but not least, we have phishing. While almost unanimously considered to be a cybersecurity term, we think otherwise. But first, what is phishing? Well, it is a fraudulent practice where the perpetrator sends out a legitimate-looking website address, email, or hyperlink, in an attempt to fish out personal information such as bank account info, passwords, CVV codes, etc.
So what does it have to do with digital marketing? It destroys marketing. People that have been tricked by phishing in the past, will be less likely enticed to open a marketing email. This is further worsened by the fact that roughly 72% of customers prefer email communication.
If you plan on using email campaigns, your top priority is to make sure your style guide reflects your business. Furthermore, you need to test your freshly created emails beforehand with other people. Doing so will minimize the risk, as well as reinstate trust between you and your customers.
Keep Learning
There are plenty of digital marketing terms we haven’t covered yet. However, the ones we listed will help you understand digital marketing better and make your actions data-driven. The more you know, the more data-driven decisions you can make.
When it comes to digital marketing, there’s always something new to discover. If you liked our list, be sure to come back soon. We try to post articles like this every single month, so make sure you bookmark us. But in the meantime, we suggest that you take a look at our other posts.
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