Ever attended a meeting with the marketing team and wondered what some of the terms mean in the middle of a conversation? Ever feel out of your depth and worried you are not understanding what people are talking about?
We have demystified 10 commonly used digital marketing terms below to help arm you for your next marketing meeting!
1 A/B Testing
OK, so let’s just get to the first confusing piece of marketing jargon ‘A/B testing’ . I am sure you would have heard this procedure mentioned several times before, if you are into marketing or development or a savvy business owner.
A/B testing simply means that you will be testing two different versions of an ad that you are proposing for your business to see which of the two is most effective. For example, imagine you own a food stall and you are planning to start selling chicken sandwiches. Now, you have no idea whether your customers would like to have vegetables with their sandwich or just the chicken filling. What would you do? You could make 20 sandwiches with the chicken and veggie filling and make another 20 with just the chicken filling. At the end of the day, you will get to know which sold faster and which sandwich was more popular. Now, if you meet your customers face-to-face, you could just ask the customers buying the sandwich which they prefer. But imagine implying the same idea online? You don’t know who your customers are, you don’t know what they think of your product, you don’t even know why they didn’t choose your product. This is why A/B testing is vital for your online business presence enabling you to target market to your correct audience and serve up the products that they desire.
2 Analytics
Analytics is not just about opening your Google Analytics account and gazing at the data. Analytics is about collecting website data from a wide variety of sources and putting all the statistics together in a report to derive meaningful insights from the data. For any business that already has traffic/visitors coming in to the site, Analytics has to be the starting point before developing a digital marketing strategy. Only through analytics results and implementation based upon these results, can you improve your current digital marketing approach. Analytics are a vital road map for your online business highlighting where you can improve and fix roadblocks in your existing content.
3 Bounce Rate
What exactly is bounce rate? Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and leave without any interaction with your web page. A user might have just landed on your page by mistake or they might have been frustrated by the website and hence chose to leave quickly. A high bounce rate is obviously bad and a lower value is good. If your business is selling products or services it is vital that you should aim for low bounce rate.
4 Buyer Persona
Buyer persona is identifying the type of customers you have or may have for your business. The details can include age, gender, income, marital status, location, type of work, etc.
Now why do we need to create a buyer persona for our business? Buyer persona can give you and your digital marketing company a good idea of who your target audience is and that’s extremely useful when it comes to making use of paid marketing services such as Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, Messenger and Google Ad words. You will know exactly who to target if you already have a custom audience setup. You can either build your buyer persona from your email subscriber list or from your Social Media Channels insight tools.
5 Earned, Owned and Paid Media
In digital marketing, these three terms play a very important role in creating and maintaining your brand and business.
Owned media are resources that you have complete control of. For example, your website, your blog and your social media pages.
Earned media are the different ways or medium through which your brand gets recognition. For instance – word of mouth, reviews through Google, reviews from other websites, any references to your website from an external blog – these all come under the banner of earned media.
Paid media are the things that involve cost. Your paid ads and sponsored social media posts come under the banner of paid media.
All three are important for a business to stay relevant and competitive. Optimise your website to create a seamless user experience, stay connected to your customers vital your digital marketing channels and make them feel special so that they talk about you and refer your business to others. Also make use of paid channels to get to your target customers easily.
6 Remarketing
Remarketing is a way to connect with people that Google has identified as having previously interacted with your website or mobile app. Chances are high that you yourself are a target of remarketing for many brands if you are person who relies on the internet to make a purchase. For example, you might have just looked for a pair of jeans in an online store like Ebay.com.au and you keep seeing similar ads for jeans from Ebay in your social media platforms or other websites. Likewise, if you have added a product in your online shopping cart and didn’t make a purchase, some businesses even send you a mail offering you further discount for the products in your cart in order to lead you to a purchase. Often online customers need an incentive from your business to complete a successful transaction. If you are an eCommerce business, remarketing helps you a lot in regaining the attention of customers who are in doubt whether to purchase your product or not.
7 Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action/goal. This goal can be anything that your business sets, such as signing up for a newsletter or completing an online product purchase. Why do you need to measure your website conversion rate?
Conversion rate gives you an idea of how well your online website and your marketing strategy works together. A good conversion rate means you know what your customers want and you are successful in helping them complete their goal.
So is there a range for a good conversion rate? Well, yes! An average conversion rate would be in the range of 2-3%. Getting a conversion rate above 11% is difficult but excellent if you can achieve it.
8 Lead Nurturing
Imagine you walk into a Shoe store to get a pair of shoes. A nicely dressed salesperson from the store approaches you and asks about the type, color, size and price range of the shoes you would like. You respond by telling them all the details about the shoes you are looking for. Suddenly, they just walk off completely ignoring you. You waited for more than 15 minutes and there is no sign of them coming back to help you. How would you feel? Would you wait for them to get back to you or will you just walk off and find another store?
Most of you would just find another shoe store rather than dealing with low quality customer service. There are times where we would be completely ready to purchase the product but an frustrating customer service experience would just turn us off and make us rethink our buying decision. Lead nurturing is guiding a customer throughout the buying funnel while developing a strong relationship at the same time.
Your customers are the ones who can make your brand popular as well as ruin your brand’s success. That is why lead nurturing campaigns are a very important part of your business customer relationship management.
9 AI Marketing
As a business, have you ever felt, “If only I could understand what would my customer’s next move be?”. A few years ago, we might not have had an answer to this question. But now we have – through Artificial Intelligence. Some systems make use of your customer data (from your CRM) and AI concepts like machine learning, to come up with useful insights that can help your digital marketers to target the potential leads for your business. This, in turn, helps them take the necessary steps to enable leads to complete the desired action which is to buy from your business. One such example is Salesforce. Salesforce makes use of its CRM data and Einstein Analytics to help the businesses sales and marketing teams to stay focused on productive tasks.
10 Backlinks
If you own a website and some other website mentions your business and creates a link to it, this is called a backlink. Backlinks are important to Google as they determine how legitimate and strong your website is. There are some businesses who try to acquire backlinks by paying other sources. Google is against this and it is just a matter of time until they get hold of such websites and issue a penalty on anyone who misuses the concept of backlinks.
I would recommend concentrating on link earning and link building as link earning is a natural process based upon your business being authentic and a business that people would recommend. Having said that, it is very important for your business to conduct regular backlink audits and clean any spammy backlinks. You are responsible for all the external links referring to your website and bad backlinks can create Google penalties that are hard to come back from.
