Definitions
Advertising – the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service.
AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) – a framework that describes a buyer’s journey through four key stages: Attention, Interest, Decision and Action. See ‘Marketing Funnel’.
Audience – The people (or homes) reading, listening to, viewing, or seeing a particular media vehicle.
Brand and Branding – The accumulation of customer experiences with a specific product or service, represented by a collection of understandings and ideas. Brand recognition and other reactions are created by the accumulation of experiences, both directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design, and media commentary. A brand is identified by an explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols, and sound, which may be developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality.
Clicks – number of times a banner, image, or link is clicked.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) – A ratio of the number of times your ad was clicked (Click) to the number of times it was displayed (Impression).
Conversion – A desired website visitor transaction or submission of information. Common examples include purchases, subscriptions to the company newsletter, and requests for or downloads of information.
Conversion Rate – A ratio of the number of conversions to the number of total interactions.
Cost Per Click (CPC) – The amount paid every time someone clicks on an advertisement.
Cost Per Thousand (CPM) – The cost for every 1,000 impressions an ad receives. (The “M” in CPM comes from the Latin word mille, which means 1,000.)
Customer Journey – the path of interactions that a person has with a brand, from before they even know about its existence, all the way to making a purchase and then the ongoing relationship afterwards
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – The practices, strategies and technologies companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goals of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention, and driving sales growth.
Direct Advertising – Communicating directly to a pre-selected customer and supplying a method for a direct response, for example via emails, phone calls, SMS, or direct mail.
Display Ad – Graphic advertising made of images and text, and banners, such as banners on the web or images next to editorial content in newspapers.
Earned Media – favorable content relating to an organization, which is published by a third party without any form of payment to the publisher. Examples include word of mouth and editorial publicity.
Engagement – One of the most overused and versatile terms in branding and marketing. The definition varies depending on the specific context, but it generally means interaction between the consumer and the brand, such as the consumer going to a location, making a purchase, reading content sponsored by the brand, commenting on said content, or participating in a campaign.
Event Marketing – a promotional strategy that involves face-to-face contact between brands and their customers at events like conferences, trade shows, and seminars.
Evergreen – A story or piece of content that has no time implications and can be published at any time.
Four P’s – a marketing concept that summarizes four key factors of any marketing strategy: Price, Product, Promotion, and Place.
Guerilla Marketing – An advertising strategy that uses surprise and/or unconventional interactions in order to promote a product or service.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) – The main language for creating web pages and other information for display on the web. Think of HTML as the brick and mortar of pages on the web. It provides content and structure while CSS supplies style.
Hyperlink – A hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided to by clicking or tapping.
Impressions – the number of opportunities people have had to view your campaign AKA the number of times your content was displayed to users.
Inbound Marketing – a strategic approach that centers around aligning with your target audience’s needs and attracting leads via content and experiences curated just for them.
Influencer Marketing – Working with influential individuals or communities to advocate on behalf of your brand via paid product placements or similar advertisements.
Keyword – a word or a group of words used to perform a search in a search engine.
KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) – the critical (key) indicators of progress toward an intended result. A quantifiable metric used to track progress towards a specific business objective.
Marketing Funnel – Your customer’s journey with you from the initial stages when someone learns about your business, to the purchasing stage. Categorized by Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA).
Media – plural of medium; a channel of communication.
Metrics – Set of measurements that quantify results.
Native Ad – a type of paid advertising that appears in the style and format of the content near the advertisement’s placement.
Negative Keywords – keywords you want to exclude from your ad targeting, preventing ads from appearing when these keywords are used.
OOH (Out-of-Home) – Advertising and branding that reaches consumers while they are outside of their homes e.g. billboards, subway ads, pamphlets handed out on the street, etc. This marketing usually operates in public spaces and acts in contrast to things like targeted Internet ads.
Opt-in – When customers express permission to send them information.
Opt-out – When customers rescind permission to send them information.
Organic Marketing – The strategies used to gain customers naturally over time, rather than through paid advertising
Organic Search Marketing – The strategies used to appear higher up on Search Engine Results Pages’ unpaid search results, primarily through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Paid Marketing – the process of using paid advertising channels to target potential customers online.
Paid Search Marketing – A marketing tactic in which advertisers pay search engines for ad placement on SERPs, often appearing as the first results. One form of pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – a form of online marketing where advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their ads.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – the page you see after entering a query into Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine.
Personas – Fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.
Qualitative Data – Data measuring characteristics of consumers, views, etc., rather than amounts.
Quantitative Data – Data that can be measured numerically and precisely, such as attendees of an event, clicks on an ad impression, etc.
Reach – the number of unique users that were exposed to your content
ROI (Return on Investment) – A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage or ratio.
Search Engine – A software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user’s query.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines. The 3 pillars of SEO are Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.
Social Media – interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content amongst virtual communities and networks.
Targeting (Targeted Advertising) – segmenting your potential audience into groups based on relevant characteristics like demographics, interests, behaviors, and location, and tailoring your marketing efforts to best appeal to them.
Traffic – the number of visitors or users who come to a website, mobile app, or other digital platform. Imagine real-world “foot traffic” to a physical store, but in a digital sense.
Unique Visitor – the number of people who visit a website whereas visits are the number of visits to a website, including multiple visits from one person.