Like any industry, marketing is awash with buzzwords and acronyms - from social media terms and content marketing terms to email marketing and website optimisation jargon there’s plenty to try and get your head around.

Let us guide you through the lingo and acronyms of the marketing world so that you’re better prepared for your next campaign.

A/B Testing

A/B testing gives you the ability to compare two variations of a single campaign. From testing something as small as the colour of a call-to-action button on your website or the subject line of an email to a whole web page - A/B testing gives you a better understanding of the best approach to take in your marketing. Normally, you serve the variations to a proportion of your audience and then depending on which one performs best you can then roll out this version to the rest of your audience.

Analytics

One of the most important stages of any marketing campaign is the analysis stage. Gaining an understanding of what works and what doesn’t will help you develop actionable insights to make better informed decisions when it comes to marketing your business. It can also provide you with a good starting point from which to establish objectives and KPIs.

Bounce Rate

When investigating your website’s analytics, you will see reference to a bounce rate, this figure represents the percentage of people who land on a page on your website and then leave without clicking on anything or navigating to any other page on your website. A high bounce rate often means a poor conversion rate because visitors aren’t staying on your website long enough to do anything. However bounce rate should always be considered alongside other metrics such as dwell time.

Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your idea customer. Based on a combination of market research and real data from your existing customer base, using a buyer persona will help you truly understand your customers, their demographics, motivations and their problems so you can write content that appeals and entices your target audience.

Calls-to-Action

Also known as CTAs, calls-to-action are used to ‘hook’ a website visitor and convert them into a lead by encouraging them to take a particular action. A call-to-action can take the form of a text link (e.g Give your business a boost with our free lead generation ebook), a button or image which guides your web visitors to click through to a specific landing page and become a lead or whatever action is more valuable to your business.

Content

This one might seem a little obvious but content is such an important part of inbound marketing that we couldn’t possibly ignore it. Content can come in almost any form - blog, video, social media post, photographs, podcast… the list goes on. Content gives you the opportunity to engage with your target audience, boost website traffic and improve lead conversion rates.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

A conversion rate is the percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web page - for example, filling out a form. If your pages have a high conversion rate, they are performing well but, if you’re experiencing a low conversion rate, you will need to do a little bit of work. CRO is the method of using analytics and user feedback to improve the performance of your website.

Engagement Rate

Commonly used on social media, engagement rate is a term used to describe any interaction - likes, shares and comments - which a piece of content receives. These interactions provide an indication of the success of your content and the relationship you have with your audiences.

Evergreen Content

Some content - such as event information or seasonal offers - is time sensitive meaning that you have a limited time frame to share the messages. Evergreen content on the other hand is content which continues to provide readers with information days, months, weeks or even years after it has been published.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing allows you to put your customers first. By creating and sharing high-quality, targeted content that attracts and engages your customers based on their needs and challenges, your business is in the ideal position to be discovered and increase leads and conversions.

Keywords

Keywords are the topics that help websites appear in search engine results. In order to work out which are the right keywords for your website, it’s important to consider what your buyer personas will type in a search engine to find your website as well as the search volume of the keyword. There are a number of keyword tools you can use to help you identify which keywords might be most relevant for your business.

Landing Page

A landing page is a website page which can be used for lead generation. The page usually requests a visitor’s personal information e.g name and email address in exchange for an ebook or webinar. A business should create a selection of landing pages to appeal to different people at the various stages of the buying process but remember - your landing pages and the content within them should appeal to your target audience.

No-Follow Link

A no-follow link is used when a website does not want to pass search engine authority to another web page - basically, search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo are instructed not to follow a link through to the page. As such, the link will take people through to a website but it will not have any effect on your SEO - it does not work to support PageRank, and doesn’t help improve a website's placement in the search results.

Pay-per-Click (PPC)

PPC is an advertising technique which advertisers pay a publisher - usually a search engine or social media site a certain amount of money each time the advert is clicked. This type of advertising is often used to drive website traffic.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the practice of enhancing where a webpage appears in the search results. Search engines scan websites for things like tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure and inbound links so that it can serve the best quality results to users. The better the SEO, the more likely you are to rank for your chosen keywords and the higher up in the results your web pages will appear when users are searching for relevant key terms.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of marketing terms used but by narrowing the terms down, we hope that you have been able to get a better understanding of the buzzwords used by marketers.

If you would like to develop your knowledge further, why not get in touch? Our marketing experts will be happy to help - remember, you can always request a call back too.