Digital Marketing Terms You Should Know (A-M)
Kori Lim
Last Update 6 years ago
A
A/B Testing
This is the process of comparing two variations of a single variable to determine which performs best in order to help improve marketing efforts. This is often done in email marketing (with variations in the subject line or copy), calls-to-action (variations in colors or verbiage), and landing pages (variations in content). Outside of marketing, you can use it to determine what tastes better on a peanut butter sandwich: jelly or fluff. (Learn how to run A/B tests here.)
Analytics
What I sometimes refer to as the “eyes” of inbound marketing, analytics is essentially the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. When referred to in the context of marketing, it’s looking at the data of one’s initiatives (website visitor reports, social, PPC, etc.), analyzing the trends, and developing actionable insights to make better-informed marketing decisions. (Want to learn marketing analytics? Here a list of nine great sources to get you started.)
Application Programming Interface (API)
APIs are a series of rules in computer programming, which allow an application to extract information from a service and use that information either in their own application or in data analyses. It's kind of like a phone for applications to have conversations -- an API literally "calls" one application and gets information to bring to you to use in your software. APIs facilitate the data needed to provide solutions to customer problems.
HubSpot has APIs that developers use to get information from our software into theirs. It’s important for marketers to understand what APIs can do to factor them into their marketing strategies. Learn more about how marketers can use APIs here.
B
B2B (Business-to-Business)
An adjective used to describe companies that sell to other businesses. For example, Google and Oracle are primarily B2B companies.
B2C (Business-to-Consumer)
An adjective used to describe companies that sell directly to consumers. For example, Amazon, Apple, and Nike are primarily B2C companies.
Blogging
This is short for weblog or weblog. An individual or group of people usually maintains a blog. A personal blog or business blog will traditionally include regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material, such as photos and videos.
Blogging is a core component of inbound marketing, as it can accomplish several initiatives simultaneously -- like website traffic growth, thought leadership, and lead generation. It does not, however, do your taxes.
Business Blogging
Business blogging retains all the attributes of "regular" blogging but adds a tasty layer of marketing strategy on top. It helps marketers drive traffic to their website, convert that traffic into leads, establish authority on certain topics, and drive long-term results. (Learn about these benefits in more detail here.)
When blogging for a business, marketers should create posts that are optimized with keywords that their target audience is searching for and provide helpful, educational material to these readers. Typically, these blog posts should be actionable (by providing an opt-in, downloadable offer), as to provide a metric for the effectiveness of the business blogging.
Bottom of the Funnel
Since we’re going alphabetically, the last part of the funnel process is first! So, “bottoms up,” I suppose. The bottom of the funnel refers to a stage of the buying process leads reach when they’re just about to close as new customers. They’ve identified a problem, have shopped around for possible solutions, and are very close to buying.
Typically, the next steps for leads at this stage are a call from a sales rep, a demo, or a free consultation -- depending on what type of business is attempting to close the lead.
Bounce Rate
Website bounce rate: The percentage of people who land on a page on your website and then leave without clicking on anything else or navigating to any other pages on your site. A high bounce rate generally leads to poor conversion rates because no one is staying on your site long enough to read your content or convert on a landing page (or for any other conversion event).
Email bounce rate: The rate at which an email was unable to be delivered to a recipient's inbox. A high bounce rate generally means your lists are out-of-date or purchased, or they include many invalid email addresses. In an email, not all bounces are bad, so it's important to distinguish between hard and soft bounces before taking an email address off your list. (Learn about hard and soft bounces here.)
Buyer Persona
A semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. While it helps marketers like you define their target audience, it can also help sales reps qualify leads. (Learn more about developing buyer personas here.)
C
Call-to-Action
A call-to-action is a text link, button, image, or some type of web link that encourages a website visitor to visit a landing page and become of lead. Some examples of CTAs are “Subscribe Now” or “Download the Whitepaper Today.” These are important for marketers because they’re the “bait” that entices a website visitor to eventually become a lead. So, you can imagine that it’s important to convey a very enticing, valuable offer on a call-to-action to better foster visitor-to-lead conversion. (Download our free, introductory guide to effective calls-to-action here. Hey, that was a CTA!)
CAN-SPAM
CAN-SPAM stands for "Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing." It's a U.S. law passed in 2003 that establishes the rules for commercial email and commercial messages, it gives recipients the right to have a business stop emailing them, and outlines the penalties incurred for those who violate the law. For example, CAN-SPAM is the reason businesses are required to have an "unsubscribe" option at the bottom of every email. (Learn more of the details here.)
CASL
CASL stands for "Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation." It's a Canadian law passed in 2013 that covers the sending of "commercial electronic messages" that may be accessed by a computer in Canada. CASL covers email, texts, instant messages, and automated cell phone messages sent to computers and phones in Canada. (Learn more of the details here.)
Churn Rate
A metric that measures how many customers you retain and at what value. To calculate churn rate, take the number of customers you lost during a certain time frame, and divide that by the total number of customers you had at the very beginning of that time frame. (Don't include any new sales from that time frame.)
For example, if a company had 500 customers at the beginning of October and only 450 customers at the end of October (discounting any customers that were closed in October), their customer churn rate would be: (500-450)/500 = 50/500 = 10%.
Churn rate is a significant metric primarily for recurring revenue companies. Regardless of your monthly revenue, if your average customer does not stick around long enough for you to at least break even on your customer acquisition costs, you’re in trouble.
Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
The percentage of your audience that advances (or clicks through) from one part of your website to the next step of your marketing campaign. As a mathematic equation, it’s the total number of clicks that your page or CTA receives divided by the number of opportunities that people had to click (ex: number of page views, emails sent, and so on).
Closed-Loop Marketing
The practice of closed-loop marketing is being able to execute, track, and show how marketing efforts have impacted bottom-line business growth. An example would be tracking a website visitor as they become a lead to the very last touchpoint when they close as a customer.
When done correctly, you’d be able to see just how much of your marketing investment yielded new business growth. One of the biggest business benefits of implementing an inbound marketing strategy and utilizing inbound marketing software is the ability to execute closed-loop marketing.
Conversion Path
A conversion path is a series of website-based events that facilitate lead capture. In its most basic form, a conversion path will consist of a call-to-action (typically a button that describes an offer) that leads to a landing page with a lead capture form, which redirects to a thank you page where a content offer resides. In exchange for his or her contact information, a website visitor obtains a content offer to better help them through the buying process. If you’re still having difficulty grasping the topic based on this description, feel free to absorb it as a rabbit hunting analogy in comic form.
Content
In relation to inbound marketing, content is a piece of information that exists for the purpose of being digested (not literally), engaged with, and shared. Content typically comes in the form of a blog, video, social media post, photo, slideshow, or podcast, although there are plenty of over types out there. From website traffic to lead conversion to customer marketing, content plays an indispensable role in a successful inbound marketing strategy.
Content Management System (CMS)
A web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to create, edit, and manage a website. Helps users with content editing and more "behind-the-scenes" work like making content searchable and indexable, automatically generating navigation elements, keeping track of users and permissions, and more.
(At HubSpot, we think COS is better than CMS. Find out why.)
Content Optimization System (COS)
A COS is basically a CMS (Content Management System), but optimized to deliver customers the most personalized web experience possible. (Learn more about HubSpot's COS here.)
Context
If content is king, then context is queen. Serving up valuable content is important, but ensuring that it’s customized for the right audience is equally (if not more) important. As buyers become more in control of what information they digest (again, not literally), it’s important to deliver content that’s contextually relevant. If you own a restaurant, you wouldn’t want to send a coupon for a steak dinner to a vegetarian, right? Unless you’re anti-herbivore, of course …
Conversion Rate
The percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web page, such as filling out a form. Pages with high conversion rates are performing well, while pages with low conversion rates are performing poorly.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
The process of improving your site conversion using design techniques, key optimization principles, and testing. It involves creating an experience for your website visitors that will convert them into customers. CRO is most often applied to a web page or landing page optimization, but it can also be applied to social media, CTAs, and other parts of your marketing. (Learn more here.)
Cost-per-Lead (CPL)
The amount it costs your marketing organization to acquire a lead. This factors heavily into CAC (customer acquisition cost) and is a metric marketers should keep a keen eye on.
Crowdsourced Content
Creating your own content can take more time than you have to lend to it -- which is where crowdsourcing comes into play. Allowing subject matter experts, customers, or freelancers to create your content for you is a prime way to get more quality content published in less time. Compile the content you get back into a really awesome offer and give credit to all the contributors -- a win-win for everyone involved. (Learn how to crowdsource a blog post using Google Docs here.)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Your total Sales and Marketing cost. To calculate CAC, follow these steps for a given time period (month, quarter, or year):
Add up program or advertising spend + salaries + commissions + bonuses + overhead.
Divide by the number of new customers in that time period.
For example, if you spend $500,000 on Sales and Marketing in a given month and added 50 customers that same month, then your CAC was $10,000 that month. (Learn more here.)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A set of software programs that let companies keep track of everything they do with their existing and potential customers.
At the simplest level, CRM software lets you keep track of all the contact information for these customers. But CRM systems can do lots of other things, too, like tracking email, phone calls, faxes, and deals; sending personalized emails; scheduling appointments; and logging every instance of customer service and support. Some systems also incorporate feeds from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. (Learn more here.)
CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and it's what gives your entire website its style, like colors, fonts, and background images. It affects the mood and tone of a web page, making it an incredibly powerful tool. It's also what allows websites to adapt to different screen sizes and device types. (Learn more about CSS, HTML, and JavaScript here.)
D
Dynamic Content
A way to display different messaging on your website based on the information you already know about the visitor. For example, you could use Smart CTAs so that first-time visitors will see a personalized CTA (perhaps with a top-of-the-funnel offer) and those already in your database see a different CTA (maybe for content that offers a little more information about your product or service). You can read this post to learn more about dynamic content.
E
Ebook
Ebooks are a common type of content that many marketers use, often to help generate leads. They are generally a more long-form content type than, say, blog posts, and go into in-depth detail on a subject. Here's an awesome ebook on how to write an ebook (so meta).
Editorial Calendar
It's like a road map for content creation, showing you what kind of content to create, what topics to cover, which personas to target, and how often to publish to best support your strategy. Maintaining an editorial calendar will keep you more organized and show you any gaps you may have in your content library. It also helps ensure you're doing the right things for your personas and not going way off-track with the topics you're covering. (Don't have a proper calendar of your own yet? Check out this free, pre-designed editorial calendar template.)
In its most basic sense, email stands for “Electronic Mail.” It’s a core component of marketing because it’s a direct connection to a contact’s inbox. However, with great power comes great responsibility, meaning it’s important for marketers to not abuse the email relationship with a contact. It’s far too easy for a contact to click “unsubscribe” after gaining their hard-earned trust in your communication. Don’t blow it.
Engagement Rate
A popular social media metric used to describe the amount of interaction -- Likes, shares, comments -- a piece of content receives. Interactions like these tell you that your messages are resonating with your fans and followers. (Click here for engagement rate benchmarks for a range of different industries.)
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that continues to provide value to readers no matter when they stumble upon it. In other words, it can be referenced long after it was originally published, and even then, it's still valuable to the reader. This post on how to write blog posts serves as a prime example.
Typically, a piece of evergreen content is timeless, valuable, high quality, and canonical or definitive. These posts are typically a content marketer's best friend because of the tremendous SEO value they provide. (Learn more about evergreen content and why it's important here.)
F
Facebook is a social network you're likely quite familiar with already -- but it has become so much more than just a platform to publish content and gain followers. You can now utilize the awesome targeting options available through Facebook advertising to find and attract brand new contacts to your website and get them to convert on your landing pages ... but remember, you still need awesome content to do it.
While it’s a core component of any marketing strategy, it shouldn’t be the only component. Focusing entirely on Facebook (or any other large social channel, for that matter) will only give you a small piece of the inbound marketing pie. And it’s still piping hot, so be careful. (Download our free guide to using Facebook for business here.)
Form
The place your page visitors will supply information in exchange for your offer. It’s also how those visitors can convert into precious sales leads. As a best practice, only ask for information you need from your leads in order to effectively follow up with and/or qualify them. (Read this post to learn what you should and shouldn't ask on your landing page forms.)
Friction
Any element of your website that is confusing, distracting, or causes stress for visitors, causing them to leave your page. Examples of friction-causing elements include dissonant colors, too much text, distracting website navigation menus, or landing page forms with too many fields. (Learn more about identifying and fixing friction here.)
G
Google+ (NO LONGER AN ACTIVE PLATFORM)
Google+ (referred to as "Google Plus") is a social network that allows you to join and create circles in which you can mix and match family members, friends, colleagues, and fellow industry members. While you can use it much like other social networks -- to publish and share content, and generate new leads -- it also provides content marketers with tremendous SEO value due to the rising importance of social sharing in search engine algorithms. (It is owned by Google, after all.)
H
Hashtag
Hashtags are a way for you and your readers to interact with each other on social media and have conversations about a particular piece of content. They tie public conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram together into a single stream, which users can find by searching for a hashtag, clicking on one, or using a third-party monitoring tool like HubSpot's Social Inbox.
The hashtags themselves are simply a keyword phrase, spelled out without spaces, with a pound sign (#) in front of it -- like #InboundChat and #ChocolateLovers. You can put these hashtags anywhere in your social media posts. (Learn more about how to use hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram here.)
HTML
This is short for HyperText Markup Language, a language used to write web pages. It's at the core of every web page, regardless of the complexity of a site or number of technologies involved, and provides the basic structure of the site -- which is then enhanced and modified by other technologies like CSS and JavaScript. (Download our free guide to HTML here to learn some simple and useful HTML coding hacks.)
I
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that draw visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects' attention. It's all about earning the attention of customers, making the company easy to find online, and drawing customers to the website by producing interesting, helpful content. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time. (Learn more about inbound marketing here.)
Inbound Link
An inbound link is a link coming from another site to your own website. "Inbound" is generally used by the person receiving the link. For example, here's an inbound link to our co-founder Dharmesh's blog. Dharmesh could say, "I received an inbound link from HubSpot."
Websites that receive many inbound links can be more likely to rank higher in search engines. They also help folks receive referral traffic from other websites. (Learn more about inbound links here.)
Infographic
A highly visual piece of content that is very popular among digital marketers as a way of relaying complex concepts in a simple and visual way. (Learn more about how to create a knockout infographic here.)
Though initially a haven only for younger generations who wanted to post, edit, and share unique-looking photos, Instagram has grown into a premier social network that's a viable opportunity for content marketers. Many businesses are taking advantage of the site by posting industry-related photos that their followers and customers would enjoy seeing. (Download our free guide on using Instagram for business here, or read this blog post for our favorite Instagram tips and tricks.)
J
JavaScript
JavaScript is a programming language that lets web developers design interactive sites. Most of the dynamic behavior you'll see on a web page is thanks to JavaScript, which augments a browser's default controls and behaviors.
Uses for JavaScript include pop-ups, slide-in calls-to-action, security password creation, check forms, interactive games, and special effects. It's also used to build mobile apps and create server-based applications. (Learn more about JavaScript, HTML, and CSS here.)
K
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
A type of performance measurement companies use to evaluate an employee's or an activity's success. Marketers look at KPIs to track progress toward marketing goals, and successful marketers constantly evaluate their performance against industry-standard metrics. Examples of KPIs include CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), blog traffic sources, and homepage views. Choose KPIs that represent how your marketing and business are performing. (Here are some tips for choosing the right KPIs for your business.)
Keyword
Sometimes referred to as "keyword phrases," keywords are the topics that webpages get indexed for in search results by engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Picking keywords that you’ll optimize a webpage for is a two-part effort. First, you’ll want to ensure the keyword has significant search volume and is not too difficult to rank for. Then, you’ll want to ensure it aligns with your target audience
After deciding the appropriate keywords you want to rank for, you’ll then need to optimize the appropriate pages on your website using both on-page and off-page tactics. What are those, you ask? Skip to “O” to find out -- but don’t tell “L”, “M”, or “N”! (Learn how to do keyword research for SEO here.)
L
Landing Page
A landing page is a website page containing a form that is used for lead generation. This page revolves around a marketing offer, such as an ebook or a webinar, and serves to capture visitor information in exchange for the valuable offer. Landing pages are the gatekeepers of the conversion path and are what separates a website visitor from becoming a lead.
A smart inbound marketer will create landing pages that appeal to different personae (plural for persona) at various stages of the buying process. A hefty endeavor no doubt, but one that pays off in spades. (Download this ebook to learn more about landing pages and how to optimize them.)
Lead
A person or company who's shown interest in a product or service in some way, shape, or form. Perhaps they filled out a form, subscribed to a blog, or shared their contact information in exchange for a coupon.
Generating leads is a critical part of a prospect's journey to becoming a customer, and it falls in between the second and third stages of the larger inbound marketing methodology, which you can see below.
Lead Nurturing
Sometimes referred to as “drip marketing,” lead nurturing is the practice of developing a series of communications (emails, social media messages, etc.) that seek to qualify a lead, keep it engaged, and gradually push it down the sales funnel. Inbound marketing is all about delivering valuable content to the right audience -- and lead nurturing helps foster this by providing contextually relevant information to a lead during different stages of the buying lifecycle.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. Nowadays, with more than 414 million registered members, LinkedIn is the most popular social network for professionals and one of the top social networks overall. Getting on the platform, developing a completed profile, and networking has helped many a jobseeker find work. (Click here to learn about using LinkedIn for professional networking, business, and marketing.)
Lifecycle Stages
These divisions serve as a way to describe the relationship you have with your audience, and can generally be broken down into three stages: awareness, evaluation, and purchase.
What's important to understand about each of these stages is that not every piece of content you create is appropriate, depending on what stage your audience might fall in at that moment. That's why dynamic content is so great -- you can serve up content that's appropriate for whatever stage that particular visitor is in. (Learn more about how to map content to lifecycle stages here.)
Lifetime Value (LTV)
A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. To calculate LTV, follow these steps for a given time period:
Take the revenue the customer paid you in that time period.
Subtract from that number the gross margin.
Divide by the estimated churn rate (aka cancellation rate) for that customer.
For example, if a customer pays you $100,000 per year where your gross margin on the revenue is 70%, and that customer type is predicted to cancel at 16% per year, then the customer's LTV is $437,500. (Learn more here.)
Long-Tail Keyword
A long-tail keyword is a very targeted search phrase that contains three or more words. It often contains a head term, which is a more generic search term, plus one or two additional words that refine the search term. For example:
Head term: unicorn
Long-tail keywords: unicorn games online, unicorn costumes for kids, unicorn videos on YouTube
Long-tail keywords are more specific, which means visitors that land on your website from a long-tail search term is more qualified, and consequently, more likely to convert.
LTV: CAC
The ratio of lifetime value (LTV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC). Once you have the LTV and the CAC, compute the ratio of the two. If it costs you $100,000 to acquire a customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV: CAC is 4.4 to 1.
M
Marketing Automation
While there’s some overlap with the term “lead nurturing,” marketing automation is a bit different. Think of marketing automation as the platform with associated tools and analytics to develop a lead nurturing strategy. If you’ll let me run with an “art” analogy, marketing automation is the paintbrush, watercolors, and blank canvas. Lead nurturing is the artist that makes it all come together. Like Bob Ross! You can’t paint a happy little nurturing campaign without both.
Bonus: Want to get super-savvy with your marketing automation terminology? Take it to the next level with behavior-based marketing automation. Behavior-based marketing automation refers to a system that triggers emails and other communication based on user activity on and off your site. It enables marketers to nurture leads and send them information only when it is most relevant to their stage in the buying cycle.
Microsite
A cross between a landing page and a “regular” website. ElfYourself.com is a great example. Microsites are used when marketers want to create a different online experience for their audience separate from their main website. These sites often have their own domain names and distinct visual branding. (Here's a list of 11 of the best microsite examples out there.)
Middle of the Funnel
This refers to the stage that a lead enters after identifying a problem. Now they’re looking to conduct further research to find a solution to the problem. Typical middle of the funnel offers includes case studies or product brochures -- essentially anything that brings your business into the equation as a solution to the problem the lead is looking to solve. Also, if you want to be cool, you can refer to this stage as “MOFU” for short.
Mobile Marketing
With mobile search queries officially surpassing desktop queries, now is probably the time to explore mobile marketing. What is it? Well, mobile marketing refers to the practice of optimizing marketing for mobile devices to provide visitors with time- and location- sensitive, personalized information for promoting goods, services, and ideas.
Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization means designing and formatting your website so that it’s easy to read and navigate from a mobile device. This can be done by either creating a separate mobile website or incorporating responsive design in the initial site layout. Google's algorithm now rewards mobile-friendly websites, so if your site isn't fully optimized for mobile devices, you will likely see a hit to your ranking on mobile searches. (Learn how to make your website mobile-friendly here.)
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
The amount of revenue a subscription-based business receives per month. Includes MRR gained by new accounts (net new), MRR gained from upsells (net positive), MRR lost from down-sells (net negative), and MRR lost from cancellations (net loss).
