Often when speaking to a marketing agency rep or even reading about digital marketing, people feel like the author is speaking a different language. Technical terms, industry jargon, and acronyms can generate confusion especially if you’re scratching the surface of digital marketing.
Here’s the thing: digital marketing isn’t a foreign language. You can learn all these terms that make you feel like you could never get at the bottom of your marketing strategy. Here is a short guide to some of the most popular terms marketers use today to help you stay in control next time you discuss your company’s marketing strategy.
A/B testing
Also called split testing, it is a method to evaluate two versions of the same product and see which one performs better. You can use it in email subject lines, newsletters, Facebook Ads, landing pages, and other types of content meant to increase conversions. The differences between the two versions go from minor elements, like the color of a button, to significant items, like different images on a landing page.
Buyer persona
A concept made popular by HubSpot, buyer personas are representations of your ideal customers. Personas can help you to target the right audience for your content and relate to potential customers as real humans. When you understand who your public is, you can create customized content and even develop your products to increase customer acquisition and retention.
Buyer’s journey
It’s the process through which a complete stranger becomes a customer and, eventually, a promoter of your brand. The buyer’s journey starts with you attracting the public to your brand using content, such as blog posts, articles, social messages, or ads — who now become website visitors. The other steps of this process include the conversion of website visitors first into leads, then into customers, and in the end into promoters of your brand.
Call-to-action (CTA)
A call-to-action message is a message that you use to generate an immediate response from your readers. In simple words, we’re talking about the words that you use to make your readers take action, such as “Read More,” “Add to cart,” or “Download Now.” When you design your CTA as a button inside your newsletters or landing pages, you call it a CTA button.
Click-through rate (CTR)
The click-through rate is the number of users that click on a link out of the total number of people who visited your landing page, read the email, or saw your social ad. If you added a call-to-action on a blog post, and 600 people saw your CTA, but only 42 of them clicked on it, your click-through rate is 7%. A good CTR can help you improve your ranking, being one of the elements that Google considers when evaluating your content.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate refers to the percentage of people who take action on your website or social media ads, according to your CTA. This concept covers both prospects and existing customers. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the term that describes all the techniques that marketers use to increase the number of people who take the desired action in your CTA — which is the foundation of any successful marketing strategy.
Customer acquisition cost
The customer acquisition cost is the average amount of expenses (both sales and marketing) that you invest in acquiring a single customer. To get the most out of your overall marketing strategy, you should calculate the customer acquisition cost for each marketing channel (social media, email, blog) and invest in the most efficient of them.
Return on investment (ROI)
ROI is the metric you use to calculate the efficiency of an investment or compare the productivity and profitability of several investments. To calculate your return on investment, you must divide your profit (gain from investment minus cost of investment) by the cost of your investment.
UX and UI
These two acronyms define two similar concepts, user experience and user interface, both essential for how your customers interact with your brand.
The user experience refers to how you develop every interaction with your customers, to make sure you meet the user’s needs. On the other hand, the user interface focuses more on the presentation of your product.
Let’s take an example to understand better the difference between UX and UI: a FAQs section on your website. The UX designer will research the market and your audience, to create a useful structure that allows your users to navigate easily inside the page. Furthermore, UX also includes how valuable this service is for your company’s customers and adapt it to meet every user’s needs. The UI designer has to place all elements in the right order so that your FAQs section make sense as a whole — where each button stays, what colors to use, what fonts, and so on. So, a functional Search feature is the responsibility of the UX designer, while where you place the Search bar goes to UI.
Do you feel more comfortable talking about your marketing strategy after reading this article? This is just the tip of the iceberg! As you start learning how to integrate your marketing efforts with your daily activities, you’ll strengthen your vocabulary and become an expert in the digital marketing lingo.
