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The Urban River Marketing Jargon Buster

The Urban River Marketing Jargon Buster

Behold the Urban River A-Z Marketing Jargon Buster! We always promise to cut through the jargon and give you the facts, but unfortunately the marketing sector is rife with buzzwords and industry speak that only serves to bamboozle its customers and its audience. Particular favourites of ours are the sinful ‘Phablet’, basically a big smart phone that isn’t quite a tablet and the cringeworthy ‘mocial’, which as you can probably guess is mobile social.

From ‘Attribution’ to ‘WordPress’, we’ve covered the whole marketing spectrum with an easy to digest glossary of regularly used marketing terms with links to examples and further insights on the Urban River blog. So whether you don’t know your ‘SEO’ from your ‘paid search’ or you’ve always wanted to know exactly what ‘multi channel content marketing’ is, we’re here to help.

Attribution

Attribution in marketing refers to crediting whichever channel, for example social media, the customer used to find you.

Analytics

Analytics is the statistical data that comes from visits to a website. Data such as bounce rate, time and site and page views is normally gathered from Google Analytics. To make sure your Analytics data is as accurate as possible, take a look at our post on reducing the effects of spam.

Automation

Automation refers to technology or software that automatically sends marketing messages to your audience to save on time and resources. Good examples of these are social media scheduling tools such as Hootsuite and TweetDeck. To increase the quality of your Twitter followers our post on using Followerwonk to grow your audience is a useful read.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter a website and then left, rather than continuing on to view other pages on the same site.

Bounce rate measures the effectiveness of a website in encouraging visitors to continue browsing. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of visits that end on the first page of the website that the visitor sees.

Call to Action

A call to action is a strong instruction to an audience for a response, such as ‘call now’ ‘get a quote’ or ‘contact us today’.

CMS

A CMS or Content Management System is an application that allows for simple editing, publishing and deleting of website content, such as pages and images. Here’s our simple guide to publishing posts on WordPress.

Content marketing

Content marketing refers to the creation of quality, useful and valuable content for your audience. Content can range from blog posts, infographics, images, press releases, videos and many others. Good content marketing should result in social shares from your audience and hopefully links back from other web sources to your content.

Conversion/conversion rate

A web conversion is simply when the audience undertakes a pre-determined action on your website. This may be submitting a contact form, making a purchase, or signing up to an email newsletter.

A key metric in web analytics, conversion rate is simply the percentage of web site traffic that completed your set goal. The higher your conversion rate the better.

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)

In order to increase your conversion rate, you may need to make changes to your website. This may include making your checkout button more visible, decreasing the number of fields on a contact form, or making your copy clearer. The testing of these changes is referred to as Conversion Rate Optimisation.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a coding language used to define the presentation and visual style of a web page.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

CRM is the name given to a piece of software that manages your customer data such as Sage CRM or Salesforce.com. Its ultimate goal is to analyse and improve customer interactions, increase customer retention and drive new sales.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing is any advertising communication straight to the customer. These could be in the form of banner advertising, texts, printed mailers and many other mediums. Check out some great direct marketing examples here on our blog.

Ecommerce

Ecommerce is simply the selling of goods and services online.

Email Marketing

At its core any email message sent from a company can be considered email marketing. Typically there are a number of ways a company may interact with a customer via email. This may be informing a customer their order has been dispatched, an e-newsletter sent out to an existing database, or a retargeted email to someone that has abandoned an ecommerce cart. Have a read of our secrets to a knockout email marketing campaign.

HTML

Hyper text markup language or HTML is a coding language used to create web pages.

Inbound marketing

Aside from traditional interruptive marketing techniques such as cold calling, paid for email lists and banner advertising, inbound marketing earns your customers attention by producing valuable and interesting content. Inbound marketing techniques include social media and blogging. You can learn our 7 tips for starting a successful business blog here.

Infographic

An infographic is a graphical form used to represent data. Infographics are a great way of creating interesting content as part of any marketing campaign. They are also great for sharing across your social media profiles and for encouraging links. Take a look at our latest infographic on Newcastle.

Link building

Link building is a key metric used by search engines to establish you rankings. Quality links from other websites back to yours gathered over time, can greatly improve your position in the likes of Google. Be warned though as low quality links can also negatively affect your website.

Meta tags

Meta descriptions, meta titles and less so meta keywords, are website code that are used for SEO purposes to tell search engines such as Google, what a web page is about.

Multichannel

Multichannel marketing is the ability to communicate with your audience and potential customers on various platforms and channels. This can be via email, Twitter, television, print ads, etc. No matter what channel a customer chooses to communicate with a brand the response (in terms of speed, tone of voice and outcome) should be the same.

Paid search

Paid search is a term used to describe paid inclusion on a search engine results page (SERP)

When a user searches for a particular word or phrase, the results will appear as a list on a search engine results page (SERP), these results will generally be a mixture of naturally occurring links (organic) and paid-for adverts.

These ads normally appear at the top of a SERP or to the side. If you want to advertise on Google you must use their advertising network known as Google AdWords. Yahoo and Bing also run their own similar advertising network, called the Yahoo Bing Network.

Parallax design

Parallax is a popular technique in modern web design of making website background images move slower than the foreground images to give an illusion of depth. A good example is Rimmel London.

Pay-per-click (PPC)

PPC is tied in to paid search and is a paid advertising model for those who want to place advertisements for their company on search engines. The advertiser submits a bid to the search engine, indicating how much they are willing to pay for their advert to appear in the search results of their chosen word. The amount they suggest is on a ‘per-click’ basis, and they will pay this amount to the search engine every time their advert is clicked.

Responsive web design

Responsive refers to providing an optimal viewing experience of a website across a wide range of devices such as tablets and mobiles. This includes minimum re-sizing, scrolling and panning. Read about how responsive websites are now rewarded with higher rankings in Google.

Retargeting

Retargeting is a method by which marketers can ‘re-attract’ previous visitors who perhaps abandoned a shopping basket, or who browsed some product pages, but then left the site to go elsewhere.

A small piece of website code is placed on the customer’s computer called a ‘cookie’ which allows the advertisers to show ads for the product or service the prospective customer didn’t buy at the time.

Retention

Retention is essentially encouraging your customers to come back for more. There are many different skills and values you need to engender in order to improve customer retention, most of them around building trust, loyalty, reliability and relevance.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing involves increasing the visibility of websites on search engine results pages (SERPs) by either using search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques, which help your website appear higher in the results, or by using a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, which displays adverts on the SERP based on the users search terms. This is also known as paid search.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimising your website and its content so that it can easily be indexed by search engines. You can read our handy guide for Ecommerce SEO here.

Using this indexed information about your website, search engines can provide searchers with the most relevant results based on their search terms. These listings are known as organic search results and often appear below any paid search listings. Read Urban River’s Top Ten SEO Tips here to learn more.

Social media

Social media is the general term used to describe any online network that allows a user to create a profile and interact with other companies and individuals. The most popular examples of these are Facebook and Twitter.

For marketing purposes, social media is a great way to communicate with your customers by sharing your product and services, dealing with queries and pushing new deals and sales.

User experience (UX)

In digital, a ‘good user experience’ is one that helps somebody accomplish a task in the most efficient, effective and enjoyable way possible. There are many elements that comprise user experience, ranging from the visual design, the way we interact with the product (website/technology/software) and how we interact with it.

WordPress

WordPress is the most popular website creation tool in the world and is the easiest Content Management System (CMS) to use. Here are our 6 reasons why you should use WordPress for your website.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Carl Buckley .