Jargon buster

The PR and marketing sector is, like most industries, constantly striving to come up with the ‘new’ thing that will blow you away. Sadly, most of these are just re-inventions of something that we already do or no.

That’s why we’ve put this Jargon Buster together – courtesy of several excellent existing articles including those by Instantprint and Cariad Marketing – which you can ‘deep dive’ into if you’ve got your wetsuit at the ready…

A/B Testing

Probably best known in relation to email marketing, it is also known as ‘split testing’. It is an experiment where two (or more) variants (A and B) are compared based on performance, so we can see which converts best. Often used for testing parts of a website and to test different marketing email subject lines to see which gets the highest open rate.

Above-the-line

Originates from traditional accounting practice that treated advertising through television, radio or published media as ‘above-the-line’ expenditure. Other advertising, such as direct marketing, was accounted for ‘below-the-line’.

Actionable Insight

Used in data analytics, this refers to information that can be acted upon, or gives enough information that it can influence decisions.

Advertorial

An advertisement that is designed to look like an editorial article. It has to be identified as an advertisement in a publication but is not necessarily on a website.

Affiliate Marketing

Where an online retailer pays commission to someone else (such as a publisher, or ‘influencer’), who then promotes the retailer’s products on their own website/blog/social media accounts. The publisher gets a portion of the online retailer’s sales as a thank you for promoting the product.

Analytics

The process of discovering and interpreting meaningful patterns in data, which is analysed to help inform future business decisions.

Backlink

Backlinks are one way links from one website to another and are often also called incoming links or inbound links. The quality of the link is determined by the quality and traffic of the website sending the visitors, so a link from a relevant website with a high traffic will always be of more value than any others.

Banner Ad

This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser via a creative.

Below-the-line

Opposite to above-the-line. Advertising media that used to be considered more as promotional channels, including direct mail, telemarketing, electronic media, displays, leaflets and brochures and sales promotion and other media.

Big Data

Seems to have gone out of vogue a bit… Big data is a large volume of structured and unstructured data that’s often too difficult to process using traditional data-processing software techniques.

Black Hat SEO

The ‘dodgy’ side of SEO! The practice of using techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking or hidden text as a method to improve website rankings. These methods are considered ‘unethical’ and contravene search engine guidelines, therefore website owners that practice black hat SEO methods beware, as you run the risk of being penalised (or in extreme cases banned) by the search engines.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of website visitors who navigate away from the site having only viewed one page.

Brand Equity

A phrase used to describe a brand’s value, with the idea that a well-known brand name can make more money for the business. Brand equity is a set of perceptions, knowledge and behaviours on the part of customers that creates demand and/or a price premium for a branded product—in other words, what the brand is worth to a customer. Brand equity may also be defined as a set of elements such as brand associations, market fundamentals and marketing assets that help distinguish one brand from another.

Brand Loyalty

When consumers develop emotional relationships with brands, they are more likely to repeat-purchase and choose one business over its competitors as a result.

Brand Publisher

You produce your own content and publish this in various ways – just like you’ve always done in e-newsletters, website articles, brochures!

Brand Value

Brand value is the net present value of future cash flows from this branded product minus the net present value of future cash flows from a similar unbranded product – or in simpler terms, what the brand is worth to management and shareholders. Whilst measuring the brand value of a product or corporation has its usefulness, the act of measurement by itself will not make a brand more valuable or less risky.

Call to Action (CTA)

The point where you ask the reader to take action, such as ‘buy now’ or ‘send us an enquiry, usually in an email or at the end of a website article.

Clickbait

Evil, evil stuff! A piece of online content that reveals just enough information to attract attention and stimulate curiosity, encouraging people to click through to a webpage, video, or even to react to something on social media.

Content Calendar

An effective way of managing marketing campaign content, this is a calendar to help you keep track of what content is needed by when to reach your campaign deadlines.

Content Marketing

A form of marketing involving the creation of online content such as blogs, social media posts and videos, which is distributed to a targeted audience to create interest in a business.

Contextual Marketing

Contextual marketing is marketing that occurs when a person is more likely to be interested in a product or service.

Conversion Rate

This is the percentage of people who carry out a desired action, for example the percentage of website visitors that make a purchase on the site.

Customer Centric

This is an approach to doing business with a focus on creating a positive experience for the customer. Businesses that adopt this approach make customer service a main priority to gain a competitive edge.

Marketing Engagement

Engagement is about building a relationship with customers through looking at how they behave and how they want to interact with you, this can be through getting likes on social media or creating conversation through blogs.

DRTV

Direct Response Television – any TV advertising that asks consumers to respond directly to the company, usually either by calling a freephone number or by visiting a website. This is a form of direct response marketing.

Drupal

A powerful and extendable open source CMS (content management system).

Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing is a marketing strategy where businesses advertise their products/services in an unusual/unconventional, and usually low-cost, way.

Hyperlocal

Hyperlocal marketing is an extremely focused form of marketing that targets customers in a highly specific way, such as ‘near me’ searches – e.g. when someone uses their smartphone to search online for a restaurant ‘near me’.

Ideation

Ideation is a creative process where team get together and create new ideas and concepts.

Internet of Things (IOT)

Broadly speaking, the Internet of Things term covers everything connected to the internet, including ‘smart devices’ like smartphones and other devices that can be connected/share data through a network.

Keyword

In SEO, keywords are words and phrases (search queries) people will enter into search engines to find your content. Before writing a piece of content, it’s important to research keywords and phrases to include.

Landing Page

This is a standalone web page designed for a marketing campaign that’s used to prompt customers to take another action, for example sign up for an email newsletter or register for an event, therefore converting web traffic and generating leads.

Lapsed Customer Reactivation

The process of re-contacting ‘former’ customers and following up on ‘lost orders/old quotations’ with the objective of generating new leads.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is where a business builds a relationship with its customers at every stage of their buying journey until they make their purchase.

Lookalike Audiences

Select social media platforms and some data companies are able to provide you with new prospect customer data, through customer profiling, based on your existing customers. This new data set will have attributes in common with your excising customer base and this new audiences is called a lookalike audience.

Market Segmentation

This is where a business segments their target market into subgroups based on certain shared characteristics to target its audience more accurately with directed marketing.

Marketing Automation

The act of automating repetitive tasks such as emails and social media by using marketing automation software to schedule and plan these tasks.

Marketing Mix

This refers to the combination of factors a business uses to promote their products/services. Typical marketing mixes consist of the 4Ps of marketing: Price, Product, Promotion and Place.

Netiquette

A combination of the words ‘net’ and ‘etiquette’, netiquette refers to the polite way of behaving online, such as respecting rights of privacy and good manners in online communications, for example in emails.

Omnichannel Marketing

The process of delivering a seamless experience across different sales channels. For example, the customer experience of shopping in-store and shopping online using either a desktop computer or smart device will be integrated.

Off-Page SEO

All the marketing activity you do to promote your website outside the design of the website itself. Getting more inbound links to your site, registering with directories relevant to your industry, and getting more pages into the search engine indexes are all parts of Off-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO

The process of placing your selected keywords in the right places on your web pages. On-page SEO involves optimising page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve search engine rankings.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is when a business reaches out to customers. This can be through trade shows, direct mail campaigns (like postcards and catalogues) and even cold calling.

Page Ranking

This refers to the importance placed by the search engines on each individual web page, which determines where it will appear within organic search results.

Page Views

The number of web pages within your website have been viewed. This is the total amount of page views from all visitors within a given amount of time.

Pages/Visits (online)

The number of pages the average visit generates. This is an average number.

Pain Points

A pain point is something that bothers people, where your product/service is the solution.

Persona (company or brand)

A persona is a character that a company creates to represent an ideal customer, which helps them to understand core customer groups. As well incorporating characteristics like age, gender and income, personas also include more specific information like interests and reasons for buying a particular product.

PPC

Pay-Per-Click.

PPL

Pay-Per-Lead.

PPS

Pay-Per-Sale.

Psychographics

Used often in market research, psychographics refers to categorising people based on psychological criteria such as attitudes, values, opinions and lifestyles.

Purchase Funnel

This is a marketing model that shows the theoretical customer journey. The order of the model suggests that the customer journey goes in this order: Awareness, Opinion, Consideration, Preference, Purchase

Realtime Engagements

Realtime customer engagement refers to interacting with your customers in a quick and personal way. This can be through having short response times for customer requests, by building up a digital community online or even through using customer data/location to provide instant recommendations.

Repurposing Content

Finding new ways of using pre-existing content to help reach a new audience, for example turning product images into Pinterest posts or turning a written guide into a video.

Responsive web design

A web design approach which means a website is built to automatically provide the best possible viewing experience on all devices, whether the user is using a PC, mobile or tablet. A responsive website automatically resizes itself to make it easy to read and navigate with the minimum amount of resizing, panning, and scrolling.

Retargeting

A type of online advertising that targets people who have already visited your website. This technique is commonly used with audiences that have shopping in their online basket. 

RSS

Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. Technique used to distribute dynamic content (i.e. news headlines).

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This is the process of maximising how visible your website or webpage is in search engine results. There are lots of factors that affect your website’s search engine ranking, including keywords, quality of content and backlinks.

Seeds

When you purchase a database or mailing list, the list owner will place their own details into it in order to identify whether a rented list is being used more than the agreed level.

SERP

Search Engine Results Page – this is the results page that appears when you input a search term into a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Snackable Content

Snackable content is online content that’s easy for people to consume and share with others. It’s generally something short and visual that a lot of people can relate to.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework)

An anti-spam measure in which the internet domain of an email sender can be authenticated. This helps to discourage email spammers who disguise the origin of their email, which is known as email spoofing. SPF makes it easier for a mail server to recognise if an email message has come from a domain other than the one claimed.

Spider

The software used by search engines to crawl the internet and identify web pages.

Splash Page

An introductory screen a user sees when visiting your website. You can read more about them courtesy of Active Campaign.

Transparency

Being clear and honest with customers by creating trustworthy, authentic content, where actions speak louder than words – if you claim to be a customer centric brand, show it by offering a top notch customer service and building up a supportive community around your business.

Unique Selling Points (USPs)

This is what differentiates your business or its products from your competitors’. This could be anything from low costs of products and services to showcasing the more customisation options available.

User Experience (UX)

How easy/pleasing an overall experience of using a business’ website, app or product is for the customer. User experience design enhances this overall experience.

User Generated Content (UGC)

This is any content that’s been posted by users of online platforms, such as social media and forums. This includes influencers, celebrity endorsements or fans of a particular product.

Viral Marketing

Content that’s been circulated widely on the internet. How ‘viral’ a piece of content has gone depends on the context, the platform and market.

White Hat SEO

The term given to the execution of ethical SEO practices embracing search engine guidelines and enhance a website’s ranking and traffic.

X-Post/Cross Post

Sharing a piece of content across multiple channels at once, such as sharing the same message on Twitter and on Facebook at the same time.

Zero Cost Strategy

A marketing activity which is very low, or zero, cost to the business.