A/B Testing
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).
Analytics
Analytics is 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.
Application Programming Interface (API)
A series of rules in computer programming, allowing an application to extract information from a service and use that information either in their own application or in data analyses. -- an API "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.
B2B (Business-to-Business)
Used to describe companies that sell to other businesses. For example, Google and Oracle are primarily B2B companies.
B2C (Business-to-Consumer)
Used to describe companies that sell directly to consumers. For example, Amazon, Apple, and Nike are primarily B2C companies.
Blogging
This is short for web log 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 video.
Business Blogging
Business blogging retains all the attributes of "regular" blogging, but adds a layer of marketing strategy on top, helping marketers drive traffic to their website, convert that traffic into leads, establish authority on certain topics, and drive long-term results. 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
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.
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 the site long enough to read your content or convert on a landing page (or for any other conversion event). As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.
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 include numerous invalid email addresses. In 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.
Average email benchmarks for all industries:
• Average open rate: 17.92%
• Average click-through rate: 2.69%
• Average unsubscribe rate: 0.17%
• Average click-to-open rate: 14.10%
• Average bounce rate: 1.06%
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. It is important to convey a valuable offer on a call-to-action to better foster visitor-to-lead conversion.
CAN-SPAM
CAN-SPAM stands for "Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing.” It is 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, and outlines the penalties incurred for those who violate the law.
Case Study
An in-depth analysis of work a company completed for a client or customer that highlights the goals, process, and services used, as well as the results achieved through the services.
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.
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.)
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 pageviews, emails sent, etc.).
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 touch point when they close as a customer. When executed properly, you’ll be able to measure 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, that redirects to a thank you page where a content offer resides. In exchange for their contact information, a website visitor obtains a content offer to better help them through the purchase process.
Content
Content is a piece of information that exists for the purpose of being digested), engaged with, and shared. From website traffic to lead conversion and customer marketing, content plays an indispensable role in a successful inbound marketing strategy. Content marketing is meant to educate your prospects in your industry and help them better understand or resolve common problems they’re experiencing. Types of content that could be produced include blog articles, white papers, videos, social posts, eBooks, webinars, etc
Content Audit
A thorough examination of how existing content is performing on a website, which may lead to making adjustments in order to increase results.
Content Management System (CMS)
A web application designed for non-technical users to create, edit, and manage a website. Assists 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.
Content Optimization System (COS)
A COS is basically a CMS (Content Management System), but optimized to deliver customers the most personalized web experience possible.
Context
Providing valuable and viable 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, it’s important to deliver content that’s contextually relevant.
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 to create an experience for your website visitors that will convert them into customers. CRO is most often applied to web page or landing page optimization, but it can also be applied to social media, CTAs, and other parts of your marketing strategy.
CPI
Cost per impression is the expense incurred each time a potential customer views an ad you’ve taken out on a webpage. This would be charged by the website publisher, who might request a certain amount per viewership of the ad. Views are not the same as clicks (like PPC). An impression occurs when a user who fits a certain buyer persona has the potential to view your ad, such as when it is displayed in a sidebar on a website they’re visiting.
CPM
Cost Per Mile is the measurement of the estimated cost of the advertisement based on 1,000 views or impressions For example, if a website publisher charges $1.00 CPM, that means you pay $1.00 every time views for that advertisement hit 1,000.
Cost-Per-Lead (CPL)
The amount it costs your 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 an enormous amount of time. Allowing subject matter experts, customers, or freelancers to create content for you is a prime way to get more quality content published in less time.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
The total Sales and Marketing cost. To calculate CAC, follow these steps for a given time period (month, quarter, or year): To calculate, add up program or advertising spend + salaries + commissions + bonuses + overhead. Then, divide by the number of new customers in that time period.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
The practice of managing and analyzing customer interactions and data throughout their lifecycle in your system. CRM software lets you keep track of all the contact information for these customers. CRM systems can do a diverse array of other functions also, such as 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.
CTA
A Call-to-Action's sole purpose is to invoke an immediate response.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), is what gives your entire website its style, such as colors, fonts, and background images. It affects the tone of a web page, making it an incredibly powerful tool. It's also what allows websites to adapt to different screen sizes, device types, etc.
Drip
A style of campaign or communication strategy that sends pre-written emails, messages, or content to a set of customers over a certain amount of time as a way to keep current customers engaged.
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 first-time visitors see a personalized CTA, and those already in your system see a different CTA (perhaps for content that offers more information about your product or service).
Engagement Rate
A popular social media metric used to describe the amount of interaction.
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that continues to provide value to readers no matter what timeframe. The content can be referenced long after it was originally published and still valuable to the reader.
Facebook is a social network to publish content and gain followers. There are also targeting options available through Facebook advertising to find and attract brand new contacts to your website. While it’s a component of any marketing strategy, it shouldn’t be the only one. Focusing entirely on any other large social channel is only a piece of the inbound marketing strategy.
Form
The place page visitors will supply their information in exchange for your offer. It’s also how those visitors can convert into sales leads. As a best practice, only ask for information you need from registrants in order to effectively follow up with and/or qualify them.
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.
Gated Content
Content that requires a reader to obtain access through something like a form. Content that’s behind a form could include white papers and eBooks, on-demand webinars, infographics, etc. These forms also help because they indicate to you which prospects are interested enough in what you’re presenting to give you their email
GDPR
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is to guard all EU citizens from breaches in privacy and data. It is a monumental adjustment to data privacy regulation that remolded how data, from every aspect of life, is handled.
Google+
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.
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. Hashtags tie public conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram together into a single stream, which users can find by searching for a hashtag, clicking on it, or using a third-party monitoring tool. The hashtags are simply a keyword phrase, spelled out without spaces, with a pound sign (#) in front of it.
HTML
HyperText Markup Language, is a language used to write web pages. It's at the core of every web page, regardless the complexity of a site or number of technologies involved. HTML provides the basic structure of the site, which is then enhanced and modified by other technologies like CSS and JavaScript.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that earn the attention of customers and draw visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that can then be converted and closed.
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. Websites that receive many inbound links can be more likely to rank higher in search engines, and help receive referral traffic from other websites.
Infographic
A highly visual piece of content that is popular among digital marketers as a way of relaying complex concepts in a simple and visual way.
A social network that can be used for posting industry related photos that followers and customers would enjoy seeing.
JavaScript
A programming language that lets web developers design interactive sites. Most of the dynamic behavior you'll see on a web page is due 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.
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 constantly evaluate their performance against industry standard metrics. Examples of KPIs include CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), blog traffic sources, and homepage views.
Keyword
Keywords are the topics that webpages get indexed for in search results by engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Choosing keywords involves ensuring the keyword has significant search volume and is not too difficult to rank for, while also aligning with your target audience
Landing Page
A website page containing a form that is used for lead generation. This page revolves around a marketing offer, and serves to capture visitor information in exchange for the offer. Landing pages are the gatekeepers of the conversion path and are what separates a website visitor from becoming a lead.
Lead
An entity that has shown interest in a product or service, either by filling out a form, subscribing to a blog, or sharing their contact information in exchange for the offering.
Lead Nurturing
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 entails 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.
A business-oriented social networking site that is primarily used for professional networking. LinkedIn is the most popular social network for professionals and one of the top social networks overall.
Lifecycle Stages
The lifecycle stages 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.
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. Then subtract from that number the gross margin. Divide by the estimated churn rate (aka cancellation rate) for that customer.
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.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is the platform with associated tools and analytics to develop a lead nurturing strategy. 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, 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 distinctive visual branding.
Middle of the Funnel
The stage a lead enters after identifying a problem, and looking to conduct further research to find a solution. Typical middle of the funnel offers include case studies or product brochures -- things that bring your business into the equation as a solution to the problem the lead is looking to solve.
Mobile Marketing
The practice of optimizing marketing for mobile devices to provide visitors with time/location sensitive, personalized information for promoting products, services, and/or ideas.
Mobile Optimization
Designing and formatting your website so it is easy to read and navigate from a mobile device. This can be accomplished by either creating a separate mobile website or incorporating responsive design in initial site layout.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
The amount of revenue a subscription-based business receives per month.
Native Advertising
A type of online advertising that takes on the form and function of the platform it appears on, in order to make ads feel more like part of the content. It is usually a piece of sponsored content that's relative to the consumer experience, isn't interruptive, and presents similar to its editorial environment.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A customer satisfaction metric that measures, on a scale of 0-10, the degree to which people would recommend your company to others. The NPS is derived from a simple survey designed to help you determine how loyal customers are to your business. To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of customers who would not recommend you (detractors, or 0-6) from the percent of customers who would (promoters, or 9-10).
News Feed
An online feed full of news sources. On Facebook, the News Feed is the homepage of users' accounts where they can see all the latest updates from their friends. The news feed on Twitter is called Timeline.
No-Follow Link
A no-follow link is used when a website does not want to pass search engine authority to another webpage. It tells search engine crawlers not to follow or pass credit to linked websites as a way to avoid association with spammy content or inadvertently violating webmaster guidelines. To varying degrees, the no-follow attribute is recognized by all major search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
On-Page Optimization
This type of SEO is based solely on a webpage and the various elements within the HTML Ensuring key pieces of the specific page (content, title tag, URL, and image tags) include the desired keyword will increase a page rank for that particular phrase.
Off-Page Optimization
Off-page SEO refers to incoming links and other outside factors that impact how a webpage is indexed in search results. Factors such as linking domains and social media play a role in off-page optimization. P
Page View
A request to load a single web page on the internet. Marketers use them to analyze their website and to see if any change on the webpage results in more or fewer page views.
Partner Marketing
The concept of wo organizations coming together to increase reach and engagement with a marketing program that’s designed to meet both party's goals. It’s collaborative marketing for people with two products that could coexist or work together as one package.
Pay-per-Click (PPC)
The amount of money spent to get a digital advertisement clicked. Also an internet advertising model where advertisers pay a publisher (usually a search engine, social media site, or website owner) a certain amount of money every time their ad is clicked. PPC ads are used to direct traffic to the advertiser's website, and PPC is used to assess the cost effectiveness and profitability of your paid advertising campaigns.
There are two ways to pay for PPC ads:
Product Matrix
A chart that describes the various products a business offers and the features that apply to each product. Product matrices typically assign each version of a product its own column along the top, with the features included in each version listed in rows on the side.
A visual social network typically used by ecommerce marketers, B2B and B2C content marketers. Businesses and consumers alike use the website to post images and photos they like so fellow users can re-pin (share) that content.
PPC
Pay-Per-Click is an advertising technique wherein an advertiser places an ad in an advertising venue (like Google AdWords or Facebook), and pays that venue each time a visitor clicks on the ad.”
Public Relations
A strategy complementary to marketing that positions a company in a positive light through messages from the company or an individual, which are delivered by third-party sources, such as publications, news sites, etc., to boost credibility and earn trust with new audiences.
Qualified Lead
A contact that opted in to receive communication from your company, and is interested in learning more. Marketing and Sales often have two different versions of qualified leads: MQLs for Marketing, and SQLs for Sales.
QR Code
A Quick Response code is a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) that is readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera telephones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded may be text, URL, or other data.
Responsive Design
The practice of developing a website that adapts accordingly to how someone is viewing it. Instead of building a separate, distinct website for each specific device it could be viewed on, the site recognizes the device that the visitor is using and automatically generates a page that is responsive to the device the content is being viewed on -- making websites always appear optimized for screens of any dimension.
Return on Investment (ROI)
A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency and profitability of an investment, or to compare the efficiency and profitability of multiple investments. The formula for ROI is: (Gain from Investment minus Cost of Investment), all divided by (Cost of Investment). The result is expressed as a percentage or ratio.
Retweet
A re-posting of a tweet posted by another user on Twitter. Retweets look like normal tweets except for the retweet icon. They can be done in three ways. You can retweet an entire tweet by clicking the retweet button, indicated below. You can post a new tweet that includes your own commentary. In a new tweet, which also features the original tweet. It means you've pressed the rotating arrow icon to retweet a post, and then added a comment in the text box provided. This method of retweeting allows you to add your own thoughts. (The retweet takes up 24 characters, leaving you with 116 characters for the comment.). You can post a new tweet that includes your own commentary in addition to the information you're retweeting. This method of retweeting allows you to add your own thoughts, but with a very limited character count. When you see "Please RT" in someone's tweet, it means they are requesting their followers retweet their tweet to spread awareness.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The practice of enhancing where a webpage appears in search results. By adjusting a webpage's on-page SEO elements and influencing off-page SEO factors, an inbound marketer can improve where a webpage appears in search engine results. Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links, etc. Search engines also look at site structure, visitor behavior, and other external off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in the search engine results pages.
Sender Score
An email marketing term that refers to a reputation rating from 0-100 for every outgoing mail server IP address. Mail servers will check your Sender Score before deciding what to do with your emails. A score of 90+ is good.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
An agreement between a company's sales and marketing teams that defines the expectations Sales has for Marketing and vice versa. The Marketing SLA defines expectations Sales has for Marketing with regards to lead quantity and lead quality, while the Sales SLA defines the expectations Marketing has for Sales on how deeply and frequently Sales will pursue each qualified lead. SLAs exist to align sales and marketing, and it is critical that these two groups be properly integrated.
Small-to-Medium Business (SMB)
Generally encompasses companies that have between 10 and 500 employees.
Smart Content
Targeted website content that changes based on the past interactions or preferences of the website user – or their geographic location, device, etc. Those users could be leads who have already downloaded a certain type of content on your site, customers who have a deeper understanding of your service, prospects in a foreign country, etc. Relevant and personalized content that can be customized to your audience via your CRM system.
Snapchat
A social app that allows users to send and receive time-sensitive photos and videos known as "snaps," which are hidden from the recipients once the time limit expires. (Note: Images and videos still remain on the Snapchat server). Users can add text and drawings to their snaps and control the list of recipients in which they send them to.
Social Media
Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ are examples of social media networks that one can join for personal or business use. Social Media is a core component of Inbound, as it provides marketers with additional channels to spread reach, increase growth, and reach business goals.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Any software that is hosted by another company, which stores your information in the cloud. Examples: HubSpot, Salesforce, IM clients, and project management applications.
Top of the Funnel
The very first stage of the buying process. Leads at this stage are just identifying a problem that they have and are looking for more information. As such, an inbound marketer will want to create helpful content that aids leads in identifying this problem and providing next steps toward a solution.
A platform that allows users to share 140-character long messages publicly. Users can follow one another and be followed back.
Unique Visitor
A person who visits a website more than once within a period of time. Marketers use this term in contrast with overall site visits to track the amount of traffic on their website. If only one person visits a webpage 25 times, then that web page has one UV and 25 total site visits.
URL
Uniform Resource Locator is the address of a piece of information that can be found on the web such as a page, image, or document. URLs are important for on-page SEO, as search engines scour the included text when mining for keywords.
User Interface (UI)
This is a type of interface that allows users to control a software application or hardware device. A good user interface provides a user-friendly experience by allowing the user to interact with the software or hardware in an intuitive way. It typically includes a menu bar, toolbar, windows, buttons, etc.
Viral Content
A piece of content that has become wildly popular across the web through sharing.
Website
A set of interconnected webpages, usually including a homepage, generally located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a collection of information by a person, group, or organization.
Word-of-Mouth (WOM)
The passing of information from person to person. Traditionally, the term refers to oral communication, but also is applied to online communication, as well. This type of marketing is inexpensive, but involves leveraging various components of inbound marketing such as product, content, and social media marketing.
XML Sitemap
A file of code that lives on your web server and lists all of the relevant URLs that are in the structure of your website. It also helps search engine web crawlers determine the structure of the site so they can crawl it more intelligently.
YouTube
YouTube is the largest video-sharing site in the world where users can upload, share, and view videos.
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