Helpful Marketing Terms to Know

Marketers throw around a lot of jargon, terms, and abbreviations that they’ve learned during their time in the field. Whether you’re starting a marketing career, or just trying to understand what your marketing team or agency is talking about, here’s a list of some marketing lingo that can help.

Backlinks - You’ll hear “backlink” a lot when talking about SEO. Backlinks are hyperlinks that link from another site to your site. The more quality backlinks you have, the better your website’s authority score is. (Psst...there’s more on how to build backlinks to your site here.)

B2B and B2C - Business to business and business to consumer. This refers to the type of business you run. Marketing agencies are B2B; our customers are other businesses. A dentist is B2C, as they have their own customers (patients).

CTA - Call to action. This is the part of your content or message that asks a potential client or customer to do something, take action. That might be to fill out an online form in exchange for a coupon or download.

Hubspot - Hubspot is one of the world’s leading marketing automation and customer relationship management platforms. It can help you automate and personalize your marketing efforts while giving you the tools and insights you need to delight your customers every step of the way. (And don’t forget, your favorite Raleigh marketing agency happens to be a HubSpot Solutions Partner!)

Infographic - An infographic is a visual image that is used to explain information or data. An infographic can make difficult information more visually pleasing and easy to understand. The graphics can also encourage engagement on social media and help generate backlinks and other “Google Juice” to your website. 

KPI - Key performance indicators. These are whatever metrics or measurements you are using to decide whether a marketing campaign or project is working. You might have key performance indicators in other areas of your business as well. In marketing, we tend to look at website traffic, email and social media performance, phone calls to your business (hopefully you are tracking how they heard about you!), and email opens, among others.

PPC - Pay per click advertising. These ads can run on Google or on social media platforms - like Facebook and Instagram. You set a daily budget for the ad and pay either when someone clicks the ad or views it, depending on the campaign type. 

Responsiveness - This term describes the way your website looks and functions across devices - both desktop and mobile. Your website should scale and shrink for any device and even feature different content keeping in mind that users on a phone might want something different than a desktop user. (Note: The website should not be a separate mobile site, as you may have done in the past. Now having a separate site will hurt your SEO.)

SEO - Yet another abbreviation. This one is for Search Engine Optimization, which is the work we do to lift your website higher in search engine results (aka Google SERPs, so consider this a two-for-one). Different SEO tactics can help you rank where it matters for your business, whether that is in local results and maps, organic search, or even shopping or image results.

UI/UX - An abbreviation for User Interface and User Experience. Both apply to websites, how they look, how a person will navigate through them. While some think the terms are interchangeable, they actually refer to two different things. 

WordPress - This is one of many (and our preferred) open-source software that allows you to host your website on the internet. Many websites today are built using these platforms as a way for you to manage your content without having to know programming languages. We often use WordPress because we find it to be user-friendly yet customizable - so you can build the website of your dreams in a snap.

What marketing terms are you not sure of? Contact us for help with the terminology or a marketing strategy.