News

We get it. Sometimes it seems like the digital marketing world has its very own language that can sound like straight-up verbiage to anyone outside the business, especially agency clients. We’ve been in the middle of a marketing meeting with a client and as most agencies do, we start throwing out a bunch of terminology that gets lost in translation. While we try our hardest to explain everything in a way that each client can fully grasp, it’s not always easy. To help level the playing field, we’ve chosen 10 of what we consider the most common but underappreciated terms in the marketing lexicon to help you go into your next agency marketing meeting a step above the rest.

A/B Testing

This is the process of comparing two versions of a single variable to figure out which performs best. This is usually used for email marketing campaigns, digital ads, landing pages, and other marketing tactics. Some variables that could be tested are location, creative, copy, demographics, and more. Outside of marketing, you can use A/B Testing to determine stuff like what the best hot sauce at Taco Bell is.

Analytics

Data and statistics about the users of a website and how they interact with the website. Your website analytics can tell us information such as how many people browse your website, how much time they spend on your website, and the specific actions they take when they’re on your website. We then take this information and use it to create target audiences, understand consumer behavior, improve user experience and optimize your advertising campaigns.

Behavioral Targeting

When browser cookies are used to select a target audience for an ad. So when you see ads for vacation packages because that’s all you look up while you’re at work? That’s behavioral targeting, clear your cache before your presentation.

Call to Action (CTA)

A button that we place in the optimal spot on your website that is so appealing in its copy and color that people are just compelled to click it. How do we know how to make this button? Decades of market research.

Circle Back

Does a topic keep getting avoided or is there no time to address it? We can and we will circle back to it later. Finished dealing with a crisis or last minute deadline? Now it’s time to circle back to that conversation from yesterday.

Copy

Speaking of copy (mentioned in the description for CTA), in the world of advertising and marketing, copy refers to the text or writing used in advertisements, pages of your website, basically anything we’ve created for a client. It’s technically referred to the output of copywriters, which are individuals at a marketing agency who write material that is designed to get the reader to respond or take action.

Em Dash

To clarify, an Em is the appropriate indent before a paragraph, not a tab. It is the width of the “M” in a given font. An Em Dash is a hyphen that is the width of an Em, but it’s actually not a hyphen at all (and it will upset those copywriters we mentioned if you decide to call it a hyphen).

Personas

A fictional character(s) created to represent types of people who use your brand, typically broken down into 3-4 distinct groups.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

All of the major search engines people use, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, have primary search results, where websites, videos, local listings, and other content are shown. All of this content is ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to you, the user. There are a ton of components that go into improving the SEO of your site pages. Search engines look for elements such as title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links – and that’s just to name a few. Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in the search engine results pages. Yeah, it’s a lot of moving parts, but that’s where we come into play.

Target Audience

The type of people you want to see your ad, buy your product, or use your service.

Next time you’re in a marketing meeting, we hope you can wow everyone with your new vocabulary. Even better, now you’ll know exactly what your marketing agency is talking about when reviewing your SEO report.