Digital Marketing 101

Actual Moment of Truth (AMOT)

A recent addition to the Moments of Truth in marketing, Actual Moment of Truth was coined after the growth of eCommerce. It is the time between the order placement and the time when the buyer receives the product.

Affinity Marketing

Affinity Marketing is a partnership between two brands with common business goals and interests. In this subset of direct marketing, a business can team up with an affinity group and provide products as part of an affinity group and create a win-win situation for all parties involved.

Ambient Marketing

Ambient Marketing is a tactic where brands perform marketing and advertising campaigns at unusual and unexpected places in creative ways to increase brand awareness.

Astroturfing

Astroturfing is a deceptive marketing strategy where false promotions are made by fake ground-level users to create hype around the product, often sponsored by the business to increase their credibility. The term astroturfing is a wordplay on fake grassroots level users involved in such practices.

Audience Segmentation

Categorizing your audience into smaller subgroups based on their browsing and past purchasing behavior. By segmenting your audience, you can send tailored messages to specific groups that are more relevant to them. These groups can be created based on the audience’s age, gender, location and is not just limited to their browsing behavior.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing model where a business offers bonuses or commissions to individuals and marketers who help in selling and promoting the products of a business.

Backlink

A backlink is similar to a citation. It is a link in a website that refers to another. Backlinks are important from the perspectives of Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing as search engines consider backlinks as a ranking factor in their results page. The reason behind this is websites provide backlinks to others when they deem their content worthy of providing a link.

Behavioral marketing

Behavioral Marketing is a digital marketing strategy in which businesses adapt their marketing strategies based on the user’s actions like their browsing behavior on their website, and social media to serve personalized solutions to the user based on their usage patterns.

Black Hat Link Building

Black Hat Link Building is an exploitative strategy employing methods to cheat search engine algorithms, to increase the ranking of websites in the Search Engine Result Page, for increasing traffic. Search Engines penalize and ban websites that practice Black Hat Link Building to discourage it as it leads to a false and undeserved ranking for these websites.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO is an optimization tactic involving techniques such as Black Hat Link Building and others that breach the search engine usage terms and exploit loopholes to rank websites higher. Stuffing keywords, spamming backlinks, and deceptive redirects are some examples of Black Hat SEO.

Brand Monitoring

Brand Monitoring is the process of following the presence and perception of a brand across different communication channels from newspaper articles to social media posts and comments, to understand and act on the perceptions in alignment with the brand’s business goals.

Buyer Persona

A Buyer Persona or a Customer/ User Persona is a description of a fictional person who has all the characteristics of your ideal customer. Researching and creating a Buyer Personas is useful in understanding the customer’s perspective and needs to design and improve the product as well the user’s experience.

Brand Personality

Brand personality is the set of relatable, human-like qualities you associate with a brand. Brand personality is how you would perceive the brand if it were a person.

B2B

B2B is a type of business model where businesses design and create products whose target audience is other businesses. Processor manufacturers that manufacture and supply processors to computer and cellphone manufacturers are a popular example of B2B business models.

B2C

B2C businesses also called Direct To Consumer models create products that are intended to be sold directly to consumers. The B2C business model removes the need of retailers and other middlemen and is prevalent in eCommerce.

Blog

A blog is a website or a part of a website where articles are posted serially. Blogs can be written about a particular topic and related ones and can be penned by one or more authors. Blogs are useful to educate and keep users updated on relevant topics and the structure of a blog is so that the latest post is always on top. Blogs also serve as a forum for the visitors by adding the ability to comment and discuss the blog article’s subject.

Bounce Rate

The number of people visiting your website and leaving it without performing any actions like clicking further links, or subscribing to newsletters, filling out forms, etc. The higher the bounce rate, the more people are leaving without performing any action on your website. This is bad for website owners and calls for rehauling or adding features expected by users to increase engagement and so reduce, bounce rate.

Brand Awareness

Brand Awareness refers to the ability of users to recognize a brand or its product in different settings. The bigger a brand’s awareness among consumers, the better the prospect of sales and market share the brand and its products have.

Brand Identity

Brand Identity or Corporate Identity is the way a business presents itself to the public, through promotions, marketing, and advertising campaigns, its public relation strategies, and even basics like the brand’s logo and other propriety strategies that point to a brand.

Call to Action (CTA)

Call to Action is a prompt made by you so the user may take the action that you desire. It contains phrases like “Buy Now” or “Sign Up!” leading to a sales completion or newsletter sign-up, respectively.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS is a Style Sheet Language used to describe how the web pages are to be presented. It is often used with HTML but it is independent and can be used with other Markup Languages to describe font, colors, and layouts of the web content. CSS is also used for adapting the presentation to different types of devices accessing the web page, like tablets, laptops, and mobile devices.

Churn

In marketing, churn refers to the measure of people who have opted to stop using a particular product for a variety of reasons. High churn is bad for any business and marketers study churn rate and the reasons to reduce it.

Click To Open Rate (CTOR)

Click To Open Rate is a metric that measures the clicks made from opened emails. CTOR gives an even better measurement of success of email marketing by giving how many clicks were made from emails users opened.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is a success measurement metric of your marketing campaign. It is the measure of the number of people engaging with your email, pop-up, or advertisement after having viewed it. Depending on its success you can understand the effectiveness of your campaign.

Consumer Behavior

Consumer Behavior is the study of individual consumers and organizations and how their actions and behaviors work in the matters of buying and using goods and services. It usually boils down to their motivation, psychology, and attitude that leads to their buying.

Content Marketing

Content is any material that gives value and information to the visitor. It can be anything from blogs, explanatory videos, infographics, posts, and graphics that are aimed at educating, informing, or engaging the visitor. Having quality content on your website is important as it is useful in converting curious visitors into potential, and recurring customers.

Cold Email Marketing

A kind of email marketing campaign where marketing emails are sent out to prospective customers with whom you have no prior relationship. This is a lot like cold calling to attract new customers except it’s done via email. Understand the GDPR guidelines regarding unsolicited communication before you go through with cold marketing of any kind though.

Content Management System (CMS)

Content Management is the process of holding, publishing, and distributing the digital content of a business. CMS is software that enables businesses to accomplish this. It is in the form of databases where content is stored in templated forms and usually, CMS is handled and consists of multiple content contributors.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate of a website is the rate at which visitors take action after visiting your website. These actions may entail sales A high conversion rate translates to a good marketing strategy on your part and vice versa.

Conversion Rate Optimization

CRO is the process of increasing the conversion rate capacity of your website by making it more visitor-friendly. Adding elements to your website that visitors find desirable and taking action is the principle behind CRO.

Cost Per Click

Cost Per Click is a marketing strategy used by campaigns that rely on advertising as their major promotion method. Search engines like Google use this model to charge advertisers for displaying their ads on its pages.

Cost Per Impression

Cost Per Impression is the cost the advertiser has to pay for every time the ad is viewed by a prospective customer. This metric tells the advertiser how cost-effective an advertising campaign is going to be.

Co-Branding

Co-Branding is when multiple brands that are usually involved in different industries team up to create a new product to attract more customers and increase brand visibility.

Co-Creation

Co-creation is an interactive campaign where a business encourages customers to contribute to designing and creating new products. Customers get to personalize the product to best suit their needs and the company understands the market demand better and creating a win-win situation.

Co-Marketing

Co-Marketing is similar to co-branding except here, two companies use their brands to promote the product of each other. These companies are usually involved in related industries and co-marketing enables them to reach more customers.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files used by websites to store and use information such as browsing and login history to identify the user. Cookies are used by websites to provide personalized ads and recommendations based on the user’s online behavior.

Customer Acquisition Cost

The cost of winning a customer over by having them purchase or subscribe to your product or service. It involves advertising, promotion, marketing, and other costs related to these processes which help in bringing new customers to your business.

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

A platform that collects customer data such as Customer Identity, description, behavior, and qualitative data to simultaneously improve the marketing efforts of a business and its relationship with its customers.

Customer Experience

Both subtle and broad, the term Customer Experience encompasses everything a user experiences concerning a business even if they are not an active customer. It ranges from how the customer’s experience with a business has been from its advertisements all seemingly irrelevant exchanges.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Lifetime Value of a Customer is the total profit a business gains from a customer throughout their interaction. It is a metric used along with Customer Acquisition Cost to determine the financial scopes of a marketing campaign and its profitability.

Customer Onboarding

The first step of a user when they decide to use a product. It involves activities that get the user familiarized with the product, often involving a signup process, orientation, and a guided virtual tour of the features and services of the product. Usually, by the end of onboarding, the user is converted into a customer.

Customer Profitability

Customer Profitability shows the overall profit made by a business by serving a customer over a period. The profit involves the difference between the income from the customer and the expenditure in gaining the customer.

Customer Onboarding

Customer Relationship Management refers to all actions performed by a business to develop its relationship with the customer and potential customers with the end goal being business growth.

Customer Success

A type of client management that is dedicated to ensuring the customer achieves their desired outcome from using your product. Customer Success Management is a mutually beneficial method where the customer gets what they came for and the business gets what they want, which is growing clientele while retaining existing customers.

Demand Side Platform

Demand Side Platform is a kind of software that allows advertisers to search and place advertisements automatically and across multiple advertisement publishing networks. In essence, it is an automated advertising tool useful for marketers using paid advertising strategies.

Digital Distribution

Digital Distribution is distributing digital content such as audio, video, software and videogames through platforms that aim to deliver the content to end users in a downloadable form.

Digital Marketing

A method of marketing that relies on the internet and other online technologies like emails, social media posts, and other online advertising platforms to promote products and find prospective clients.

Digital Merchandising

Digital Merchandising covers methods employed in positioning and selling products. These methods generally include attractive visuals, pleasing website aesthetic and performance, promotions, offering discounts and special coupons with the aim of increasing sales.

Direct Email Marketing

Direct email marketing is where promotional emails of your product are sent to prospective customers via email. It can be risky as these mails can be perceived as spam by ESPs and the very nature of direct advertisement emails may not be suitable for all prospective customers.

Direct Selling

Direct Selling is a business model where businesses sell their products directly to customers without retailers and middlemen. Both B2C and B2B companies engage in direct selling to increase profit margin and reduce spending on store-related expenses.

DMARC

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. It is a protocol in email authentication used by email domain owners to protect the domain from being misused for scams and similar threats.

Domain Authority (DA)

Domain Authority is a search engine ranking metric developed by Moz and it shows how well an entire domain performs on the Search Engine Results Page. DA depends on the quality of content and products presented by a domain, its authors, the competition in which the domain is participating, and even backlinks that build credibility for the domain.

Domain Name System (DNS)

DNS is a decentralized naming system used to identify computers and other devices accessible through the internet. It is the phonebook of the internet, that is, it translates readable domain names to machine-friendly IP Addresses.

Domain Name

A domain and a domain name is the version of an IP address that is readable. It is a unique name pointing to the physical IP address of your website. A domain name is what you type into a web browser to access websites such as www.google.com.

Dofollow

Dofollow is a setting that can be appended to a hyperlink. Dofollow links are a kind of backlinks where a website has content with a hyperlink that points to another website and instructs the search engines to consider the pointed website while it is indexing. Hence having a lot of Dofollow links help in building domain and page authority.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping is a retail business model where the business doesn’t store the products it is selling. Rather, it relies on a supply chain of manufacturers from whom it procures the products and fulfills orders as required by the users.

Drip Campaign

Drip marketing is where a set of emails or sent over a while or based on customer behavior. Drip email campaigns are popular in the marketing funnel to win back old customers or encourage prospects into becoming new customers.

E-commerce

E-commerce is the process of buying or selling goods and services electronically, commonly over the internet. E-commerce is classified into three types, B2B where the transaction occurs between two businesses or B2C where businesses sell products to customers, or C2C where the commerce occurs between two customers who use the E-commerce website as a platform for promoting their product and to find prospective buyers.

Email Automation

Sending time-based emails en masse to a target audience for commercial purposes. The target audience is put into lists based on their interests and habits and the emails are sent based on the same to increase sales and meet other business goals.

Email List

A collection of email addresses that are procured by signups or a newsletter feature in your website or other marketing forms. The email list is your subscriber list to whom you can send marketing and other promotional emails.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a popular marketing method where you broadcast your products and services, among other things to grow sales and traffic to your website. It ranges from direct email marketing to educational newsletters. Combined with email automation, email marketing can be quite useful in achieving your business goals online.

Email Open Rate

Email Open Rate is the number of emails opened by recipients compared to the total number of emails sent in a marketing campaign.

End User

End Users are whom a product or service is destined for. A customer is not necessarily the end-user in the context of software products and services. A product can be bought or rented by a customer and then given to end users who may be the employees of the customer.

Error 404

It is a common HTML response code returned by the browser when the requested resource is not available in the address of the server. 404 errors occur when the user misspelled the URL or when the website publisher has deleted the content or moved it to a different URL. This affects user experience, having regular website maintenance to catch broken links, having a custom 404 link with redirects to the home page or related page with a touch of humor are good ways to handle 404 errors.

Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO)

Fear Of Missing Out is a marketing strategy that uses time-sensitive campaigns that trigger audiences into making impulse purchases lest they miss out on the campaign.

Featured Snippet

A featured snippet is a Google Search feature where a short citation from a website is generated by Google to answer the searcher’s question without having to open a new website. This snippet is automatically generated by Google based on the pages in its index for the particular keyword. Featured Snippets often are definitions, lists, tables, or steps.

First Moment of Truth (FMOT)

The first few seconds when a user sees the product. It is an important moment that has the ability to turn the visitor into a buyer, both online and offline.

Freebie Marketing

Freebie Marketing also goes by the name of “razor and blades business model” where a product is sold at low cost or given as free in order to increase the sales of a complementary product. Popular examples are shaving razors for which their blades are considerably cheaper, and video game consoles and their likewise complementary products which are the game CDs

GDPR

General Data Protection Regulation is a European Union law regulation on data privacy that was created to protect the citizens of the EU by setting guidelines on how personal data is collected and used online and to give users an understanding of how their data is used.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analysis tool that helps website owners track their website performance and offers data to optimize websites better for Search Engine Optimization purposes, and in turn rank higher and increase traffic.

Google My Business

Google My Business is a business promotion tool that lets you integrate your business with Google services such as Google Maps and lists your working hours, and list your business in location-based search results. Having your business in Google My Business helps improve the exposure of your business to new visitors and even builds a reputation by being listed.

Google Remarketing

An online advertising tool that works by promoting your product across different websites after a user has visited your website. Google adds users to your remarketing list by a small snippet and thus your brand is remarketed to the user as they browse other sites. Google Remarketing is a highly effective method of paid promotion.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another SEO tool offered by Google, which allows you to monitor your website’s indexing status and helps you understand how your website is performing in Google search results based on a mix of different metrics.

Grassroots Marketing

Grassroots marketing is a marketing strategy that targets a small niche audience and uses this audience to amplify the marketing message through organic means. This niche audience is incentivized for their efforts, and since it is a small audience, grassroots marketing is cost-effective.

Green Marketing

Selling environment-friendly products or showcasing the eco-conscious way a company conducts its business to improve customer reach and stand out from competitors.

Guerilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing is an unorthodox marketing strategy that uses innovative tactics to generate interest and surprise among the audience in a product or service.

Hard Bounce

A hard bounce is a term in email marketing where an email has failed to reach the intended recipient for a few reasons from the email address being invalid to the recipient being unknown.

Hashtag

A hashtag is a way to tag metadata using the Hash sign (#) followed by words that are cross-referenceable across a platform. Hashtags are popular on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. They are searchable so Hashtags are commonly used to increase the exposure of a post related to a specific theme.

Heat Map

The heat map of a website is an aggregated visual representation of visitor engagement of different elements of your website. It is a color-coding technique in which the intensity, hue, and the very colors of the map give a self-explanatory idea of the performance of different elements of your website.

Hreflang Tag

Hreflang tag is used in HTML and is used to denote the language of the content in your website to search engines. This helps the search engine provide language appropriate content to users based on their location. This is useful in cases where you have different language versions of your webpages, and by providing relevant language content, bounce rate is reduced, and conversely, the conversion rate is increased.

HSTS

HSTS is the abbreviation of HTTP Strict Transfer Protocol. This is a security protocol that ensures browsers interact with secure connections in order to prevent security breaches like data theft and other cyber attacks. HSTS achieves this by only allowing websites through HTTPS connections.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

HTML is the language commonly used to create a structure for web page content and make them suitable to be rendered by web browsers. It is used in conjunction with Cascaded Styling Sheets and a scripting language like JavaScript to give attributes to the content of the web pages.

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

An Internet Protocol used to access data on the World Wide Web. It uses hyperlinks to access webpages and it supports data communication of hyperdata of all kinds like texts, images, videos, etc. HTTPS is an extended version of HTTP and it encrypts the communications done over the internet using a communication protocol called Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Hyperlink

A hyperlink on the internet is an item that points to another location containing a webpage, image, or other kinds of online content. Usually, a hyperlink is identifiable as underlined or blue text, though images can also act as hyperlinks along with texts.

IMAP

IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol and is a network used to receive and manage emails across multiple devices.

Impulse purchase

Customers making a purchase without having meant to do so is impulse purchasing. An impulse purchase is a result of a well marketed and presented product that urges a customer into making a sudden and perhaps an irrational purchase.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is a method to grow clients and customers by providing value to them and letting your values do the converting. This value can come from educational blogs, videos, and other tools that fix you as an expert in the field of your business. And this reputation of expertise works in attracting visitors and converting them to loyal customers.

Integrated Marketing

Integrated Marketing aims to deliver a consistent and unified brand experience to the target audience across all media and marketing channels used by the business, such as paid, earned, and owned media.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is providing links that are directed to other URLs within a domain and is useful for visitors and search engines to navigate a website. Internal linking makes it easier for users to go across a website’s pages and services and similarly for search engines to crawl and read the content of a domain. A strong internal linking is an essential SEO best practice to rank higher in SERP.

IP Address

An IP address is a unique address pointing to your device on the internet or a local area network. IP is an internet protocol, that has set rules on how data is to be communicated across the internet or a particular local area network.

JavaScript (JS)

JavaScript is a high-level programming language used in creating web pages. While HTML and CSS are used to give structure and style to web pages, JS focuses on making web pages dynamic and adds interactive, user-engaging elements to them.

Keyword

A Keyword is a descriptive word that is the essence of a webpage or blog. In terms of digital marketing, Keywords are what a user enters in search engines while looking for relevant results. Websites that optimize their keyword strategy rank higher on the Search Engine Results Page.

Keyword Density

Keyword density shows how often a keyword occurs in a particular keyword occurs in web page, in comparison with all the words on that page. Keywords are identified and used by search engines to index them based on relevancy to show results when a user searches using said keywords in the search engine. One of the basics of Search Engine Optimization, overusing keywords in attempts to rank higher in search results can cause search engines to penalize your website.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is overusing keywords in an attempt to rank higher in Search Engine Result Pages. It results in an awkward and unnatural flow of prose in the webpage content. Search engines are capable of identifying keyword stuffing and websites are penalized for this practice and so, stuffing keywords for SEO purposes often backfires.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

These performance indicators are used to gauge the success rate of the activity a particular market is engaged in. In a digital marketing context, KPI includes but is not restricted to Leads, Sales Growth, Cost of Acquiring a Customer, Customer Lifetime Value, etc. Periodic tracking of KPIs help in measuring the progress of a business towards the intended target.

Landing Page

A landing page is an important page a website has in terms of lead generation and conversion. A landing page is where the user “lands” after clicking on a prompt that acts as a step in converting a visitor into a customer. It can be a marketing email or other places on your website which then leads to the landing page where the user is expected to make a decisive action such as finishing a purchase or subscribing to your newsletter.

Leads

A lead is a person or a business that has shown interest in your product. Leads are prospective customers and marketing and sales teams employ various tactics to identify and classify different types of leads with the end goal being the leads converted into customers.

Link Building

Link Building is a search engine optimization strategy which creates links from external websites to the target website in order to increase said website’s ranking in Search Engine Results Page. Link building is done by methods like posting guest articles in other websites, providing and gaining backlinks mutually, and reaching out to “best of” listicles to get your website listed in them.

LSI Keywords

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. LSI keywords are considered relevant and related to the main Keywords of a page or an article. While LSI keywords are related to the primary Keywords, they are not synonyms to them, but semantically relevant words that help search engines understand whether the page is indeed related to the keywords that it is going to be indexed.

Marketing Analytics

Marketing Analytics is the process of evaluating the effectiveness of the marketing efforts undertaken by a business. It monitors and tracks the performance of the marketing channels with tangible results in ROI, sales growth, audience building, and other metrics of the desired business outcomes.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is the use of software to automate repetitive parts of a marketing campaign. Marketing Automation is employed in lead capturing and nurturing aspects like email marketing, social media campaigns, etc. The aim of automating these parts of a marketing campaign is to both increase efficiency and to offer a personalized experience to customers as well.

Marketing Collateral

Marketing Collaterals are digital and physical aids of a marketing campaign. Some common marketing collaterals are sales brochures, ebooks and handbooks, product white papers, and other similar sales support tools.

Marketing Mix

Marketing Mix refers to the areas to be focused on in a marketing campaign. It initially contained four elements known as the four Ps of the Marketing Mix, ie. product, price, placement, and promotion. Later on, with the emerging of more complex business models, 3 more Ps are considered a part of the Marketing Mix which is, process, people, and physical evidence.

Marketing Promotions

Promotion is a basic component of marketing and it refers to the efforts taken by businesses to persuade prospective customers into buying their product or service. Traditionally, there are four types of marketing promotions; advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, and publicity. Promotion also refers to sponsored events, and digital marketing and the methods of promotion are ever-evolving with the emergence of new business models.

Marketing Research

Marketing Research is a systematic research of target audience and markets by studying the viability of a product or service to them, and Marketing Research aids Marketing Management’s decision-making.

Marketing Strategy

A Marketing Strategy of a business is its actionable plan, generally long term to identify and convert prospective leads into customers. A list of Marketing Objectives usually helps businesses in directing their marketing teams to keep their work in parallel with the overall Marketing Strategy of the company.

Market Share

Market Share of a business is the revenue it makes when compared with the total revenue generated in that specific industry in a given period. For example, if the total revenue in an industry is $10,000 and a company has earned $1500 in it, then the company has a 15% market share in that industry.

Meta Description

Meta Description offers an outline of the contents of a webpage. It is written in the HTML code of the page and appears below the website in the Search Engine Results Page. Search engines and searchers alike consider meta description while ranking a web page in search results and understanding whether it has the answer for their query, respectively.

Meta Keywords

Meta Keywords are relevant keywords that are added as words separated by commas. They are intended to inform search engines what a particular web page is talking about. However, Meta Keywords are no longer considered by search engines for ranking purposes due to the rudimentary design and overuse of Meta Keywords by websites.

Meta Tags

The canonical URL, along with Meta Description and Meta Keywords form the prominent Meta Tags of a website. All three are written into the source code of a web page, written in HTML. The tags give structure to web pages and also provide search engines with insight into their topics.

Micro SaaS

Micro SaaS is a type of software as a service that is built and run by a small team with negligible cost and without external funding. Micro SaaS serves a niche market by providing a very targeted service.

Moment of truth (MOT)

In marketing, Moments of Truth are when the user creates or changes opinion about a product or brand after an interaction with it. There are five common moments of truth depending on the purchase cycle the user is in, namely Zero Moment of Truth, First Moment of Truth, Second Moment of Truth, Third Moment of Truth, and Actual Moment of Truth.

Multilevel Marketing

Multilevel marketing is a direct selling strategy where companies recruit representatives who then sell products and recruit potential marketers. The company then provides incentives by giving a percentage of sales done by the recruit to the recruiter.

Narrowcasting

Narrowcasting, as opposed to broadcasting, is a form of Niche Marketing where the marketing efforts are channeled ats specific target audiences conforming to criteria deemed as more relevant for both the product and the audience. Email newsletters that send emails to people who have signed up due to their interest in it are a popular method of narrowcasting.

Niche Market

A niche market is a market that focuses on a specific product or service that caters to a narrow audience. A niche market is a small market and is a subset of a broader market that has a wider audience range.

Nofollow

Nofollow is a type of attribute that can be appended to a hyperlink. A nofollow tag is used to instruct search engines to ignore the link for ranking purposes. Not as effective as dofollow links especially in building domain authority, nofollow links are nevertheless useful for SEO purposes.

Nonprofit Marketing

Nonprofit marketing refers to the marketing efforts of a nonprofit organization. Such endeavors are generally harder than the marketing efforts of for-profit businesses due to a lack or scarcity of resources and funds when compared to for-profit businesses of similar scales. The goals of nonprofit marketing include raising awareness, pooling funds, and recruiting volunteers. Hence it is also called cause marketing.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO is all the activities done outside the webpage to improve its ranking in search engines. The activities range from backlink building, writing guest posts on other websites, social media engagement, and promotion.

Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel Marketing refers to consistent brand identity and presence across different channels. It helps brands to build a reputation and complete purchases, especially in retail businesses. Sales texts, email alerts that act as prompts to complete purchases are examples of Omnichannel marketing.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is all the activities you do on your webpage to optimize it for search engines. From keyword strategies to having quality content, and optimizing the meta tags of the webpage, on-page SEO is the base and first step in all SEO activities.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Managing and controlling the reputation of your business. In digital marketing, online reputation management refers to managing your business’s reputation and is vital to bringing new leads.

Organic Search

A key element in SEO, organic search refers to the results that are calculated purely based on search engine algorithm while ignoring paid search results which are advertisements. Improving the organic search performance of websites plays an important role in building traffic and reputation. Optimizing websites for organic search is crucial in ranking higher on the Search Engine Results Page.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic to your website is the visitors you get from free sources like search engines. Organic traffic is built through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content distribution across social media channels, and similar marketing techniques.

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing is what the term “marketing” traditionally meant. Outbound marketing is actively reaching out to customers to interest and engage them with your product. It is a broad-reaching approach as opposed to inbound marketing where customers are attracted to a product by having quality content that acts as a magnet. Outbound marketing is losing to inbound marketing, especially in digital marketing.

Outreach Marketing

Outreach marketing is a method in which marketers contact prospective customers and other marketers and offer mutually beneficial partnerships like favors in exchange for incentives. Outreaching is done via calls, emails, and social media messages.

Page Authority (PA)

Page Authority is a quality score developed by Moz, a marketing analytics website. The scores range from 0 to 100 and show how well a page performs in the Search Engine Page Results when compared with other web pages that contain content about the same topic. Generally, the higher the PA score of a web page is, the better it is ranked on the Search Engine Results Page.

Paid Search

Paid Search is an advertising tactic used by businesses where they pay search engines to show their websites on the Search Engine Results Page. Paid Search works on a commission basis where the businesses pay search engines depending on the number of clicks the search engine has generated for the business’s website. This model is called Pay-Per-Click, about which we will see presently.

Pain Point

Pain points are problems faced by users and prospective customers. A study of pain points helps businesses understand how to improve their service and to give customers a better experience.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

An advertising model used in internet marketing where the advertiser pays to have their ad in publishing channels which are often popular search engines and social media websites, and pay them every time the advertisement is clicked on.

Personalized Marketing

Personalized Marketing also goes by one-to-one marketing or individual marketing and is the strategy where a business uses detailed analysis to deliver personalized marketing content tailored to individuals. The analyses study past purchases, browsing history, age range, ethnicity, location, economic status, and other isolatable traits of prospective customers.

POP

POP3 or POP is Post Office Protocol which is a simpler email retrieving protocol where the email is retrieved and downloaded to the local computer.

Product Life Cycle

Product Life Cycle (PLC) refers to the time from which a product enters the market to when it becomes obsolete. PLC has four stages; introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Impact-driven marketing can prolong a product’s life.

Product Positioning

Product Positioning is a form of marketing comprising of the strategies undertaken by a business to show off and distinguish its product, where it stands in the market, its standout features, and how it fares in comparison with its competitors. Product Positioning is important in maintaining a consistent brand identity and increasing brand awareness.

Product Range

A product range or product line is a group of products that have similar functions, price ranges, and are suitable for an audience with common traits. Having or diversifying products into a strong range is an important long-term strategy for a business.

Psychographics

Psychographics is a qualitative analysis of the psychological traits of consumers such as their activities, interests, and opinions. It is studied along with the demographics of the consumers to understand their behavior and devise business strategies under the analyses.

Pyramid Schemes

Pyramid schemes are an unsustainable adaptation of MLM where recruits have to bring in more recruits, and the focus is not given to sales and products. Recruits are also encouraged to invest in the company, so pyramid schemes are illegal.

Quality Score

Quality Score is a metric used by search engines to determine the position of paid search results in their Search Engine Result Pages. The quality of keywords in the promotions, and the landing pages are among the main variables that determine the Quality Score.

Redirect

Redirect is a technique used in websites to move visitors from the web page they requested to a different one. Thus redirects make a web page accessible from multiple URL addresses. Redirect is often used to move visitors from old, outdated, duplicated content or an old domain to a more relevant page that suits their request.

Referral Marketing

Referral Marketing is a tactic in which businesses encourage customers to promote their products to other prospective customers through word of mouth and other strategies and provide incentives to the referring customers.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Return On Ad Spend is a metric used in marketing to calculate the revenue generated per dollar spent on a business’s online advertising campaign. Businesses can understand the efficacy of their advertising campaigns from their ROAS and adopt different strategies to improve on it, as required.

Return On Investment (ROI)

Return On Ad Spend is a metric used in marketing to calculate the revenue generated per dollar spent on a business’s online advertising campaign. Businesses can understand the efficacy of their advertising campaigns from their ROAS and adopt different strategies to improve on it, as required.

Return On Investment (ROI)

Return On Investment is used to measure the income generated by an investment. A high Return On Investment means the investment has been a successful endeavor as the amount invested has produced high levels of profit. Marketing ROI refers to a ratio that is similar to overall ROI, here the income generated by a marketing campaign is compared with the amount spent on marketing.

RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a web feed that allows users to easily access and read a summary of updates on a website. RSS feed is visible to users and applications in the format of an XML text file.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file used by website managers to instruct search engine robots which URLs are accessed by the search engine crawlers for ranking in the Search Engine Result Page. It gives website owners control over what data is accessed by search engines.

Sales Flywheel

Sales Flywheel is considered an alternative to the Sales Funnel model in having a customer-centric approach to sales. Customer experience throughout their sales journey is engaged and it helps the marketing and sales teams keep their momentum. Thus Sales Flywheel model keeps the Sales process continuous and customer-focused and has been deemed more relevant to the digital marketing platform.

Sales Funnel

A customer-focused visualization of a sales model that demonstrates a customer’s journey in purchasing a product or a service. It starts from a broad network of lead capturing methods and narrows down to the desired outcome, which is a customer’s purchase. Thus it is visualized as a funnel.

The term “salesy” describes pushy sales pitches that are overly focused on the product. Salesy pitches emphasize the product and its features without considering the prospect’s needs. While “salesy” is a characteristic of hard selling, it represents a distinct approach.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing is a form of digital marketing where a website is promoted to attract more visitors from the Search Engine Results Page. Paid SEM strategy has ads with keywords that act as triggers to get users to the desired landing page and these triggers have catchy Call To Action phrases to enable it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the contents of your website to grow its visibility in search engines organically. Search engines have algorithms that help them create lists for their results page is when a user looks up something. From having relevant keywords to a healthy amount of backlinks, SEO refers to all unpaid methods that can be used to rank a website higher in a search engine’s ranking algorithm.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

Search Engine Results Pages are the pages returned by search engines when users send search queries to them. SERP includes both paid and organic results. Websites that have good SEO implementation rank higher in Search Engine Result Pages while some use paid marketing and rank high as paid search results, bypassing the need to implement time-consuming SEO and resource taxing, depending on the overall marketing strategy of the business.

Search Engines

A search engine is a software that helps users to search for information on the World-Wid-Web based on the keywords they enter in their search query. The search engine has algorithms based on which it indexes the websites and the process of optimizing websites to rank higher in search engines is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search Intent

SEO metric that refers to why a user searches for a keyword. Usually classified as informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional. Search Intent gives an idea of the user’s perspective and the relevance keywords hold with respect to them.

Second Moment of Truth (SMOT)

The Second Moment of Truth has more than a single occurrence. After the user has purchased the product, every time it is used and the user’s experience with regards to the what the brand had promised about the product. Second Moment of Truth helps the user in making future purchase decisions and the business with retaining customers if the experiences are of positive nature.

Sitelink

Sitelinks are additional links that appear below the website in Search Engine Result Pages. These additional links contain navigational links that are commonly visited by users upon visiting the website. The advantage of Sitelinks is that they allow users to see and navigate popular links of websites without leaving the SERP.

Sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file that is used to give search engines a website’s structure, URLs, and metadata. It helps search engines understand a website better for ranking purposes. A webmaster performs the task of creating and maintaining a sitemap so that the website performs well in the rankings of search engines.

SMTP

SMTP, short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is a network protocol used to send emails through servers.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social Media Marketing is a prominent part of digital marketing campaigns, it is the use of popular social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat for brand building, promoting products, growing audiences, and increasing revenue. Besides attracting new users, social media can also be a useful tool to engage with existing users, bring character to your brand by real-time interaction with users, and even as a way to receive and solve queries and complaints.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social Media Optimization is all the optimizations that you do on the website to aid the Social Media Marketing campaigns. When users land on your website from marketing and advertising channels, they are going to interact with your website elements. Optimizing these elements and the content of your website so that both produce a common effect on the user in the desired direction is what SMO is about. In other words, if Social Media Marketing is Off-Page SEO, then SMO is On-Page Seo except here the optimization is done with social media websites rather than search engines.

Soft Bounce

Soft Bounce happens when an email fails to be sent, usually rejected by the server for reasons like a full inbox, or other server communication issues.

Spam

Spam is irrelevant or unsolicited messages, commonly as emails on the internet. Spams are considered an easy if bad marketing strategy as it reduces user interest and annoys them by the irrelevant and aggressive manner in which spam is used.

Spamtrap

Spamtraps are email addresses used to lure spammers. Spamtrapping is done by making the trap invisible to regular users but visible to email harvesters and other tools used by spammers.

The idiom “standing on business” is used to indicate someone is firmly focusing on their goals over anything else. It also reflects the meaning of the another idiom “walking the talk”, which literally means acting in a certain way rather than just talking about it. The usage of this phrase is totally dependent on the crowd you are addressing. It can be used while having a conversation with Gen Z or peer communication. It must be avoided in the formal gathering and while addressing mixed audience.

Target Audience

Target Audiences are a specific group of people or audience who are more relevant to a product and so, would be more interested in buying the said product. It is important to know who your target audience is when attempting to market it, to get better results out of marketing and advertising campaigns.

Third Moment of Truth (TMOT)

The Third Moment of Truth is when users are not only retained and regular customers, they, in turn, become brand advocates and spread the product to other consumers through word of mouth marketing. When a product reaches this stage, the brand and product have executed good production and marketing strategies.

Title Tag

A Title Tag is an HTML tag that then acts as the title of a website. Title Tags occur in Search Engine Result Pages as search snippets and in the title bar of browsers. Title Tags are important SEO-wise and it is necessary to optimize them with relevant keywords for search engine ranking purposes.

Transactional Email

A Transactional Email is sent by a seller to a buyer after a commercial transaction and contains the details of said transaction. The emails you get from vendors when you purchase and pay for a product online are an example of a transactional email.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

A URL is a technical term that is commonly called a web address. URL is a unique address given to a web page located on the internet so that it can be identified and accessed by other devices.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Unique Selling Proposition also goes by Unique Selling Point and as the name indicates, it is a marketing technique that tells the stand-out features possessed by a product and how it is better than its competitors.

Unique Visitors

In web analytics, a unique visitor is a person that has visited a website at least once. Even if the visitor has visited the website multiple times, their visits are tracked and traced back to them and considered as a single/unique visitor.

User Experience (UX)

User Experience refers to the user’s experience as they interact with a product. For users to have a good experience, the product needs to be easy to use and understand, relevant to them, and have appealing aesthetics.

User-Interface-(UI)

User Interface is the place where a user typically interacts with a digital product. How well a User Interface is designed directly impacts the User Experience (UX). That is, User Interface is where a user derives their User Experience from. A good UI that gives good UX is important while designing a product and it is an element that affects the success of a product.

UTM

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module and it is a feature in Google Analytics used to track how marketing campaigns are working and the effectiveness of different marketing channels and sources in bringing traffic and other desired results through the campaigns.

Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing is an organic marketing strategy that involves word of mouth promotion about a product at an ever increasing rate, very much like a viral infection from which it derives its name. Viral Marketing happens via high number of shares, likes and views in social media where it often happens.

Welcome Email

In Client-Business interaction, a Welcome Email is the first email a client receives as a part of the onboarding process. Welcome emails often confirm newsletter subscription, signup, or order confirmation and generally are the way a business makes its first impression with the user.

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO refers to legitimate search engine-approved practices to grow website traffic organically. Organic link building with websites having quality content and similar optimization practices that are slow but sure ways to increase SEO metrics all come under the White Hat SEO umbrella.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing (WOM Marketing)

Word of Mouth Marketing is free advertising where consumers show their interest in a business by including it in their everyday conversations naturally and so, sparking the curiosity of nonusers into trying out their product. It is also highly successful and arguably a really old marketing strategy. But for a product to enjoy word-of-mouth marketing, it has to have a large base of happy and loyal consumers and a relevant and successful product range.

XML

XML is Extensible Markup Language. It is a standard language, and has rules that are readable by both machines and humans, and defines the format in which documents are to be encoded.

Youtube Marketing

Marketing using Youtube is a subcategory of video marketing. Businesses can run ads or maintain a channel related to their industry and produce original video content as a method to increase brand awareness.

Zero-click searches happen when Google fulfills the user’s search intent within the Google search engine result page (SERP) using featured snippets or the generative AI feature.

Zero-Cost Marketing

Zero cost marketing is a strategy that does not require additional cost to execute. It employs ways to increase the dimensions and efficiency of the processes and operations in existing marketing.

Zero Moment Of Truth (ZMOT)

In a customer’s purchase cycle, Zero Moment of Truth refers to the information gathered by the customer that is not directly influenced by the seller.