Although it is relatively new, digital marketing is a quickly-evolving type of marketing embraced by nearly every serious business today. The fast growth and constant changes mean you’ll encounter different digital marketing terminology, which can be challenging to keep abreast of in your strategy.
This article explores 30 digital marketing terms you should be aware of in 2022 and beyond. Let’s get going!
Terms for Types of Marketing
Digital marketing broadly refers to different types of marketing that happen virtually on the internet. You may encounter the following terms describing various forms of digital marketing:
1. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing refers to the process of using search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search to increase the quality and amount of traffic to a website.
When you combine the two strategies, you count on both paid (paid search) and unpaid (SEO) web search results to boost your website’s visibility in search engines.
2. Inbound Marketing
Also called pull marketing, inbound marketing is a customer-centric technique that utilizes tactics like search engine optimization, social media campaigns, blogging, podcasting, and webinars.
With inbound marketing, the idea is to forego business-centric traditional marketing, such as the always intrusive paid advertising that breaks into the customer’s life.
Instead, this type of marketing is subtle and lets customers come to the business once they discover it.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most profitable methods of digital marketing. It brings over 40 times returns on investment on every dollar spent if done the right way.
Today, businesses can take advantage of many email marketing tools and software, such as ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, MailerLite, SendinBlue, and Omnisend.
4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media marketing is a form of digital or internet marketing that uses social networks and social media for marketing a company and its products or services.
Businesses use social media to connect with and engage their target audience to enhance brand awareness, drive more sales, and increase organic or paid website traffic.
A business can do this by creating social posts or through paid social ads.
5. Affiliate Marketing
In affiliate marketing, a business or individual promotes the products or services of another business, individual, or company for a commission for every item sold through their affiliate links.
The promoting entity (the affiliate) may place affiliate links to the recommended products or services in their owned media, such as blogs or websites, encouraging prospective customers to check out the recommended items.
A good example of affiliate marketing is Amazon Associates. The program allows people to link to products on Amazon in their website content and pays them commissions for items purchased through their link for purchases that happen within a given period.
6. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Also called key account marketing, account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy that engages potential customers in unique ways instead of relying on buyer personas.
A company or business uses ABM to find and rake in best-fit businesses that fit the company’s ideal customer profile (ICP).
These best-fit companies are called target accounts and can be reached out to through campaigns powered by marketing automation and supported by customer relationship management tools.
7. Affinity Marketing
Also called co-branding, affinity marketing involves two brands promoting each other’s services or products rather than only one brand doing so.
Affinity marketing allows a brand to pair up with another as partners so either brand can promote its business offerings to the customers of the other brand, thus getting new customers for itself.
For affinity marketing to work best, it’s advisable to ensure the two partner brands are closely related and that the services or products of one brand are necessary to the customers of the other brand.
This model works well where the products or services of the two brands are complementary, but for some reason, one brand can’t sell on its own.
8. Data-Driven Marketing
Long gone are the days when marketing was based on creatives’ and marketers’ gut feelings. In the digital marketing world, businesses look at hard data obtained from research.
The data is analyzed to interpret aspects such as the behaviour of purchasers on different digital channels. The business can then use this information to target the purchasers accordingly.
For example, an eCommerce store may collect and analyze data on how many customers make purchases or abandon their cart to target and remarket to those who abandon their cart. This helps increase sales.
9. Local Marketing
Businesses use local marketing to target prospective customers in a specific area or community, usually within 50 miles of the business’s physical location.
Local marketing is also called neighbourhood marketing or local store marketing. It is ideal for brick-and-mortar businesses operating in a specific area, such as plumbing, carpentry, laundry, recreational, and motor repair businesses.
10. Influencer Marketing
A company or business may seek the help of an influencer to boost its marketing efforts and reach its target audience.
For influencer marketing to be effective, the influencer you choose must be influential, a person of good standing, active on social media, and relevant to your audience, performance indices, and goals.
There is stiff competition for good influencers on the market, but you can always start with smaller influencers that are less expensive.
11. Proximity Marketing
Also called geofencing, proximity marketing uses Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to allow businesses to communicate with users and potential buyers when they are in a specific area or location.
This communication could be in the form of emails, notifications, or short phone messages.
An excellent example of geofencing is how Google often asks people to review a place they have been to, which helps other people evaluate the businesses and their products or services.
12. Remarketing
Also called retargeting, remarketing involves targeting users who recently viewed your services, products, or website.
Remarketing is done by placing ads in strategic places on the web where users usually visit to remind them of the items they saw earlier.
13. Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing uses real humans or conversational AI (artificial intelligence) to engage customers and win over their business through speech and text on channels like chatbots or live chats.
14. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy that involves consistently creating, publishing, and distributing relevant and valuable content on channels like blogs, websites, and social media to attract and retain a clearly targeted audience.
The ultimate goal of content marketing is to elicit profitable customer actions. This is done without intrusively or directly pitching your services or products but rather providing useful content to potential customers to help them find solutions to their problems.
Basic Digital Marketing Terms
From paid media to owned media to SEO, domain authority, and copywriting, there is no shortage of digital marketing terms you can encounter as a digital marketer or business owner. Here are some common internet marketing terms to know.
15. Marketing Analytics
As the name suggests, marketing analytics involves using various tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to analyze data. The purpose is to see what is working or not working in a given marketing campaign and adjust accordingly.
Google Search Console lets marketers and website owners see their site’s organic performance on the Google search engine. It also offers them suggestions for increasing visibility.
Google Analytics tracks a website’s performance and shows the owner information such as the number of visitors the website receives, popular pages, and how visitors find the site.
16. User Experience (UX) and Digital Customer Experience
User experience is a digital marketing term that refers to all aspects through which an end-user interacts with a business and its products or services.
Digital customer experience is the total number of all the online interactions an end-user has with you across virtual media like websites, social media, live chats, and chatbots.
You can enhance the user experience through steps like optimizing images or videos, strategically placing calls-to-action near highly informative content, telling users exactly what you do on your homepage, and automating website speed improvements.
17. Content Management System
A content management system or CMS is software that simplifies the process of creating websites and publishing content.
WordPress is one of the best-known CMS software for managing users, SEO, and content.
18. Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who complete an action such as clicking on an advertisement or buying a product or service on a medium such as a website or an app.
Conversion rate optimization refers to efforts to increase the number of visitors to a website, app, or other media that complete a desired action.
19. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer relationship management is the continuous process of establishing, maintaining, and improving the relationship between a business and its customers.
Digital marketers use CRM software for sales analytics, contact management, marketing efforts automation, customer service improvement, storing customer data, and customer segmentation.
20. Copywriting
Copywriting refers to professionally written text that is used in promotional or marketing materials. This text is referred to as “copy.”
A copywriter is a professional writer who writes copy for various uses in marketing materials, websites, and ads. The purpose of copy is to elicit a specific action like downloading an eBook, buying a product/service, or subscribing to a newsletter.
21. Brand Awareness
Brand awareness refers to how well-known your business and its services or products are. Every company or business desires to make their brand a household name, and they often go to great lengths to see this happen.
To quickly enhance your brand awareness, you can use digital marketing tactics like influencer marketing, advertising, forming partnerships, and guest blogging.
22. Owned Media
Owned media refers to the online property directly controlled by a brand, company, or business as the owner. Such property includes blog posts, websites, blogs, podcasts, webinars, and social media profiles.
23. Paid Media
Paid media involves using paid placements to advertise your owned media on third-party platforms to bring in more business. Paid media can take the form of a Google ad, video ad, social ad, or display ad/banner ad.
Paid media is a form of digital advertising where each paid ad is added to an ad inventory on the web, apps, or mobile advertisements. Ad inventory refers to the number of adverts or amount of ad space available for a publisher to sell at a given time.
24. Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Ad Spend
The financial markup realized after a business invests in a service or product to improve their business is called a return on investment.
The ROI can either be positive or negative. A negative ROI means the total investment costs exceed the returns realized. On the other hand, a positive ROI means the total realized returns were more than the total investment costs.
Return on Ad Spend, or ROAS, is a type of ROI ratio that compares the revenue received by ads to the cost of placing those ads on platforms like Google AdWords, Instagram ads, and Facebook ads.
25. User-Generated Content
User-generated content, or UGC, is any type of material like text, images, blog posts, tweets, live streams, podcasts, testimonials, reviews, audio, or videos that users create and post on online platforms.
Forum threads and blog comments are good examples.
Also called consumer-generated content, UGC is always created by employees, brand loyalists, or customers. It is original and brand-specific, depending on the brand.
26. Keywords and Keyword Research
A keyword is a term or phrase that a person enters in a search engine when looking for navigational, informational, or transactional content.
Keyword research refers to the process of finding and analyzing keywords that people use on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
When you use keywords well in your content, you raise the chances of appearing higher in a search engine results page for a keyword related to your business, service, or product.
27. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Local SEO, and SERPS
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the continuous process of improving a website to increase its visibility and the chances of ranking higher on relevant search engine results.
SERPs is short for “Search Engine Results Pages.” It’s the page that search engines return after a query is placed and processed.
Local SEO is a search engine optimization strategy used by businesses to increase their visibility in local search results on search engines like Google.
28. Marketing Automation
In an endlessly changing market, automation is necessary to keep pace with existing marketing campaigns while keeping an eye on new advancements.
It is challenging to stay in touch with each touchpoint in the customer journey without automation. However, automation shouldn’t be used to totally remove the human touch. Instead, it should be used to enhance it by making business-customer relations easier.
29. Freemium
This marketing term is common in pricing structures where a company sells a product or service for free for a limited time, after which users or buyers are expected to pay to continue using it or unlock premium features.
Freemiums are effective for both buyers and sellers. The seller is able to gain the buyer’s trust and finally win them over into paying for the service or product. The buyer has enough time to enjoy a free item and decide whether it’s worth their money or not.
30. Product-, Marketing-, Sales-, and Conversation-Qualified Leads
A product-qualified lead, or PQL, is a customer that has tried a company’s service or product and is interested in becoming a full-fledged customer.
A marketing-qualified lead, or MQL, is a potential customer or lead that is more likely to become an actual customer than others. The marketing team focuses more on the lead to win their business.
A sales-qualified lead, or SQL, is an MQL that the marketing team approves and forwards to the sales team as a prospective customer that can be turned into a permanent client.
A conversation-qualified lead, or CQL, is a potential customer that has been in active talks with a chatbot or sales team and has expressed interest in becoming a full-fledged customer. This lead is referred to as conversational as they are born of a direct conversation.
Bottom Line
The digital marketing world is constantly changing to include new concepts and practices. With time, these changes lead to the proliferation of marketing jargon that may be confusing if you do not keep tabs on the latest developments.
We hope this post has covered a lot of the digital marketing terminology you meet daily as you go about your marketing efforts.
