The “I’m No Dummy” Guide to Marketing Lingo L

Ok, admit it. Marketing these days feels like high school. The cool kids are throwing around new terms every day. As you sit in meetings, meet with agencies and follow “thought leaders” on Twitter, someone uses a new term and you have no idea what it means but don’t want to raise your hand to admit it. You finally feel confident when someone talks about a responsive website, and then they start talking about adaptive response…UGH!

It’s ok. The web, content marketing, digital, inbound, lead scoring, social…they are all changing so fast it is very hard to keep up. Don’t despair. Here it is. The “I’m No Dummy Guide to Marketing Lingo.” A list of terms that get thrown around all the time that we all wish we knew. Go ahead…Print it out…Post it on your door… turn it into your own little study guide. You will feel like the smartest kid in class in no time. And let us know if terms are missing as new ones are emerging every day.

Sitemap - A map of all of the pages on a website in hierarchical order. It is used as a planning tool for web design. Wireframe - A visual guide or a “screen blueprint” that represents the skeletal framework of each page within a website. Wireframes are used primarily to strategically place various design elements across a website, and direct the flow of traffic to achieve set business goals. Social “Snackables” - Small or medium-sized images, designed to contain the perfect combination of eye-catching imagery and relevant textual content, that are posted by a company across social media channels to gain awareness and interaction. Native app - A mobile or tablet application program that has been developed and made accessible specifically in app format. CMS - Content Management System. It is your point of access into the back end of your website where you may publish or edit content, and change design elements. WordPress or Drupal are considered two of the most common and user-friendly for corporate websites today, and provide great long term flexibility and scalability. Drupal - A free, open-source web development platform for online content, also known as a content management system (CMS). This platform is considered by many to be more complex than Wordpress due to the wide breadth of customizable design options that it offers. WordPress - A free and open source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. WordPress is considered by many to be a user friendly CMS system because it offers a variety of templates for website design that are easily customizable. In the past people were concerned about its security, but those concerns are no longer an issue. Promo - A small, promotional piece of content found on any page of a website that often cross-promotes a separate or related piece of content.

Carousel - This is a design element found within a web page wherein a set of images and text rotate within a single section of the page. It is used to maximize the breadth of content that the audience member comes into contact with while keeping the site interactive and engaging. HTML - Is an abbreviation for Hyper-Text Mark-up Language, HTML, and is the code that the web is written with. JavaScript - The programming language of the web; an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. AJAX - Short for asynchronous JavaScript + XML. AJAX is not a new programming language, but a new way to use existing standards. AJAX exchanges data with a server and updates parts of a web page in real-time without reloading the web page. CSS - This stands for Cascading Styling Sheet, and is a style sheet language used to describe the look and formatting of a document written in a markup language. It is most often used to change the style of web pages and user interfaces written in HTML and XHTML. Content Marketing – Generally refers to the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant and consistent content across a set of social and traditional PR channels. This marketing technique aims to use creative tactics to drive awareness, improved perception and sales among prospective customers. Native Advertising - A form of paid media in which ads match the visual design of the experience of the website they live within- making them look and feel like natural content. Analytics - Often referring to Google Analytics, this is a set of data that summarizes key behaviors surrounding website traffic. Such data points may include percentage of returning vs. new visitors to a website, male vs. female visitors, etc. and are used to measure website performance. Landing Page - The page on a company’s website that serves as the primary “entry” point into website content for most users. It harvests a large set of topics that the user can direct to via click. Because of the way search works, it is important to create landing pages as side doors into a website, as opposed to simply assuming that every visitor will start on the homepage.

SEO - Stands for Search Engine Optimization, and refers to the set of tactics use to improve search rankings on Google and Bing. By tailoring the specifics of a website and how it is marketed, a website can move further up the results page on a search engine when a user searches, and this typically increases clicks and traffic to the website. Persona - This is a characterization of the target audience member that a company wants to market to- whether it is an individual or an entire business. The persona has a set of behaviors, interests and preferences that the marketer may focus on when trying to gain mindshare, sell a product, etc. Impression - This is a media term that refers to when an audience member sees an advertisement. There is a general “Rule of 3” in advertising that for every three impressions, or times a person views an ad, they are likely to gain awareness of the product/ service offered. PPC - Means Pay-Per-Click and is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. It is defined simply as “the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked.” Responsive design - A web design approach that aims to provide an optimal viewing experience for the user by building a website that is user friendly on desktop and mobile/ tablet devices, and is easy to read and scroll through. Adaptive response - Using a predefined set of layout sizes based on device screen size along with CSS and JavaScript, the adaptive response setting enables the format of a website to automatically adapt to the format of the device being used. CPC - Refers to the Cost-Per-Click, a pricing model where companies are charged by publishers for every click people make on an ad or set of search terms that direct people to their website or search results in which the site is displayed. CPM - This is the Cost-Per-Thousand, a pricing model where advertising impressions are purchased and companies are charged according to the number of times their ad appears per 1,000 impressions. This metric is used mostly in cases where a company aims to increase brand awareness- for example, via a television commercial or highway billboard. CPE - A Cost-Per-Engagement is a new term, often used to describe how much a company pays for every interaction its audience has with paid content placed on social media. In the context of Twitter or Facebook, an “engagement” refers to a favorite, retweet, click, share, or “like.”

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