Let’s Talk Marketing

There’s a lot of jargon thrown around in the world of marketing. As the owner of a plumbing company, hair salon, or landscaping company, you might feel overwhelmed and out of the loop when you’re on the phone with your marketing team and they’re talking about things like CPCs, Bounce Rates, and CTRs. If you’re not sure what these mean, that’s okay. Let’s talk marketing.

 

Commonly Use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Terms

• Bounce Rate

This is when someone visits your website and immediately clicks the “back” button on their browser or exits out of the page before giving the page a chance to load. This occurs when a user accidentally clicks on your link or your website takes too long to load. It’s normal to have bounces happen as it’s simply a mis-click in most cases but the goal is to keep that number as long as possible. 

• Title Tag

This is the main thing that appears in a Google search. The headline or main text you see before reading the description. This should be optimized to catch the attention of a quick browser. 

• Meta Description

This is the quick snippet below your title tag. This should be optimized to fit your target keywords as well as support the users’ readability when they’re browsing search results. 

• Keywords

Speaking of keywords! Keywords are individual words or phrases that someone might search in order to find your product or service. Your title tags, meta descriptions, and website content should be optimized to support your focus keywords. It’s important to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and imagine what they would be searching for and not what you would search for. You’re knee-deep in your industry so the terms of verbiage you would use to discover your own company might be lost on the typical user. 

• Domain Authority

This refers to how a whole domain (like www.theadleaf.com) will rank on search engine results. It’s typically calculated by a combination of things like link metrics, root domains, number of other links, and other things on a 100-point scale. This measurement is used internally by Google to see how your website compares to others in regards to your keywords. 

 

Commonly Used Social Media Terms

• Engagement Rate

This is the rate at which your followers share, like, or comment on your content. This is a great way to determine whether or not your content resonates with your follower base. A quick way to calculate this is to take the average number of engagements you’ve received on a singular piece of content (like a post) and divide it by the number of followers you have. 

• Pixel

If you’re running Facebook Ads and have a large ad budget, this is necessary to build strong audiences. A Facebook Pixel is a tracking code added to your website that tracks and monitors the users that visit your website as a result of Facebook. You can use the data from this Pixel to build Lookalike Audiences and build Remarketing/Retargeting campaigns. 

• A/B Split Testing

Another fun one for when you decide to start running paid advertising on social media! A/B Split Testing is the practice of taking two different types of ads that have one variation between them. For example, you may create Ad A with a caption, graphic, and budget. To successfully conduct an A/B Split Test, Ad B should vary one of those items. If you’re stuck between two different graphics/images, run Ad A with Graphic 1 and run Ad B with Graphic 2. This will allow you to test the variables against each other and see which one was more successful. 

• Boosted Post

You’ve probably heard this term before if you’d ever taken a peek at Ads Center on Facebook. This function allows you to “sponsor” a top-performing post and get it in front of more users. This is done primarily to grow your audience and increase your engagement. It will show it to more of your current follower base and may be shown to users who don’t follow you. Boosting posts is very different from running high-level ads as the targeting options are very limited and the capability to be creative is limited. 

• Evergreen Content

This type of content is crucial to your organic social media campaigns. Today, most social media algorithms are based on activity and not based on chronological posts. You’ve probably noticed that if you like a post about a movie theater or a pair of sneakers, all of a sudden your whole timeline is filled with other local movie theaters or other sneaker brands. This means that content that’s posted can essentially “live forever” on social media. It’s important that you incorporate content into your campaigns that are applicable to your target audience whenever they see it, any day, any time, any season. This type of content is “evergreen” because it’s always green and is applicable year-round. 

 

Commonly Used Email Marketing Terms

• Hard Bounce

This is what happens when an email campaign is returned from an email address you sent it to because the email address is either incorrect or no longer active. This does count against your domain’s quality score if you have too many hard bounces. 

• Soft Bounce

This is slightly different than a hard bounce. This is what happens when an email campaign is returned from an email address due to a technical error like the recipient’s email inbox is full or their server was down and unable to receive emails for a period of time. This doesn’t count against your domain’s quality score because these are unable to be controlled. 

• CTRs

This stands for Click Through Rate. This is the number of people who click on a link, button, or icon in your email campaign and end up on your desired landing page. An easy way to calculate your CTR is to take the number of users generated from your email campaign and divide it by the number of emails you sent. The final number is your CTR. Generally, you should be aiming for a CTR between 10-15% but this may vary depending on your industry. 

• Open Rate

This is the number of recipients who open your email. It’s important to keep track of your open rate so you can determine whether or not the campaigns you’re sending are relevant to your audience. The way you calculate this is similar to your CTR. Take the number of emails opened and divide it by the total number of recipients on your email list. 

• List Segmentation

Segmenting your list is incredibly important. This is the practice of taking similar groups of email recipients based on a variety of factors and creating a new list with just a select number of emails. You may want to create a list based on a recipient’s geographical location (like what State or Town they live in), the company/industry they work for, their age, their gender, or any other qualifying factors. This will allow you to craft campaigns that are unique to each subset of your email list. 

 

Don’t feel overwhelmed if you’re talking with one of our team members and you don’t understand a term we use. If you’re not sure what we’re talking about- ask! We love getting to talk through the terms we use and explain what they mean so you can fully understand the services we’re providing for you. We want you to feel comfortable knowing exactly what we’re doing for you! If you’re ready to get your marketing campaign started, give us a call at 321-255-0900 or email us at info@theadleaf.com and we’d be thrilled to take you on the journey with us!