There’s a ton of marketing jargon flying around — and we’re guilty of throwing those words around too, assuming that our clients understand it all. But we try to remember that what’s secondhand to us is not necessarily familiar to the average nonprofit professional. That’s why we’ve created a list of the top 30 key marketing terms and their definitions.
- Marketing Campaign
Marketing campaigns are campaigns with a specific goal that require a series of strategies, tactics, and activities to achieve that particular objective in a measurable way. Most commonly, these are designed to influence a certain behavior, whether that’s increasing awareness, sales, or engagement.
- Brand
A brand is both the physical and emotional representation identified with your organization. It includes your logo, your values, your key messages, your products, your offerings, your color palette, your value proposition, and so much more. Your brand is deeply connected to how your audience perceives you, whether they trust you, and how they speak about you — which is why brand consistency is key across your design, your copy, and your channels.
- Awareness
When we talk about awareness, we’re talking about familiarity — with a product, with a brand, with a service, with an audience.
- Engagement
Engagement refers to the interaction an individual has with your brand. In digital marketing terms, we’re often thinking about whether an individual is reacting to or commenting on your social media, how often they visit your website and the actions they take there, opening your emails, etc.
- Content
Content is any piece of information that’s meant to be viewed by an audience. Blogs, social media posts, email newsletters, videos, brochures, podcasts, press releases, infographics, etc. — they’re all considered content.
- Channel
A channel refers to the mechanism through which you share content — such as social media, television, the internet, newspapers, emails, etc. We often refer to these as distribution channels.
- Platform
Platforms are the individual mechanisms through which you can share content — such as Facebook, Mailchimp, WordPress, etc.
- Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is designed to attract new clients by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them that offers opportunities for indirect engagement. A great example of inbound marketing is a blog that seeks to answer a commonly asked question. It attracts a reader’s attention and allows them to interact with your content on their own terms, creating a more positive experience and association with your brand. Think of it as an indirect invitation for engagement!
- Outbound marketing
Outbound marketing is the reverse of inbound marketing — instead of creating content that invites the user to you, you’re going out to them! Outbound marketing often includes cold calling, email and direct mail campaigns, and advertising on multiple platforms.
- Digital marketing
Digital marketing refers to any type of marketing communication that occurs on a digital, internet-connected device. Examples of digital marketing include social media, digital ads, your website, email marketing, etc.
- Social media marketing
Social media marketing uses social media networks to support a marketing campaign and largely focuses on publishing content, engaging with followers, running paid ads, and analyzing your performance to better your interaction and engagement on social media.
- Email marketing
Email marketing uses email to share content and connect with your audience.
- Content strategy
A content strategy refers to the way in which all your content works together to tell your organization’s story. It involves thinking about how you’ll develop your content, when you’ll publish it, whether it needs to be retired, who the content is for, the performance of each piece of content, and so on.
- Content marketing
Content marketing elevates your content strategy by giving your content a goal and identifying parameters to track performance and efficacy.
- Organic Content
Content that is published to reach your existing audience for no cost. Examples of this include a blog on your website, a Facebook post, an email newsletter to your subscribers.
- Paid Content
Content that is published to reach new audiences for a fee. Examples of this include a newspaper ad, a Google ad, an email to the subscribers of another organization’s list.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A customer relationship management system is exactly what it sounds like — a way to manage customer relationships. For some organizations, this looks like a spreadsheet with a list of names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, giving amounts, and other important data. For others, it’s a tool such as Bloomerang, DonorPerfect, and Raiser’s Edge that combines this information with the ability to track interactions, identify key prospects, automate data entry, and report on fundraising performance.
- CMS (Content Management System)
A content management system is a type of web-based software that allows marketers to create, edit, and publish from a single location. Examples of content management systems include WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and more.
- Lead magnet
Lead magnets can be a great way to incentivize someone to engage with your website or email list. In exchange for providing their contact information, the user gets valuable information by way of a case study, white paper, or other resource. In an ideal world, your lead magnet is connected to your CRM — possibly by way of your CMS!
- Keyword
When a user looks up information, they are typing in phrases or words — your key words — that direct them to your website. They should be relevant to your user (i.e. not jargon-y!) and specific enough to drive visitors to your site specifically.
- Analytics
On a broad scale, analytics refers to the process of analyzing data to determine the return on investment of a particular marketing tactic or strategy. On a more narrow scale, analytics can refer to a particular reporting system, dashboard, or tool used to measure performance.
- Buyer persona
The idea behind buyer personas is identifying the ideal “buyers” — people who may be interested in your products and services — and creating content with those personas in mind.
- Call to action (CTA)
A successful campaign invites the recipient to take action and ranges broadly from RSVPing for an event to subscribing to a newsletter to learning more about a particular service. Any messaging you put out should always have at least one clear call to action.
- Click-through rate (CTR)
Let’s say you share a blog post from your website on social media. When someone clicks on the link, that is tracked as a click-through rate. The higher the number of clicks, the better performing that piece of content is. In some cases, a call to action can be completed when someone clicks on the link — such as opening the aforementioned blog in a web browser. In other cases, there’s an additional action that needs to be taken, which leads us to…
- Conversion Rate
A conversion rate measures the number of people who completed a call to action — such as filling out a form, subscribing to a newsletter, or making a donation. A higher lower conversion rate warrants reviewing the design and copy on the page where you want the user to take an action, whereas a higher conversion rate indicates that all systems are moving ahead.
- Earned media
Earned media is essentially free publicity — exposure that your organization receives without paying for it. Current forms of earned media include being a guest on a podcast; customer reviews and testimonials; publishing an op-ed; shares of your social media posts, etc.
- Paid media
Paid media is just what it sounds like — publicity that you’ve paid for. These might include print and digital ads, billboards, bus ads, television commercials, radio ads, etc.
- 14. Public relations (PR)
Public relations focuses on strategic storytelling to positively promote an organization. Public relations professionals work with both internal and external stakeholders and responsibilities often include streamlining messaging, raising awareness of an organization, enhancing the organization’s reputation, and so on.
- Media relations
Media relations focuses on working directly with members of the media — podcasters, television producers, radio producers, journalists — to secure coverage about the organization in the news.
- Copy
Copy and content often get used interchangeably, but they’re actually two different things. Copy refers strictly to the text that is used for content. Content encompasses text, images, graphics, charts, and so much more.
- Design
Design incorporates your organization’s brand and personality in a visually appealing way that makes the viewer want to take action — whether that’s subscribe, attend an event, or support your organization!
Whew. That was a lot! And that’s just the beginning. Stay tuned for our forthcoming blogs on branding, web + email marketing, and a breakdown of all the different print and digital deliverables you can use to promote your organization!
In the meantime, if you need help figuring out which marketing strategies are right for you, we’ve got you. Reach out and book a discovery call today! https://thesunnysidecreative.com/lets-talk/
