What are the benefits of inbound marketing? Before you can understand what inbound marketing is and why it’s crucial for your project or business, let’s explore common marketing jargon.
The world of marketing is filled with jargon and acronyms. This can be overwhelming for beginners and even for seasoned professionals. Understanding these terms is crucial for anyone looking to navigate the marketing landscape successfully. This guide will help break down some of the most common marketing terms, providing a solid foundation for your marketing journey.
Benefits of Inbound Marketing: A Comprehensive Glossary
Understanding the language of marketing is the first step towards becoming a successful marketer. Here are some common terms you’ll encounter:
- A/B Testing: This is the process of comparing two variations of a single variable to determine which performs best in order to help improve marketing efforts. This is often done in email marketing (with variations in the subject line or copy), calls-to-action (variations in colors or verbiage), and landing pages (variations in content).
- Analytics: What I sometimes refer to as the “eyes” of inbound marketing, analytics is essentially the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. When referred to in the context of marketing, it’s looking at the data of one’s initiatives (website visitor reports, social, PPC, etc.), analyzing the trends, and developing actionable insights to make better informed marketing decisions.
- B2B (Business-to-Business): A company that sells to other businesses. For example, Google and Oracle are primarily B2B companies.
- B2C (Business-to-Consumer): A company that sells directly to consumers. For example, Amazon, Apple, and Nike are primarily B2C companies.
- Blogging: An individual or group of people usually maintains a blog. A personal blog or business blog will traditionally include regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material, such as photos and videos. Blogging is a core component of inbound marketing. It can accomplish several initiatives simultaneously — like website traffic growth, thought leadership, and lead generation.
Benefits and Features of Inbound Marketing Strategies
Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.
- Marketing Automation: This refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.
- Social Media Marketing: This practice promotes your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business.
- Content Marketing: This term denotes the creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, and customers.
- Email Marketing: Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people toward the business’s website.
- Website Optimization: The process of making changes to your website so that it can appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPS).
- Application Programming Interface (API): APIs are a series of rules in computer programming, which allow an application to extract information from a service and use that information either in their own application or in data analyses. It’s like a phone for applications to have conversations — an API literally “calls” one application and gets information to bring to you to use in your software. Furthermore, APIs facilitate the data needed to provide solutions to customer problems.
Maximizing Marketing Efforts with Analytics and Technology
The role of analytics in marketing is to provide the data and insights necessary to make informed decisions. It involves the collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage. Here are some terms related to these concepts:
- Sales Funnel: This is a visual representation of the customer journey, depicting the sales process from awareness to action (purchase). The funnel narrows as visitors move through it, indicating the number of audience members who go on to the next stage.
- Customer Journey: This is the process that a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service.
- Lead Generation: This is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): This is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action on a web page.
- Branding: This is the marketing practice of creating a name, symbol, or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products. An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets.
Understanding Inbound Marketing
Understanding the language of marketing is crucial for anyone looking to navigate this rapidly evolving industry. By familiarizing yourself with these terms, you’ll be better equipped to understand the market trends. Use this knowledge to make informed decisions, and ultimately, succeed in the world of marketing.