Content marketing dictionary
Above the Fold:
Above the fold is the portion of a web page visible on the screen without scrolling.
Adaptive Content:
The concept of crafting an experience that is tailored to a user’s customer experience, behaviour, and desires. The goal is to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
Affiliate Marketing:
Revenue sharing between online advertisers and publishers where payment is based on performance measures — usually in the form of sales, clicks, and/or registrations.
Agile:
The word agile used in this sense comes from the world of software development and is based on iterative and incremental development.
Analytics:
This is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Popular analytics tools used in content marketing include Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Facebook Insights. The data ranges from categories like customer behaviour to acquisitions to conversions.
Autoresponder:
An autoresponder is a sequence of email marketing messages that get sent to subscribers in the order and frequency that you decide.
Backlinks:
Backlinks display other web pages that link to your posts. You typically see backlinks at the end of blog posts or articles.
Bounce Rate:
The percentage of visitors who enter your site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site.
Buying Cycle:
The stages a customer passes through on his way to making a purchase with a business. There are at least five stages customers pass through awareness, consideration, intent, purchase, and repurchase.
Click-Through Rate (CTR):
The number of times someone clicks on a link based upon the number of times it was seen.
Content Management System (CMS):
The system a company uses to manage the content of a website. A CMS helps publish and manage online content.
Content marketing:
Is the process of creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers.
Content Shock:
The notion that as content marketing becomes more and more popular, we’ll eventually face a “Content Cliff” — a period where content collapses in on itself as audiences max out on their abilities to consume it.
Copywriting:
Copywriting is one of the most essential elements of effective online marketing.
Cornerstone Content:
Online, cornerstone content is the basic, essential, and indispensable information on your website that answers common questions, solves problems, entertains, educates, or all of the above.
Cost Per Action (CPA):
This is the measure of how much your business pays to convert a prospect into a customer.
Cost Per Click (CPC):
An online advertising model where a company pays for each click instead of paying by the number of impressions. A campaign stops running once the daily budget of clicks is reached.
Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM):
A common measurement used in advertising, CPM is the cost to an advertiser of showing an ad to 1,000 people. Compare to CPC.
Cost Per Sale (CPS):
This is the amount an advertiser has to pay for each sale generated from an advertisement.
Creative Commons Licenses:
Free licenses that allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.
Crowdsourcing:
A means of generating ideas, capital, content, or services by asking for contributions from a large group of people, typically through an online community.
Curation:
The act of collecting, organizing, and sharing content. This can be done via a blog, social media, or an email newsletter.
Digital Commerce:
Digital commerce is what happens when a buyer gives a seller money for a digital product. The seller could be a single person or company.
Direct Marketing:
Marketing efforts directed toward a specific targeted group — direct selling, mail, or catalogue — for soliciting a response from the customer.
Direct Response:
Promotions that permit or request consumers to directly respond to the advertiser — by mail, telephone, email, or another means of communication.
Echo Chamber:
When a community repeats, reinforces and amplifies certain ideas, information, or beliefs to the exclusion of competing information, ideas, or beliefs.
Editorial Calendar:
An editorial calendar is just a fancy term for a publishing schedule.
Engagement:
The ability to hold the attention of an audience and persuade the audience to participate in some sort of activity.
Exit Rate:
Unlike the bounce rate where there is only one session (your visitor landed on that page and left on that page), the exit rate calculates how many visitors left on that particular page after multiple sessions elsewhere on your site.
Gamification:
Applying features of game design — like keeping score, competing with others, rules of play — to everyday tasks to make them more fun and engaging.
Impression:
In online advertising, an impression is counted when an ad is fetched from its source and seen by a user. Each impression is counted, whether or not the ad was clicked.
Interactive Learning Environment (ILE):
An online environment where people can learn at their own pace.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI):
A metric is chosen by an organization to help define success. KPIs will differ from business to business (new customer acquisition or customer loyalty) and can even differ from department to department (zero defects, uptime).
Keyword:
A term used to identify the content of a web page. A keyword usually appears in the headline, subheadings, and is repeated throughout the copy. A keyword can be identified within most content management systems.
Landing Page:
A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result.
Lead Generation
The act of generating interest in a company to feed a sales pipeline. A lead generation is a deliberate act by a consumer that exchanges her contact information for a resource from the organization.
Learning Management System (LMS):
A software program that manages the administration and tracking of an online course.
Learning Style:
A person’s unique approach to learning based on strengths, weaknesses, and preferences.
Link Building:
Links are the bridges between content online. Links allow search engines to crawl and discover content on the web.
Long Tail:
The long tail is the portion of a statistical set of data to the right of the x, y-axis that represents a narrow, diverse, and low-volume set of data.
Market Profile:
A summary of the characteristics of a market, including information of typical purchasers and competitors, and often general information on the economy and retailing patterns of an area.
Market Research:
The systematic gathering, recording, analyzing, and use of data relating to the transfer and sale of goods and services from producer to consumer.
Market Segmentation:
To divide a market by a strategy directed at gaining a major portion of sales to a subgroup in a category, rather than a more limited share of purchases by all category users.
Marketing Automation:
Marketing automation refers to software used by people and companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing workflows by automating tasks.
Membership Site:
A membership site is a private website that’s protected by a password that offers exclusive content and training and (often) the ability for members to interact with one another.
Mobile Marketing:
Any advertising or promotional messages that appear on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
Native Advertising:
Native advertising is paid content that matches a publication’s editorial standards while meeting the audience’s expectations.
Newsjacking:
Newsjacking is the idea that when an event is breaking, either in the general news cycle or in the industry that you’re in or in the local market that you serve, that if you are very, very clever and very, very fast, and get something into the market that journalists are looking for in order to write their stories, you can become a part of those news stories.
Offer:
The element of a sales page defines what customers will get if they make a purchase. The offer can include a free trial (“free 14-day trial), deadline (“get 12 for the price of 6 if you order by midnight”), and/or guarantee (“30-day money-back guarantee”).
Off-page Optimization:
A set of techniques that aren’t performed directly on your website but can help your website gain visibility in search engines and build authority. Techniques include guest blogging, posting in forums, building a community on social sites, and link building.
On-page Optimization:
A set of techniques performed directly on a website to improve visibility in search engines. These techniques optimize aspects of your website such as title tags, content, and URLs.
Owned Media:
This is media controlled by a brand. Includes a website, blog, and social media accounts.
PageRank:
Google’s PageRank algorithm attempts to rank a page based on two key indicators:
a number of the links point to a particular web page,
the value of those links
Page Views:
Measures the number of pages that have been viewed. This is different from a “hit” because to be considered a page view, a web user clicks on a link that then translates to one request to load an HTML page file on a website. A hit measures the number of files on the page that are loaded. A page may have multiple hits due to images, ads, headers, widgets, and so on.
Pay Per Click (PPC):
An advertising model where businesses pay search engines or publishers to host an ad that sends traffic to their websites. Every time that ad is clicked, the business is charged a fee depending upon the popularity of that particular term.
Permission Marketing:
The notion was popularized by Seth Godin’s book Permission Marketing. It refers to the idea that if businesses want to succeed, they need to earn the privilege of selling to their customers.
Private Label Rights (PLR):
Private label rights give others permission to rebrand and sell products, such as software, articles, and ebooks.
Product Differentiation:
Developing unique product differences with the intent to influence demand. It’s related to positioning, which is the consumer perception of a product or service as compared to its competition.
Responsive Web Design:
A web design approach where the designer builds a website or website theme to fit any device — from a desktop to a smartphone.
Retargeting:
Is a form of online advertising that keeps your brand front and centre with bounced traffic. Retargeting works by dropping a cookie (a small, non-obtrusive piece of code that won’t slow down your site) into the web browser to identify that user as a previous visitor.
Return On Investment (ROI):
The most common profitability ratio that measures the profit of an investment based on the cost of that investment.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM):
The practise of marketing a business through paid online advertising. These ads appear on the search engine results pages of Google or Bing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
It’s the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” or “natural” search results generated by search engines.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP):
The page of links that a search engine delivers in response to a keyword query.
Subject Matter Expert (SME):
An individual who exhibits the highest level of expertise in performing a specialized job, task, or skill.
Target Market:
A group of individuals who collectively make up the intended recipients of a marketer’s message or product.
Top of the Funnel:
A reference to any touchpoint that begins a customer’s interaction with a company.
Unique Page Views:
A subset of “page views” that measures individual visitors who have viewed a website’s pages.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP):
Is something that you offer customers or clients that your competitors do not offer.
Viral:
The phenomenon of a piece of content becoming very popular through shares on social networks.
Visitors:
People who visit your website.
Widgets:
A small application that adds content like Search, Categories, or Tag Cloud to your website.