As your marketing experts, it’s up to us to stay on top of industry trends, the latest social media platforms, apps and other marketing protocols. At the same time, we always like to educate our clients on the marketing process, which is why we’ve created this list of industry terms, abbreviations and common marketing platforms we use to bring you into the loop. Welcome to our world!
As your agency, it’s our goal to make sure that we are being most effective with your ad budget. As such, we like to A/B test our ads prior to increasing your ad spend. What does this mean? We’ll create two ads at the same time: Ad A and Ad B. Those ads will have the same target audience, the same time frame to run, the same cost to run (at a small recommended amount of $5 a day), the same image, and two different messages.
What this allows us to see is which message resonates best with your target audience, because all the other ad factors are the same. Once the campaign has run, we recommend doing another A/B test, only this time, switching out the imagery or visual assets. After this test has run, we’ll know exactly how your audience prefers to be marketed to, and can take this ad and run it on other platforms that have higher minimum costs to participate.
API stands for Application Programming Interface, but we’ll let the web developers worry about that. Essentially, an API is a helpful tool that developers use to make sure different software programs can connect together for ease of use. For example, if you’re a Mailchimp user and you also happen to use Shopify as your e-commerce platform, there’s an API integration for that so you can see directly how many sales came through targeted email campaigns.
Ever signed up for a company’s newsletter, a shopping discount or new online account and immediately seen an email in your inbox directly afterwards confirming your sign up or asking you to confirm your account? That is an autoresponder, and it is tied in with your CRM system to make sure that customers are engaged immediately after they take a specific action on your website. When someone signs up for something, we want to make sure we meet their needs right away, as they’re already in the mindset of performing the action you requested of them. Sending an email response immediately confirms a higher success rate of the action that you asked of them, rather than waiting hours or even a whole day when they might have forgotten about the task.
Autoresponders can also be used in other ways. For instance, on our own website we have the 7 easy steps to marketing free guide that our visitors can sign up for, which sends them one step out of seven every week, ensuring that they see our content, and more importantly, our brand name, in their inbox for seven weeks straight.
B2B stands for Business to Business and B2C stands for Business to Consumer. These are terms we use frequently to describe who we are marketing to.
A bounce rate can apply to your website, or to your CRM system.
When it applies to your website, it means the percentage of people who came to your website and left within 10 seconds, or a bounce. A healthy bounce rate for a website is under 50%. A high bounce rate leads to less conversions, as people aren’t staying on your site long enough to take any actions that you want them to.
When a bounce rate applies to your email marketing, it means the percentage of people who had their email bounce when you tried to send them an e-blast. This could mean that they have an autoresponder on indicating they are out of the office, or that their email simply doesn’t exist anymore. The nice thing about Mailchimp, is that each time you send out an email, it eliminates all the hard bounced receipients for the next email you send, making sure you don’t send to emails that don’t exist anymore. What is a hard bounce? A hard bounce means the email is invalid. A soft bounce is someone whose email inbox is full or who is out of the office.
In today’s digital world, your brand is everything. It’s important to stay true to your brand’s colors, design types, fonts, way your logos are used, etc., as each person in your audience might identify your brand by one element over the other. While some people identify a brand by colors, others might identify it by a specific font. As such, creating a brand book or set of guidelines on how to internally and externally represent your brand is important to keeping your brand consistent across all platforms, whether print or digital. A brand book usually includes instructions on how to use the logo, what fonts to use on which platforms, what primary and secondary colors can be used, etc. This is something you can pass along to multiple graphic designers, brand partners, sponsor partners or agencies to make sure your brand is always represented exactly how you want it to be.
When it comes to online advertising, there are many different routes we can take, the most common of which is called a clicks to web campaign. Put simply, this just means that when a viewer clicks on one of your ads, the action of clicking takes them to a specific page on your website. This could be your home page or a specific landing page we create for that campaign.
COA, or Cost of Acquisition, is a very important number to measure. It’s the average amount of sales and marketing expenses you invest to acquire a single customer for each campaign. You can get as detailed as you want on what the total campaign cost means to you in terms of labor, graphic design, ad expenses, printing, consulting, etc., but the important thing is that you break it down by individual campaigns.
Here’s an example. Let say you’re doing a pay per click campaign and the end cost to you is $6,500 (including setting up the campaign, landing page web design, ad expenditures, etc.). You had a total of 5,000 click throughs and the average conversion rate is 5%. Based on the above response and conversion rates, out of the 5,000 who clicked on the ad to arrive at the site, 250 converted to a sale. Now we know the cost of acquisition is $6,500/250, or $26. In this case, it would be important to make sure that your average product is more than $26, otherwise you’re losing money through advertising and sales.
When we talk about content, we are talking about anything written or visual that your brand puts out into the world. This could be photos from a lifestyle photoshoot, a blog that you may have written, a press release about your newest product, a video explaining more about your company, an interview published about your CEO’s personal story, etc. Creating original content is one of the most important keys to your marketing success. It’s our job to maximize your content’s reach, ensuring that each piece you create isn’t just a “one and done.”
For instance, if you get a great news hit from a major outlet in your industry, we’ll want to share that content across your social media platforms, ask your cross-marketing partners to do the same, create a blog about the press release to put on your site, include it in your monthly newsletter, and maybe make it the focus of one of your home page calls to action while it’s still relevant. The more ways we can use your content, the longer it lives, and the greater impact it has.
When we talk about copy as an agency, we’re not talking about mimicking something or someone, nor are we talking about going to Fedex/Kinkos to make paper duplicates of an important document. What we mean by copy is anything written. For instance, the written language on your website is known as website copy in our world. The tagline for your advertisement? Ad copy. The main takeaway on this? Copy is written and doesn’t include anything visual.
Just think of us as the Peggy Olsen (the female copywriter featured on Mad Men) on your team. And if you haven’t seen the show, we wholeheartedly recommend it!
CPC is the abbreviation for cost per click, and again, applies to the digital advertising space. For many advertising platforms and campaigns you only get charged when someone clicks on your ad versus when they just see it. The cost per click is the total amount you spend when someone clicks on your ad.
Since some ad platforms like Facebook ads or Google AdWords let you determine how much money you would like to spend on any particular ad campaign, you can also determine how much money you are willing to spend per click. For instance, if I wanted to have a maximum spend of $20 per day on a Google Adwords campaign, I could also set my maximum CPC at $0.10, which would mean I would receive a guarantee of at least 200 clicks a day, if that many people choose to click on my ad in the first place. Depending on the competition, the cost per click does not always reach the set maximum amount, so sometimes you can get more clicks than the amount you set as the highest CPC.
CPM, otherwise known as Cost Per Million, is another key metric that can be measured when it comes to advertising, both in the digital as well as traditional, offline space. However, the name is slightly misleading, as it doesn’t actually mean cost per million, but rather, cost per thousand impressions. Unlike the cost per click model, some ad outlets like to use this method where you pay for the number of people who see your ad, rather than those who take action and engage with it through a click. Therefore, if someone tells you the CPM for your ad is $50, that means you are paying $0.05 for every person (out of 1,000) who sees it. While this type of metric can come into play in the digital space, it is more commonly used for ad platforms like billboards, radio, TV, etc.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. No, this isn’t a person or even a department; rather, it’s a tool or platform that you can use to manage the relationship with your clients or prospects. Have you ever heard of Mailchimp, Constant Contact or Salesforce? Those are all widely used CRMs, which help track everything from sales prospects to newsletters.
Mailchimp is one of our favorite platforms for email marketing and monthly newsletters as it’s cost-effective, easy to use, and tracks important metrics such as open rates and click through rates, which we’ll talk about in just a moment.
At Elevate My Brand, we love cross-marketing, and we believe in the phrase “the more the merrier.” When we can find brands who have a similar target audience to yours, we can partner with these brands to mitigate marketing costs, creating awareness of your company and what unique attributes it has to offer.
A cross-marketing partnership can be brought about in a variety of different ways. We can partner with a brand strictly in a digital sense, coming up with an agreed upon strategy to talk about one another through blogs, social media, newsletters, etc., exposing our brand to their audience and vice versa online. When we do this, we create a cross-marketing guide, clearly outlining expectations for both parties involved, which we will use to make sure everyone is held accountable to the agreed upon terms.
A partnership can also manifest itself in terms of producing an event, where the partner brand would invite their audience and you would invite yours, with each partner introducing themselves in person to the other partner’s audience.
In an alternative vein, we can find nonprofit partners for a brand, as letting your audience know that you’re involved in giving back to the community is something they’re bound to get behind. In fact, 89% of US consumers polled said they would switch brands, despite their previous loyalties, to ones that supported charitable causes.
All in all, cross-marketing partnerships, whether digital or offline, are a great, effective way to increase your audience reach, as well as save on outside marketing costs.
CTA stands for Call to Action, and it’s one of the most important terms you should know. Essentially, a call to action is exactly what it sounds like, a call for the customer, consumer or visitor to take a specific action that you want them to take, whether it’s calling you for more information, filling out an online form, or entering into a contest for the chance to win a larger prize. It’s whatever you want the person to do when they see your ad, read your blog, or simply just visit your website’s home page. It often lives in the form of a button in the digital space, which makes it stand out to the visitor as part of the 10-year-old test.
What is the 10-year-old test you might ask? Say you had a 10-year-old visit your website. If there are clear CTAs on your home page, in no uncertain terms should the 10-year-old be able to understand exactly what you want him/her to do from the moment he/she visits the home page.
Your CTAs guide your consumer down the path that we, as marketers, create for them to get you the results that you want.
CTR stands for Click Through Rate and it applies to digital advertising. When you put up an ad, on any digital platform, not everyone is going to click on it. The people who do count as part of your click through rate percentage. For instance, if your ad was shown to 10,000 people, and 500 of them clicked on the ad, your click through rate would be 5%. The average click through rate for most ads is 1-2%, so a 5% click through rate would be great!
If you ever hear us using the term dev, it probably is in relation to a website we are developing for you. Say for instance you have an older site and task us with creating a new one. We don’t want to get rid of your current site completely while working on the new one, so while the old site is still up, the new site will be worked on in a dev platform. Usually the url for something like this is www.yourwebsitename.com/dev.
We’ll be able to access and see changes being made to the dev platform while they are happening, but only those with access (not the public) will be able to see these changes as they happen, ensuring that once your new website is 100% done and approved, we’ll be able to launch it within a matter of hours, still using the same url you already own. This makes the process seamless.
A digital native refers to someone born or brought up during the age and boom of digital technology, meaning that they are therefore highly familiar with technology and the Internet.
Are you able to sell items or services through your website? If so, you can consider yourself to be an e-commerce business, simply meaning that you can conduct commercial transactions electronically through the internet. There are several ways businesses can conduct transactions over the internet, one of the most common of which is Shopify, a simple e-commerce integration tool that has developed software for online stores and retail point of sale systems.
Engagement speaks to the interactions that occur on social media or the website with content that is being pushed out. Engagement ranges from likes and reactions to link clicks, shares, and comments. Engagement is one of the biggest goals and measurements for social media success.
All of these phrases might be used interchangeably by members of our team to describe the same thing. An EPK (electronic press kit)/press kit/deck/media kit is a shareable document that you can pass along to anyone who is interested in learning more about your brand. Different than your website, your deck is a helpful tool that you can use to showcase your skills and abilities, products, personality, media hits, etc. Want to see an example? See ours by clicking here. It should hit all your key points, as well as speak to your brand voice and aesthetic.
FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. As the name suggests, FTP is used to transfer files between computers on a network.
FTP is, for web developers, a way of moving information from the computer you’re working on to the server where a website is hosted. If, for instance, you wanted to change the hosting platform your site is currently using, you’re going to need access to FTP to transfer the files over. It usually has a separate login that is different than your website back-end login. Whoever set up your website originally should have access to your FTP login information.
A gatekeeper app is a digital tool used to capture information from potential customers/clients/fans in order to grow your database and expand your digital reach. It’s also an additional way to host contests, giveaways and understand your audience better where they are online. Think of it as the digital version of a booth at a fair. Spin the wheel for your chance to win a free car, but please fill out your contact information in order to participate.
For instance, if you wanted host a contest where you had fans take pictures with your products when they find them in a retail location, a gatekeeper app would make things easier for you by streamlining all the entries, making sure each submission meets your pre-established qualifications, and keeps all data in one place so that you can easily transfer it into your database.
Google offers businesses a helpful, free tool called Google Analytics which allows you to see what is going on your website at all times. Want to know how many people visited your website last month? Or how many people went to a specific page of your website after you advertised it? Want to know how people heard about your website? Google Analytics does all that and much, much more. It allows us to see all the important metrics of your site, which is a way to measure marketing success. It’s one of our favorite tools, and absolutely necessary to integrate if you haven’t done so already.
We like to look at your Google Analytics reports at least once a month to see where we can make improvements, as well as see which important marketing strategies and tactics are moving the needle forward for your brand.
At Elevate My Brand we like to be transparent with our work that we perform on your behalf. Harvest is a time-tracking tool that we use in order to make sure that we are keeping track of all the time spent on your account and doing the most for your brand. Our bookkeeper will send you a monthly Harvest report so you can see exactly where our time is being spent, whether it’s creating ads for your brand, researching articles for social media, writing your next set of blogs, or chatting with one of our vendors on your behalf. If you have any questions on your latest Harvest report, please let your account manager know and we’ll be happy to clear them up.
Confused by the number of pound signs you are seeing on the internet? Those are hashtags. Used to identify, tag and track messages on a specific topic, primarily on Twitter and Instagram, a hashtag turns any word or group of words that directly follow the pound sign into a searchable link. When it comes to representing your brand online in the social sphere, we’ll create unique hashtags specific to your brand that you can essentially "own," as well as find popular hashtags that apply to your industry and brand so you can be found amongst those searching for those particular, relevant topics.
Commonly used by graphic designers and artists, all of the above terms can be used to describe a specific color with numbers. While some platforms prefer a Hex or RGB format, some printers might want to know the specific Pantone (also referred to as PMS) color in order to get the print exactly right. Essentially, all you need to know is that every color has specific numbers assigned to describe it from a graphic design perspective. For instance, our EMB purple can be translated to #2C1D53 in hex, 669C in PMS and R44 B29 B83 in RGB.
A word to the wise, not every Pantone color will always match up with the other formats.
If we ask you for a high res version of your logo, we are referring to high resolution. What this means is that your logo remains crisp and clear, and is usually no less than 300 DPI (dots per inch). This way, if your logo is enlarged or shared multiple times, the quality will remain consistent. The best forms of a high resolution logo are usually ai (Adobe Illustrator), eps (Encapsulated PostScript), indd (In Design) or png (Portable Networks Graphic) files.
What is a vector file? If we ask you for one of these, we are essentially asking for a logo that has a transparent, clear background. It usually comes in these same high resolution file types (ai, eps, indd or png), but has a clear background so it can easily be placed on multiple surfaces without any problem.
Impressions refer to the number of times a post or ad was potentially seen. The number of impressions can be only slightly higher or significantly higher than the reach because someone can see a post multiple times.
Impressions for an organic post will still be lower than impressions for a sponsored or paid post because it may be delivered multiple times to multiple people and if the reach is high, impressions will also be high.
IO is a term we often use for Irresistible Offer. What is that you might ask? Consider when you go to a retail shopping site. When you first land on the home page, a pop up comes up offering you 20% off of your first order. That is an irresistible offer, an enticing way for the company to get you to sign up for something that you want in exchange for your email address or contact information. We always recommend having irresistible offers on a website as a way to gather important information, as IOs usually convert at a rate of 10%, depending on the offer type and the industry that you are in. This means that on average, 10% of the people who visit your website will convert into your CRM system, meaning you can continue to market to them over time through your newsletter or other e-blasts you send out.
Keywords (whether alone or in a string as a longer term/phrase) are the terms indexed by search engines like Google to find the topic that you are looking for when searching online. Picking out keywords for your website is part of a longer process than just identifying the words alone.
First, we want to make sure that the word or phrase is searched for on a common basis in your market. Google has a great free tool called the keyword planner that allows us to see how often certain words are searched for online, month over month, for a specific geographic area. It also suggests other words and phrases you might not have thought of, which can include the same phrases misspelled, or re-arranged, as this is how people might be finding that particular product, service or search.
After determining what keywords and phrases we want to use, whether it’s for your website, your ad or even your blog, we make sure that they are used throughout the content, as well as tagged throughout the back-end of your website.
A landing page is a specific page created on your website to match an ad you are running. This ensures that if, for instance, you were marketing a 10% off offer for new customers to try out your new athletic wear line, that when someone clicks on that ad with that offer, they are taken directly to a landing page that addresses that specific offer, so they are greeted with the 10% off discount right away. This process of creating individual landing pages creates a clear line of consciousness for your consumer, directing them down the path we want them to take, and increases the likelihood of them taking the action we want them to.
It also allows us to track conversions and web traffic specifically for that ad, as that landing page would be considered hidden, meaning that most people who don’t see the ad would be highly unlikely to find that page otherwise, as it would not be part of your main website navigation.
This is a type of ad campaign that is specific to Facebook. Simply put, it means that when someone clicks on your Facebook ad, they in turn like your company Facebook page, rather than say, being directed to your website. This specific type of campaign has the end goal of gaining more followers for your Facebook page so that you can continue to market to them with your posts and announcements.
LTV stands for Lifetime Value. We usually use it to pertain to the amount of time a client or customer stays with your brand, whether you are a service-based business or selling a product to your customer. Here’s the easiest way to calculate that number. Take the average value of a sale, multiply it by the number of repeat transactions and then multiply that times the average retention time in months or years for a typical customer.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a personal trainer. The average cost per session to your client is $60/hour and the average client of yours has 8 sessions a month, which translates to $480 per month. Each client usually stays with you for two years, so the lifetime value of that client is $5760 (or $2880 per year).
The average LTV to COA ratio should be 3:1. The value of the customer should be three times more than the cost of acquiring them. If the ratio is too close, such as 2:1, you’re spending too much. If it’s 5:1, you’re spending too little, and probably missing out on other business opportunities. If we used the scenario from above in calculating our COA, where the average cost to acquire a new customer was $26, and combine it with this example here where the average LTV of a client is $5760, it means we should signicantly increase our ad expenses, as we are missing out on the opportunity to gain new clients for your business.
Want to know how many people opened your last newsletter that you sent out? That would be the open rate, which is simply a percentage of the number of people who read your e-blast, newsletter, invitation, etc. out of the total number of people you sent it to.
When looking at open rates, we always like to compare our clients’ rates to the industry standard for their particular industry as a good gauge of how the brand is performing compared to other similar brands. For instance, the average open rate for restaurants, when sending out a newsletter, is 21.71%. This gives us a baseline indicator of how your newsletter should perform.
An organic post is content created by or for the brand with no paid advertising to boost or promote the post on social media.
Content marketing is largely important in the digital world that we live in, and is defined as anything that adds value to the reader’s life. While content marketing consists of things like social media posts or e-newsletters, it also accounts for blogs and video blogs (also known as vlogs). In order to maximize the reach of your blogs to a larger audience, we use content advertising platforms like Outbrain and Taboola to make sure that your content is read by those searching for similar content.
For instance, when you are reading an article online, when you come to the end of it you are usually presented with a few other similar articles to read next. Content ad platforms like Outbrain and Taboola are the ones that help suggest these other articles, ensuring that your content competes with other industry giants. It’s advertising, but specifically for your original content. It’s not just for small companies either. Even big news outlets like CNN use Taboola and Outbrain to push out their own press releases, articles and blogs.
How much does it cost to participate? Both platforms have a minimum spend of $10/day, but it can be used to push out as many content pieces as you want within that minimum budget.
PPC stands for pay per click. When you set up a campaign in a platform like Google AdWords or Facebook, as mentioned above, you pay per click, rather than paying per impression. This means you only pay for the people who click on your ad, rather than those who just see it and pass it by.
Reach refers to the potential number of viewers a post has at any given time, or the potential audience for any given social network or combination of audiences. A post that is delivered to an audience of 25,000-40,000 will have a potential reach of 25,000-40,000, while combining multiple social networks can offer a more significant reach such as increasing reach from 25,000-40,000 to 100,000 and beyond.
Reach can be used in relation to a specific organic post or a sponsored or paid post. The reach for an organic post will be significantly smaller than a sponsored or paid post depending on audience targeting and, of course, budget.
In the marketing world, the term responsive corresponds with your website. If your website is responsive, it means that the website shrinks and expands to adapt to whatever device your visitor is using to look at the site. For instance, if they looked at it on a smart phone, the site would look different than what it looks like on a tablet or a desktop. This phrase can often be tied in with the term “mobile optimized” which specifically means that a site has a different layout that is more condusive to a smaller screen, which leads to longer times spent on your site when looked at on a phone or tablet.
We don’t want people to have to constantly scroll for content when the site could be optimized or built in a responsive manner. What’s more, if your site is not responsive, Google will penalize you with lower search rankings, as they want to give their users what they want, which is easily navigable and searchable websites!
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a term used to refer to software licensing and delivery model where software is centrally hosted and licensed out to users on a subscription model. Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce and Dropbox are some of the most common and most popular SaaS businesses of today.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of enhancing when a webpage appears in search results. By adjusting the content on your website, as well as in the back-end, we can increase the likelihood that your site will be found for the relevant terms and reasons that correspond with your business.
There are a ton of components that go into an SEO strategy and improving it on your site. Search engines like Google look for title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, backlinks, inbound links, and that’s only naming a few. They also look at your site’s structure and the behavior that happens on your pages to determine where it should fall in the rankings.
Our social media team creates weekly social guides that we send to our clients who engage us as a part of their overall social media strategy. It’s just our term that we like to use internally to describe this weekly document you might receive, which will include the date of a suggested post, name the platform of that post, as well as include any imagery, videos, links, and copy that we want to include in that post. For instance, we might say that next Wednesday, on Facebook, we will be sharing a link of a blog that you wrote for a trade publication that will be going live that day.
By having a guide/calendar of our posts every week, it ensures that should you have any major changes or requests ahead of time, we’ll be able to easily adapt prior to certain pieces of content going live for your audience to see, like, comment on and share. While social media is heavily an in the moment platform, there are some things that we can predict and schedule, hence the social guide. You will receive the social guide a few days prior to the first day of content it includes.
A sponsored or paid post can be created across all social networks including:
Sponsored or paid posts can be boosted if they are already live, or ad campaigns can be created with specific goals in mind such as page growth, engagement, brand awareness, and clicks to web.
There are several platforms out there that exist for surveys and forms, but Typeform is one of the best and one of our personal favorites. It’s also growing in popularity over competitors like SurveyMonkey because of its ability to stay current, engage visitors and use of better features for those who want to just go with the free model. Yes, we said free.
Surveys and forms through this platform allow us to systemitize data, gather and report your customers’ feedback and make suggestions for marketing all in one place. Not to mention, this is a fun and engaging site that your customers, consumers and prospects are sure to love.
Similar to the term UX, UI refers to User Interface. This incorporates everything designed into a source of information (website, social media platforms, blog, software, etc.) with which a customer or client may interact. Like your UX, your UI should also be straightforward and seamless to make the customer’s experience amazing.
UX stands for User Experience. What this refers to is a user’s experience (usually on a website), and it encompasses all aspects of the end user’s interactions with the company, its offerings and its products. It’s important when developing an online element of your branding to make sure the UX is seamless for your user, giving them exactly what they want without any confusion.
For instance, one of the reasons we create landing pages for specific ads is to create a more streamlined UX. Going back to our previous example, if we advertised a 10% off for first time buyers for athletic wear, and then the ad clicked through to your products page, without any reference to the discount code, your visitors might be more likely to leave the site and search for athletic wear somewhere else. However, if you direct them straight to the 10% offer, they can feel good knowing they are getting something on their end, and will continue to shop with the end goal of purchasing and using their discount.
We’re all pretty familiar with a website’s front end, where you go to browse a site’s home page, about page, blog, etc. However, all changes that are made to your website happen on the back-end, which is where copy gets updated, pop ups get built, social media urls get added, SEO tags are implemented, etc.
If we ask you for access to your website’s backend, we just need the password you or your web developer uses to login to your website to make any changes, usually so we can make sure your website is in good health, as well as make any small changes to the website copy or make sure Google Analytics has been integrated properly.
A white paper is a short, authoritative report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue and presents the issuing body’s philosophy on the matter. We may ask if you have any white papers that you’ve already written, or might suggest that you create one as an irresistible offer, depending on your industry.