How to talk digital marketing – a glossary

Not fluent in digital marketing? We understand. Digital marketing is packed with jargon and often those in the industry will use terms as if they are universally understood.

Here’s our easy-to-fathom, digital marketing glossary broken down into the three areas – all explained – of:

1. Lead generation 
2. Lead capture 
3. Lead nurturing

Never be afraid to question a term you don’t understand when talking to your digital marketing company. It’s part of their role, to help you understand just exactly how they propose to digitally market your business.

Here we’ll go through some of the terms you might hear and what they mean.

Lead generation

The first stage in any marketing plan is the generation of leads, to entice an audience, and hopefully potential customers to your brand to eventually buy from you. There are many wonderful digital ways to do this. Here are some of the terms you might hear.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is a collective term for the ways to optimise your website so that it ranks higher in the listings search engines, like Google, return to browsers. The higher your ranking, the more exposure and potential leads you will generate.

Good and effective SEO is to do with how your website is built and written to appeal to your target audience. Messaging, page speed, backlinks to other reputable websites and responsiveness all affect your SEO and therefore search engine ranking.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is paid advertising, which will help to get more traction with search engines. The search results that come up when you type into a search engine, that say ‘Ad’ next to them, are the result of SEM.

Digital marketers bid on the keywords that will be the most effective for your brand. As a result, this is a more costly means of lead generation than organic SEO, but results are usually quicker to come in.

Paid social

Paid social is where you use paid advertising on the social media platforms to reach your audience, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Lead capture

There’s no point doing the work of generating leads, if you don’t have the means to capture them. Lead capture is about making sure your hard-won generated leads don’t slip away. Here are the main ways you do this:

Website as marketing funnel

Once users land on your website, because you’ve generated interested though your activity in stage 1 – lead generation, they should know exactly who you are, what they want to do and how to do it.

When we say, ‘marketing funnel’, we mean that your website is a means of ushering users along to the next stage, whether that’s getting in touch, registering for an offer, or clicking straightaway to buy from you.

Landing page

Landing pages?are just an extension of your website; mini websites often used in digital marketing campaigns to showcase an offer, a free download or product feature. They help users to focus on what your offer is without getting tangled in your main website.

Digital forms

Nothing fancy meant by this term. These are just the forms users fill in with personal data, usually in exchange for an offer, discount, etc. We say ‘only’; they’re an effective online means of capturing leads.

Lead nurturing

Your stack of captured leads is now waiting to be nurtured. This is a whole content strategy and involves using targeted, value-rich content and insight, to compel them to buy. Here are some of the terms you might hear when it comes to nurturing leads:

MarTech stack

MarTech is just a shortened term for ‘marketing technology stack’. ?It’s a collective term for the technology tools used to nurture and cajole leads. Email marketing platforms, web analytics and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are all potential elements of a martech stack.

Nurture campaigns

Think persuasive emails. They are usually automated and timed just right to drive interest, engagement and intention to buy.

Personalisation

Do you ever receive marketing emails that use your name? Or even refer to what you may have previously clicked on, on the vendor’s website? This is personalisation and helps the content to be more targeted and effective with individual users.

Have effective conversations about digital marketing

Understanding these three simple stages of digital marketing and terms used should help you to have those effective conversations with your digital marketing provider. Which, in turn, will help you to make more informed decisions about your digital marketing strategy and what’s right for your brand.

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