Whether you are new to inbound marketing or a seasoned advocate, new terms and phrases are always popping up as technology develops. This being the case, we thought it beneficial to bring together and define 21 of the most inbound common phrases and words, to refresh your memory (and make you look savvy in front of your colleagues).
This post can serve as your own personal inbound marketing dictionary, so don’t forget to bookmark the page and come back whenever you are in need!
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a strategic marketing style and philosophy that creates and places high-quality content on the internet. This makes it easy for them to be found by any prospect, thus converting them into leads, customers and then advocates, whilst analyzing and evaluating this data along the way. Inbound Marketing tactics include, SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing. By aligning your published content with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic. In this way, Inbound Marketing can also be explained as drawing visitors in, rather than actively searching for prospects (Outbound Marketing).
B2B/ B2C
B2B describes Business who sell to other Business. B2C is Business who sell directly to Customers.
Prospect
A prospect is anyone who visits your website and could become a customer. The fact that they have actively decided to click on one of your pages qualifies them as interested and a prospect of your industry.
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a representation, usually semi-fictional, of your ideal customer based on your marketing research and data from existing customers. These persona’s help define your target audience, allowing you to create precise content and shape your brand. These are essential within any inbound marketing campaign. If you need a little bit of extra help, check out Hubspot's free template.
Inbound Marketing Funnel
This is the path that a prospect will take from initial contact and recognition of your company to their final conversation as a customer. A prospect can enter the funnel at any stage and be nurtured to convert them near the bottom of the funnel. To learn more about the importance of a full funnel marketing approach, click here!
Top-Of-The-Funnel
This is the very first stage of the buying process. Prospects at this stage are identifying the problem and looking for general information. This means as a successful inbound marketer, you want to create general educational content about your industry to interest your prospects. There is no sales promotion involved at this stage, as you just want to help them identify their problem and provide them with enough information for the next steps towards the solution.
Middle-Of-The-Funnel
The Middle of The Funnel is the stage where leads enter after identifying their problem and are searching for the best company or way to provide a solution. Typical content here includes case studies or product brochures. The goal of the middle is to establish which prospects are credible to turn into leads.
Bottom-Of-The-Funnel
This refers to the stage where leads are very close to becoming customers. They’ve identified the problem, shopped for possible solutions and are coming close to a decision. Offers associated with this stage are usually free consultations or discounts.
Premium Content Offer
High quality, in depth content that is offered for free at a certain stage of the marketing funnel. These include e-books, checklists, webinars etc.
Inbound Link
A link that is coming from another site to your own. Websites with many inbound links are more likely to rank higher in search engines as well as referral traffic.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the exercise of enhancing where a webpage appears in a search engines search results. There are many ways to improve your SEO, by including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links. Search engines also look at site structure, design, and visitor behaviour to determine how your site is ranked in search engine results.
Keyword/ Keyword Phrases/ Long-Tail Keyword
These are the topics that webpages get indexed for in search results by engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Make sure that these aren’t too difficult to rank for, reach your target audience, and have a significant search volume. A Long-Tail Keyword is essentially a key word ‘sentence’, excluding and’s, It’s etc., instead of just one word.
Call-To-Action (CTA)
This can be a graphic, button, web link or text that is used to encourage a prospect to click, visit a landing page and become a lead. Examples of a CTA is ‘Subscribe Now’ or ‘Download for Free’. It is important to perform A/B testing to ensure you have optimized your CTA to be the most eye-catching, provocative and with a good click-through rate.
A/B Testing
In a A/B test, two or more variations of a variable (advert, C-T-A, landing page etc.) are compared to improve marketing efforts. Each piece of content should only have slight differences (colour, verbiage, subject line etc.) to determine which is better and should be continued.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
This is the percentage of people who advance or click on a CTA towards the next step of your marketing campaign, compared to the number of people who saw it. The higher the click-through rate, the better.
Landing Page
A landing page is a website page tailored for a specific service or product with the goal of converting a visitor with an offer using a C-T-A and form. Creating a landing page can become quite scientific! Check out Hubspots best practices to find out more.
Exit Page
This is the page that a visitor decides to leave on. This is not necessarily a bad statistic but can be helpful to establish goals so that your pages can be optimised to keep visitors longer.
Conversion Rate
This is the percentage of people who have completed an action on a single webpage such as filling out a form. Pages with high conversion rates are performing well.
Engagement Rate
A social media metric used to describe the amount of interactions, such as likes, shares and comments, that a post or a piece of content receives. These tell you how well received your messages are with your followers.
Unique Visitors
This is the count of how many different individual people have visited your website. You could have 30 views, but only 10 unique visitors who clicked on your website 3 times.
Bounce Rate
Website: This is the metric associated with when a visitor lands on your website and then immediately leaves from the same page. This usually means that they either couldn’t find what they were looking for or quickly became uninterested. The lower the bound rate, the better.
Email: This is the rate that an email was unable to be delivered. A high bounce rate can mean out-of-date lists, or include many invalid email addresses.
These terms are just the start. There are many more that exist within the inbound marketing and marketing world so don’t be afraid to search google and find out more. This post will be updated if and when new words become more prominent within the industry, so don’t forget to check back to refresh your memory.
If you would like to find out more about how powerful inbound marketing can revolution your business, deliver more leads and generate more customers, then get in touch for your FREE consultation.
Comments