9 Digital Marketing Terms Your Association Needs to Know

Have you ever encountered a time when you were not so familiar with the digital marketing terms floating around the internet?

Digital marketing requires you to know a lot of knowledge and jargons. Strategy and trends for digital marketing are constantly changing, and it's no surprise that there are brand new specialized terms emerging all of the time. It’s overwhelming to keep track of every new digital marketing terms on your own for your association’s benefit. But there’s hope for even the most tech-challenged. We’re going to cover some digital marketing terms that your association needs to know for a more effective marketing strategy for 2018!

Digital Marketing

If we’re going to cover digital marketing terms, it’s important we start with the most important one: Digital marketing itself. As it sounds, digital marketing refers to the marketing of products or services that are promoted through any types of digital medium and technologies.

‍Digital marketing currently consists of social media, SEO, PPC, CRO, and content marketing in addition to many other online practices. Digital marketing envelopes big time current tech trends, like artificial intelligence and others of that nature. The trend for digital marketing is expected to shift as these new technologies are being involved. More people are engaging with digital devices now, meaning digital marketing efforts are necessary more than ever. It would be a great mistake not to have online channels to optimize e-communications with your members, practice online brand management, tap into online audiences, and so much more for your association.

‍It’s important to apprehend the current trend of digital marketing and apply a suitable strategy for your association. Better understanding of digital marketing terminology will lead you to marketing success- so let’s go over some more refined digital marketing terms to get you on the right track!  

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you’re a frequent reader of our blog, you might know we’ve covered SEO in the past. SEO, an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, is a process of getting traffic from search engines by following specific rules to make your content filter to the top of search engines.  

Search engine crawlers then look for these variables and decide whether your web page is worth ranking higher in search engine results pages. To put it more simply, SEO is a means of proving to the search engine that your website carries trustworthy, authoritative, and precise contents that searchers are looking for online. This is why the more you update your website and create new and relevant content,  the more it will generate high rankings for your website. Optimizing your website can affect your ranking score on Google significantly.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators, which are a set of metrics that business or organizations use to evaluate their performances and progress regarding to different projects, programs, and products. KPIs consist of measurable values to manifest how your association is doing in order to then achieve key online objectives at various levels. There are various types of KPIs that your association can look into in order to reach specific targets.

There’s Marketing Metrics, Sales Metrics, Digital Marketing Metrics, Social Media Metrics, SEO Metrics, and so on. Usually, the higher level KPIs are tracked by higher ups at organizations (think your association executive) while low level KPIs are applied to smaller departments such as marketing and sales. While applying KPIs to your association’s system, it’s important to set S.M.A.R.T. KPIs: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

If your association does advertising online, then this is the term to remember! Pay-per-click is an internet marketing method that allows advertisers to only pay for the advertisement that they put online based on how many users click on it. PPC is mostly used on ads hosted on search engines, websites, blogs, and other web sources. But how PPC advertising work?

When purchasing an ad that’s PPC, the ad is then set up with relevant keywords that audiences might use to find the ad. This is known as Ad auction, which is an automated process most major search engines employ to detect the relevancy and validity of advertisements on search engine results page. This is helpful in efficiently targeting the specific users who might most likely to be interested in your association.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

For any association, keeping a close relationship with your members and audiences is essential. So let’s take a look at a term that can help you create a closer bond- Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Customer Relationship Management is a technology for managing the relationship and communication with current and potential customers. CRM software helps organizations be more interactive, responsive, and connected with customers by creating a database of valuable information about your customers.

A typical CRM system contains basic contact information from customers interacting with an organization. It then stores when was the last conversation with those customers occurred, and even demonstrates the process of generating conversions to show you the age of your relationship with the customer. This is great for association’s looking to see their conversion rates and how long it takes to lock in a new member. So, if you’re looking to analyze the lifecycle of a new member for your association (or just keep track of who you engage with), a CRM software could be something to look into. In any case, it’s important to know about.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence is something we’ve covered before, but it’s enough of a force to mention again.  Artificial Intelligence is an umbrella term that deals with self-thinking automated machinery. It seems like an overwhelming and complex term, but let’s break it down into a few different fields. . Machine learning and deep learning are subsets of AI that you might want to familiarize yourself with. Machine learning is the science of training machines to learn and improve from experience automatically.

With the science of machine learning, computers can act without being explicitly programmed. Examples of machine learning could be Google’s self-driving cars, effective web search, and so on. Another term branched underneath artificial intelligence is known as Deep learning, which is a subset of machine learning that can imitate human intelligence by holding massive amount of collection of algorithms and neural networks. Deep learning is a more intensive version of machine learning that most are familiar with. AI has been revolutionized digital marketing field by gearing up with high technologies- one popular technology being chatbots. Chatbots create a chat with an instant messaging format to help organizations  stay connected with customers. By using AI-powered chatbots, any queries that customers might ask would be answered in such a short amount of time by itself on any days and times the customers are online. AI and machine learning has been making marketing tasks easier for you by being smart.

Marketing Automation

Another digital marketing term that's extremely valuable for associations to know about is marketing automation.

‍Marketing automation contains multiple features and functions such as email marketing, landing pages, campaign management, prediction/scoring, lead management, CRM integration, social marketing, and marketing analytics. What marketing automation helps organizations streamline and automate marketing tasks and workflows, which assists your association for better efficiency, and could even help increase revenue in the long run.

If your association is overwhelmed with the size of its membership and looking for help segmenting audiences for marketing purposes, marketing automation can help. This technology allows you to store customer behaviors and interactions with you so that you could perform proper targeting and segmentation of your association’s audience.

Geofencing

Geofencing is a location-based marketing tool that a lot of marketers use today. But how does it work?. Using geofencing allows marketers to send messages or promotions to users’ smartphones when they are in a defined location in a setting of virtual boundary. It’s about targeting the people who are in or near your area to boost up the click through rate for your association’s digital advertising. Geofencing can be done on desktop or tablets as well. Consider using geofencing if your association is looking to amp up its mobile marketing strategy.

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is a form of advertising that is relevant to the page’s content that you have landed on a website. Contextual advertising is more personalized and catered to the liking of users or what they are searching for online compared to other forms of advertising. Related advertisements are usually determined by automated systems according to the content that is present at the moment or the information of the users.

If your association was looking for more information on digital marketing terms, you came to the right place. Getting to understand each term might take a bit of time and practice at first. But once you comprehend the basics and start to utilize these methods, you can see a stronger digital marketing strategy in your association’s future.