The online world is full of industry jargon, and as marketers, it’s expected of us to know what every term, acronym and buzzword related to our industry means. While many have been around since the beginning of the Internet, there are still newer, advanced terms that pop up everyday. Even I’ll admit I’ve run into some that have made to turn to my fairy web-mother, Google, pleading: “PLEASE tell me what this means!” To help you stay on top of your marketing lingo game, here are some not-so-common terms being used in the industry today:

  • Marketing Automation: this is a platform that syncs all your marketing efforts into one. It organizes and automates the insight-focused capabilities from your CRM, lead management system, web analytics platform, and other campaign systems to create a smooth streamline across all channels. Many companies like Salesforce and Marketo offer software programs for B2B marketers.
  • Contextual Advertising: a form of targeted marketing. This is done by advertising networks such as Google Adsense, Yahoo! Bing Network, and Microsoft adCenter to display in-text ads that correlate to the page content that a user is viewing.
  • Day Parting: refers to a feature in a PPC campaign that allows you to run your ads during the peak days and times that your audience is most engaged and receptive to take action. 
  • Remarketing: a popular technique used by most retail sites in an attempt to motivate you to complete a purchase you left abandoned in your shopping cart. Users are targeted through cookies and are will see the retailers ads as they continue to search on other sites.  You can read more about remarketing here.
  • Cloud Computing: an advanced internet-based computing where different services such as servers, storage, and applications can be accessed virtually. This new type of IT infrastructure takes away the need for expensive data-centers for developers. In 2006, Amazon launched their own cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services.
  • Responsive: responsive websites are created to respond to their environment, whether that is a desktop, tablet or mobile phone. eMagine’s B2B blog & corporate website are both responsive. Try it for yourself by playing with the width of your desktop browser, making it thinner or wider. See what I mean? Cool, right?
  • Image Alt Text: scroll over the image at the top of this blog post. That is what image alt text is and this is how search engines find and understand images. This helps generate greater SEO as it allows search engines like Google to find you and place you in the ‘images’ section of their site.
  • Customer-Centric: revolving your marketing efforts around the customer, rather than sales, leads, or SEO values. This is becoming the biggest shift in the Internet world today. Search engines themselves are focusing on customer value more than ever before. This means your online presence needs to be geared towards what your customers what, not what you want your customers to want.
  • Omnichannel: a multichannel approach to providing customers with a seamless shopping experience whether it be through a desktop, mobile device, catalog or in the physical store location. It allows the customer to start the purchase cycle through one channel, say a help chat on your website and continue down the conversion funnel through any channel they choose, without any of their information being lost along the way.
  • Enterprise: simply stated, enterprise is a sophisticated name for a business unit, company or firm. These types of businesses usually display a high level of readiness to embark on new ventures and initiatives. Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google are all enterprise companies.

Do you have any marketing terms to add to the list? Let us know, they may end up in our next post covering 10 more essential terms for marketers!