Digital Marketing: A Cheat Sheet
I was recently asked by a close friend who was applying for a digital marketing job to share my knoweldge around all the terminology. I proceeded to write a lengthy document detailing everything I could think of that might assist her in her interview.
Here is a list of all the terms and descriptions related to digital marketing that I pulled together. They’ll definitely be ones I've overlooked, but hopefully this serves as a quick read guide to all those just getting into marketing!
The Basics
Digital marketing is a method used by businesses to get their message in front of prospective customers. With the main goal being to ensure they serve the right offer, at the right time, in the right place to those prospective customers.
Today, your customers are online: hanging out in social media, staying updated on news sites and blogs, and searching online when they have a need.
Digital marketing puts you in those same channels, so your best prospects can see you, learn more about you, and even ask questions to learn more about you and your products or services.
Above is a helpful image I found detailing which platform to use for what situation. It’s dated 2014, but is still pretty relevant.
It’s a common phrase to say that “The print industry is dead”. I assume this is because magazines used to rely heavily on advertisements to make money, but now, advertisers can go to digital mediums to target more of their intended customer for cheaper, and quicker.
The Lingo
ROI- Return on investment. You run an E-commerce website. That’s a website that sells a product, and takes payments online. You create a google Adwords campaign with a budget of £100. You sell £200 worth of product. That’s a 100% return on investment (ROI).
SEO
Aka — Search engine optimisation. The base code for a website is written in a language called HTML. In the HTML there are different sections called TAGS. There’s a tag called a META TAG, which is where you to write a description of what your website is about. This is normally limited to 155 characters, and is the description that will show for your website, when it shows on google.
Lighthouse Plugin
After a developer has finished your website, you can run it through a piece of software called Lighthouse. It scans your website, code included, and gives it an SEO rating, based on how well it will perform against other sites. Google has a set of about 300 criteria that if your website doesn’t tick, then it might show lower down in their search results. These criteria include bits like, accessibility for partially blind, image descriptions if you’re fully blind, website description, too much duplicated content, keywords.
Keywords
Alongside your META tags in the HTML code of the website, is a space to add Keywords. Here the developer would list as many relevant phrases and words that you think could make your website be found easier.
For example if you had a website for Tunbridge Wells golf club you might have these keywords:
“twells golf club,golf, twells, Tunbridge wells, wells, golf club,club, golfer, old man”
Meta tags & Descriptions- Detailed above in SEO
Image Tags
If you use images on your website google says they should be accessible even for blind people.This means you should add descriptions to an image. This is again done in the code in the for of an ALT TAG.
Example: if you had an image of a man playing golf. The alt tag might be “Old man playing golf in Tunbridge Wells at a gold club”
Crawlers
Search engines like google don’t always update your listings when you make a change to your website. For example you might change some of your keywords as you think they’ll get more people searching them. In order for this change to take effect, you need to run your site through a website crawler. This will index your changes, and basically let google know, so it can update it’s listings. (Super basic description).
Sitemap Code
After you’ve put your website through a crawler, it should create a sitemap for you.This is a little bit of code which you add to your website, and it basically tells google what changes have happened, and when.
Conversion rate- Normally presented as a percentage, this would detail the percent of people who are shown your ad, to who make a purchase, or enquire.
The Funnel
The steps a customer goes through before finishing at your intended goal. Ie Click ad>find product>enter shipping details>enter payment details>done
Drop off rate- shown as a percentage of who drops off at each step of the funnel.
Lead nurturing
Some customers are not always ready to make a purchase, you might want to raise awareness for your service before the customer needs it. Ie, running brand awareness campaigns.
A/B testing
Testing two different pieces of copy or designs with the same budget, against the same people, to see which performs best.
A good app for A/B testing of designs and copy is ‘QuickTest’ avaliable for iOS on the apple app store.
Backlinks
Another method to increase your website SEO is to have other website link to yours. Google will then think yours is a trusted popular site and rate it higher.
Heatmap- A visual indicator of the most popular areas of your website. Usually button and images. See HotJar below.
Bids/Bidding
It likely won’t just be you with certain keywords, it might be a competitor company. Bids are linked with a budget, so you might bid £10 per download/click for the keyword golfclubs, while your competitor might only bid £8. Bids can be set through google adwords, facebook ad manager etc
Campaign- Campaign is what you’d typically call an advertisement, or group of advertisements in google adwords/adsense software.
PPC-Pay per click
CPA — Cost per acquisition
CTR — click through rate KPI-key performance indicator
Target demographic
When you setup your ad in google or facebook ad managers, you’ll able to build a profile of the type of customer you want your ad to be shown to. This includes (Age)(Location)(Hobbies)(Time of day) etc. By choosing these settings you can help optimise your ad campaign as you’ll likely not get it right the first timer could decrease your conversion rate by tweaking the time of day etc.
Carousel
A type of facebook ad, which consists of four or more images a that a customer can look through
CTA
Call to action. A main button on a website or ad, prompting the user to engage and perform an action. Most website have ‘SIGN UP’ or ‘DOWNLOAD’.
The Tools
Hotjar- Heatmaps your website. Records where your customers have clicked on your website. Also records how long they were on particular pages of your site.
Google AdWords-
Facebook ad manager (includes instagram)
Snapchat ad manager
The Results
Google analytics- For seeing how well your ad campaigns performed. Facebook ad manager
The Role(s)
In a traditional agency, you would have a Marketing director explaining the purpose of a campaign, and what the outcomes/success criteria should to be.
You would have a creative director overseeing the design of these ads, and a marketing designer artworking the ads.
There would likely be a front-end developer developing the website.
There would be a digital marketeer, who would take the ads and put them into Adwords, or facebook ad manage, choose the intended customer demographic, and budget, and define the duration the campaign should run for.
You might also have a copywriter, or content writer who would write the text for the ads to ensure it’s in the same tone of voice (TOV) as the rest of the brand.
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