Nowadays, acronyms and new marketing terms are surrounding us everywhere. And for non-English speakers, some of them can be tricky to understand correctly.
We thought it could be a great idea to make a recap and explain some of the most important digital marketing terms. Let’s start with terms referring to SEO, and then move on different concepts and tools you should be aware of.
The magic equation: SEM = SEO + SEA + SMO
You’ve probably heard these acronyms quite often, maybe without daring asking what it means. At least for SEO, which means Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is a set of tools to improve the visibility and ranking of a website on search engines page (the SERP: Search Engine Ranking Page). A Good SEO is done when a website appears on the top and first results’ page of the search engine for keywords related to your core activity and content.
You can improve your website’s SEO with different methods: it’s named organic or natural SEO. But you can also pay to rank first on Google (Don’t tell me you’re using Bing or Yandex, we know you’re on Google) and that’s called Search Engine Advertisement. Typically, you can recognise Paid Ads with the little green [Ad] logo next to the URL link. What does it cost? It depends on the payment method you choose: Pay-Per-Click, Bidding, fixed price. Usually, your number one tool for SEA is Google Ads.
Finally, SEO is not only about improving your website’s SERP. Your social media must be optimised too to increase your visibility and attract traffic to your website. That’s the SMO – or Social Media Optimization. It’s important to reach your customers, to interact with them and to share content.
And altogether, these concepts give you the SEM – The Search Engine Marketing. It regroups all activities aiming to improve the visibility of your website’s pages, from search engines to all social media that can directly or indirectly affect the positioning of a page.
If you want to read more about SEO, check this article about The SEO Strategy we used.
In or Out- the links matter
Inbound Links, also called backlinks, point out on your website and web pages from other sources. It can help your ranking on search engines, especially if the links are qualitative and relevant content for your website. If they are coming from pages with good SERP and good SEO, it will help you. If Google notices that the links are not relevant enough, it can alter your reputation and therefore also your SEO: Google algorithms are there to provide the best search experiences to users.
Outbound links start from your website and are pointing out to external websites. You have control over them, but you face the risk of losing your visitors by sending them to another website. However, depending on the content you create and share, it can be used as a complementary source of information. And Google is valuing this also.
Do not think only about Google Ads. Consider also Facebook, Amazon, and all the other Social Media Ads Managers.
As previously mentioned, to create ads and promote your website or products you can use Google Ads to create Pay-Per-Click campaigns (PPC). PPC is the most used type of SEA model. For every click on your ads, you pay a small fee that is calculated by Google according to different criteria.
Nowadays, you can create ads on almost every social media. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and even Amazon provide Ads management and softwares that allowing you to reach your targeted customers efficiently and realtively easily.
These ads are part of the SEA strategy, and your reach will all be a matter of budget. How much are you ready to invest (to spend) in ads and which objectives are you pursuing?
Retargeting and Remarketing – What’s the difference?
In a previous post, we talked about how remarketing and retargeting strategies matter to reduce your bounce rate.
As a reminder, remarketing is a strategy of reaching back out to your website visitors or email subscribers with products or pages for which they have expressed interest (for instance, product pages they have been visiting before). Retargeting is typically used for targeting past visitors of your website with advertisements across different channels.
Google analytics gives you metrics to analyse your website’s audience, visited pages and so on. Coupled with Google Tag Manager, you will be able to track a lot of valuable information on your visitors and their activities on your website. All these data will help you create performing Google Ads campaigns and improve your SEA.
In remarketing, another important term you may hear of is the Facebook Pixel (Facebook being the most famous, but you also have LinkedIn or twitter tags, for instance). It’s a tracking code to add to your website to track Facebook users visiting your website. It provides you information to retarget each user according to the pages or articles they visited.
You can be creative. There are plenty of different marketing strategies!
Finally, all these terms and concepts explained here concern mostly digital marketing. Your creativity is the limit. Many different types of marketing strategies are available.
One you should always remember is content marketing. It consists of delivering content that your audience is searching for. It can be blog posts, testimonials on your website, videos and so on. The goal is to make your brand more relevant to your target customers, as well as more visible, by bringing real value to your targeted users. Good content marketing can also really improve your SEO, if you do it right!
In the recent years, we have seen the development of softwares intended to automate certain repetitive tasks, to ease the workload of marketers, to increase efficiency and to reduce errors. Marketing automation is used mostly coupled to email marketing. But other types of automation exist, such as chatbots, that used to be really trendy. They are really effective automating solutions and relatively easy to implement.
Digital Marketing terms, tools, and technologies are evolving at a fast pace. With machine learning, artificial intelligence and augmented / virtual reality technologies, marketing tools and strategies will change in the coming years. Be curious, stay up-to-date… We’ll see what new trends in marketing are in front of us!
