Need To Know: 13 Marketing Terms for Your New Hires

Every industry has its buzzwords and inherent jargon, but marketing is especially filled with an array of essential buzzwords. When hiring new marketing talent, its important that your prospective recruits are up to date on the latest terms.

13 marketing terms your new hires should know

Our friends over at MediaBistro wrote a great article on marketing terms newbies need to know. The list below is a compilation and expansion of that list, targeted towards new marketing hires. When building out your marketing team, be sure to test your recruits on the application of the terms below.

It can grant a high-level insight into how much experience they have ranging from analytics knowledge to differences between paid and earned media.

Here are a few of the basic marketing terms your new hires need to know:

1. Conversion Rate (CR): The percentage of people who 'swipe right' in Tinder terms

This is the percentage of users who take the action you want them to take, like signing up for your blog, company newsletter or buying that apple watch.

2. Customer relationship management (CRM): Let's manage all of this data

CRM encompasses the practices, strategies and technologies used to manage and analyze interactions and data to respond to customer needs and wants. If a customer tells a sales rep they think a product is too expensive, that may trigger an email with a discount code for their next purchase.

3. Earned Media: Your online brand whispers

This is anyone (customers, press, friends or foe) who voluntartily share your content. For example, when a news station features a new dating app on a morning show or a blogger writes about the best pair of jeans they’ve ever bought just because they love them so much.

Sample Sentence: “Traffic to the company’s blog last month exploded thanks to earned media—the cat video got 300 shares on Facebook and 700 retweets!”

4. Key performance indicator (KPI): Which metriCs matter most

A metric that has been identified as most important for your company. While key performance indicators are metrics, all metrics are not KPIs. And KPIs are different based on your business objectives.

Sample Sentence: “Since we’re such a new business, we should make Twitter growth a KPI, and maybe even measure the cups of coffee our content writer consumes…since the numbers seem to correlate.” Your new marketers need to know some important terms

5. Metric: Numeric data used to Prove your marketing worth

Metrics are numeric data that allow marketers to evaluate performance of lead generating efforts and effectiveness of a channel or content. Keeping track of these helps you make better decisions as a marketer and prove the output of your marketing dollars and efforts.

6. Net promoter score (NPS): A measure of your brand advocacy

NPS is a way to measure how people feel about your brand and the likelihood that they’d tell others about you. Customers and prospects fill out a survey and choose on a scale of 1 to 10 to gauge how likely they are to recommend your product or service.

Sample Sentence: “Looking at the NPS, it seems users like our brand expansion into 3 practices (Health and LIfe Sciences, Creative and Marketing, and Tech would be recommend to fellow colleagues and friends)!"

7. Owned Media: Platforms you manage and control, such as a company blog or Facebook page

Owned media is one of the best ways to differentiate your brand. Owned media encompasses any communication channels that are within your company control such as blogs, facebook, email, or website content.

Owned media is crucial for brand awareness, development, and the longevity of creating lasting relationships with your end consumers.

Sample Sentence: “With our social team tackling Facebook and Twitter, and our content team rocking the blog, we are OWNING our owned media!”

8. Paid Media: Paying for your time at the top

This refers to paying to leverage a third-party channel through sponsorships or advertising. This includes traditional advertising like a TV spot, direct mail, or magazine ad, as well as PPC ads, Facebook ads or sponsored blog posts.

Sample Sentence: “We’ve gotta free up some of the marketing budget; the brand knows paid media will be very important when they launch a new product since no one has ever heard of it before.”

9. Pay-per-click (PPC); an online advertising method used to direct traffic to websites

You only pay when the ad is clicked. PPC ads complement other SEO efforts and are great for promoting sales, seasonal promotions, or the launch of a new product.

Sample Sentence: “Make some time in your afternoon, the marketing director wants to revisit the messaging for a PPC ad since the click-through rate is lower than other ads based on the same keywords.”

10. Bounce Rate (BR): 'swipe left' in Tinder Terms

This is the percentage of people who land on a page on your website and simply leave without clicking anything else or navigating to other pages.

11. Email Bounce Rate: 'bye felicia' of email delivery

The rate at which an email was unable to be delivered to a customer's inbox for various reasons including out-of-date lists, invalid addresses, or typos. The lower the better.

10. Persona: who is this person, and what Affects their buying decisions?

A persona is a user profile of a representative customer which describes purchase behavior, goals, skills, attitudes and other details that make the target consumer more realistic for the marketing team. Everyone from media planners to designers refer to personas when making decisions about their work.

11. Remarketing or retargeting: stalking through Multi-channel reach out

This is an online marketing tactic that allows marketers to reach out via other channels to visitors who have previously visited their website.

Sample Sentence: “Hey, online sales increased by 30 percent last month; looks like remarketing to customers who’d left without buying a pair of shoes was a good call.”

13. Return on investment (ROI): Is any of this worth it?

Basically, this is how you tell if something was worth the time, resources and money spent. In cases where efforts may not be directly tied to sales, especially with content marketing and social media, you may have to evaluate non-monetary gains such as awareness or consumer insights.

Sample Sentence: “Sure, social media is expensive, but when you consider the value of the brand exposure, and the insights gleaned from customer feedback, the ROI is a no-brainer.”

This is just a short and sweet list of a few marketing terms your new hires should be familiar with.

Hiring new marketing talent can be tricky, let us help!

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