Marketing Buzzword Dictionary

Buzzwords, love them or hate them, they are frequently used in the marketing world.

Digital Radish has put together an A – W (sorry, XYZ didn’t make the cut!) of key buzzword definitions and examples to demystify the jargon.

A – Always On

With so many communication channels open to us, and a continual connection to them thanks to technology, most of us are living in an ‘always on’ world. Digital Marketers are taking advantage of this, especially through social media.

e.g. You’ve just climbed into bed, but aren’t quite ready to go to sleep yet and decide to check your social media. You see a hashtag promoting a link to a sale and click on it. One things leads to another and you’ve done some late night purchasing before you go sleep.

B – Big Data

Buzzwords are generally a trend, but big data has been around for years. In fact, analyst Doug Laney first coined the term back in 2001 as information assets which are high in the ‘three Vs’: volume, velocity and variety. In more general terms, it is a data set that is so large it needs complex processing to analyse it.

e.g. Netflix uses big data on its viewers to develop new television series. The award-winning House of Cards series was developed because analytics on its millions of viewers showed that they enjoyed films by David Fincher and films starring Kevin Spacey.  

C – Clickable

In the literal sense of the word, a segment of text or an image is clickable if it has a hyperlink that you can click on to take you to another page. However, in marketing terms, something is clickable if it makes you want to click it, as with digital marketing the goal is to get potential customers to click through to your content.

e.g. Adding a button saying ‘Download your free report’ to your email may be more clickable than simply hyperlinking the text. 

D – Deep Linking

If you click on a link that takes you to a specific page within another website, rather than the homepage, you have just clicked on a deep link – a page deeper within the website.

e.g. Clicking on this link which refers to B2B Marketing awards shortlist will take you to the awards page of the website, not just the B2B Marketing homepage. 

E – Emojification

Emojis have entered mainstream culture, evolving from faces made of colons and brackets to little yellow faces with a range of emotions, not to mention food and drinks, animals, gestures and places. Brands are now using emojis when they want to be fun and expressive, as highlighted by Digiday in ‘The emojification of brand advertising’.

e.g. This blog is great 

F – Freemium

Users are permitted to use a limited version of a product for free, which entices them to pay to upgrade to an account with premium features. This pricing model has become popular with software.

e.g. Content curation tool Scoop.it offers a free version with one personalised hub topic and 10 scoops a day, but you can upgrade to a pro version for £7 a month with 5 persionalised hub topic, unlimited scoops and analytics, or a business version for £43 a month with 15 personalised hub topics, unlimited scoops and analytics.

G – Growth Hacking

The use of using low cost, high impact, new-wave internet marketing strategies to grow a start up (usually technology) company e.g. social media, email and viral marketing. Sean Ellis first coined the term in 2010 when he said, “A growth hacker is a person whose true North is growth,”  but like the phenomenon itself has grown into its own buzzword powerhouse.

e.g. Spotify grew from a humble start up to the worlds’ most popular music streaming service thanks to growth hacking. Its viral advertising techniques of getting users to broadcasting their Spotify plays to their friends on Facebook is a great example of growth hacking.  

H – H2H

As so many processes become automated by technology, people now want to have a personliased interaction: human to human. More marketers are making an effort to tap into human nature and understand buyer personas to target their prospects in a friendlier, more personalised manner. This may be reaching out to people offline, using humour to be more personable or making them feel like an individual rather than just a face in the crowd.

e.g. Chevrolet injected some offbeat humour into their new advertising campaigns. Business 2 Community highlights that this was done with the intention that “showing comedic imperfection… shows that we’re all human and makes mistakes.” 

I – Internet of Everything

In our technologically connected world, we are moving towards an Internet of Everything – a state where all things will be connected to share data by being fitted with electronics to communicate with other devices (an upgrade from the Internet of Things). According to Verizon, there are now over a billion connected smart devices and machines in the world.

e.g. Wearable fitness devices like FitBit track metrics like the wearer’s heart rate, steps taken and calories burnt and send data to a cloud or device to record and analyse.

J – Jacking

Marketers love jumping on or jacking trends. News-jacking is where marketers cover a piece of breaking news, but put a marketing spin on it. Meme-jacking has become popular on social media as brands look to build a funny element into their marketing.

e.g. Memejacking: Virgin Media used the ‘success kid’ meme as part of its 2012 out-of-house campaign. 

(Image from Pamela Vaughn, Hubspot)

Newsjacking: During the London Tube Strikes, Powwownow struck up a campaign for its Conference Calling system. Emails were sent out with offers and it used the hashtag #PWNSmartSwap to get people to share where it were swapping their office for on the day of the strike.

K – Keep reading…

Sorry nothing for K!

L – Lead nurturing

Now an important part of marketing, lead nurturing is building relationships with potential prospects who may not be ready to talk to your sales department or buy into your product. It’s developing potential leads into sales-qualified leads. This will be through methods such as email newsletters and social media.

e.g. Keeping an active social media account that keeps both followers and the wider social network aware of what is going on with your business. 

M – Millennials

The generation born between 1980 and 2000, also known as Generation Y. These are people who grew up with technology and inherently use it as part of their everyday lives.

e.g. According to Millennial Marketing, Millennial make up 21% of consumer discretionary purchases, so are a prime target group for marketers. 

N – Native advertising

This is essentially sponsored content that fits in with the form of the website. When appearing in the form of a written article, they are sometimes referred to as advertorials. Native advertising in social media now appears in newsfeeds in the form of posts, but always with a disclaimer to say that it is sponsored/promoted content in adherence with UK advertising law.

e.g. Buzzfeed has a whole host of native advertising that fits in well with its listicle style of content. Articles include ‘21 life hacks you didn’t realise you could do with Google’ by Google, ‘British views you should go and see right now’ by Toyota Aygo  and ‘14 struggles every adventurous person can relate to’ by Captain Morgan.

O – Owned Media

Put simply, it is media owned by your company that you have complete control over. This could be your website, social media, blog or microsites. You can help your marketing efforts by having coherent and interesting content as part of your owned media.

e.g. Digital Radish has its own website, a blog, and Twitter  and LinkedIn accounts, all of which it publishes content and information through.

P – Permission Marketing

Sending relevant marketing messages to people who (in Seth Godin’s words) “actually want to get them.”  Godin coined the term in his book ‘Permission Marketing’.

e.g. People who subscribe to an email newsletter are giving you permission to market to them. 

Q – Quick…

Keep moving to the next entry… 

R – Remarketing

Remarketing is online adverts that appear on users’ web browsers after they’ve been on your website. This is an effective way of targeting people who browse but don’t convert, as seeing the adverts while they’re browsing online on other sites will remind them of the content they were just looking at.

e.g. Google offers this as a service with AdWords. 

S – Smarketing

Sales + Marketing = Smarketing. The two departments don’t always work well side by side, despite aiming for the same end goal. Social Media Today defines it as when the two departments set up closed loop reporting, implement a service level agreement and use data to inform their strategy.

e.g. The Outsourced Accountant cites a study by The Aberdeen Group in 2010, which showed that companies with strong alignment of sales and marketing led an annual revenue growth of up to 20%. 

T – Transparency

By having some transparency about your business, you can gain trust and loyalty from your customers. With so much information available today, it’s sometimes better to be transparent than look like you’re hiding something.

e.g. Neil Patel has cited Groove in his blog as an excellent example of transparency in marketing. The company reveals its revenue every month, but to find out the information, you have to subscribe to its blog, which in turn generates more traffic for Groove. 

U – User-centric

With so much information and different campaigns battling for your attention, it makes sense to target the user. Companies need to do something that appeals directly to the user that they are targeting with their marketing campaign.

e.g. Exercise clothing company Sweaty Betty runs yoga classes in-store, so participants will look at the products around the store while taking part in the class and be tempted into purchase. 

V – Viewability

Viewability refers to whether an advert was seen by anyone once it was published. Infectious Media reported that 54% of all digital advertising isn’t seen due to factors including users not scrolling, slow loading ad blockers and tab switching.

e.g. Eye tracking software can be used to determine how viewable an advert is. For example, a banner ad at the very top of a page may be overlooked because users automatically look to the main content on the page.

W – WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG editors interpret HTML into ‘What You See Is What You Get’ on web content building platforms and programmes. This allows people that aren’t experts in coding to still building web content by using drag and drop and other basic functions.

e.g. WordPress uses a great WYSIWYG editor to help people build their own websites.

(image from WordPress For Life Coaches)