Understanding content marketing jargon

Creating great content that helps you promote and share you organization with the world isn’t always easy. One of the first stumbling blocks on the road to content marketing success is misunderstanding. Marketing, in general, is a field that uses a lot of jargon. And jargon is confusing. So, to help you get off on the right foot with your content marketing goals, here’s a handy glossary of 10 online marketing words and concepts:

Content marketing

(First things first!) The creation of and sharing of content (blog posts, interviews, articles, PDFs, videos, etc.) to promote an organization, business, product or service.

Conversion path

A stream that guides website visitors through a specific process after they arrive on your site.

Conversion rate

The number of people who do what you hope they will after visiting your landing page or website. Your “conversion rate” is your success metric.

Inbound marketing

Marketing targeted to people looking for companies (rather than companies looking for supporters or clients).

Lead nurturing

The process of building positive relationships with all people who contact your organization, regardless of whether they intend to become immediate customers or supporters.

Marketing asset

A piece of content (for example, a blog post, a video, a newsletter) designed to educate as well as to generate interest in the organization that produced the content.

Persona

The personality of your organization (sometimes expressed as a fictional person you create to best represent that personality) or a specific demographic group. A persona is used to target people with similar personalities.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Sometimes referred to as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, SEM is the process of paying a search engine (such as Google) to advertise your product, service or organization.

Social media

Any strategy, software system or media outlet that relies on interaction and participation of users to create content. (Facebook, blogs and Twitter are also examples of social media.)

Social selling

Sometimes called Sales 2.0, social selling is the combination of web technologies and traditional sales strategies, used simultaneously, to make the marketing person recognizable as an expert sharing knowledge, and not just a sales professional.