Working with new business owners and those new to social media, there is occasional confusion in the language used when we talk about marketing; the posts, outcomes and goals. So, here’s my glossary of the terms used in my world of marketing. I hope it comes in useful and makes communication easier!
Platform – the likes of your website, your social media pages and anywhere your marketing message appears
Posts – An update that appears on your social media platforms
Blog – A piece of added value that is hosted on your website
Article – A blog that appears on your LinkedIn profile and more now also, your LinkedIn company page
Profile – How you appear, personally on the platform. Your LinkedIn profile is about you as a businessperson, but can be confused with pages as this is often where sole traders talk about their business
Page – Your business’ profile on platforms. You may have a separate LinkedIn company page, which is clearly for promoting your work, services and teams. Post can be shared by all employees with their own input/opinion
SEO – Search engine optimisation. The work that goes into both the back and front end of your platforms to give search engines the clues that you’re waiting to be discovered by visitors
Back end – The inner workings of your digital platforms. The bits visitor can’t see, such as how to load a blog or change the copy on a page. Accessible by admins only
Front end – The appearance of your digital platform as seen by visitors
SERPS – Search engine results pages, or the list of pages you get when you do a Google (or Bing) search. It’s worth noting here that search engines produce a list of pages, not websites, so each page needs to be optimised
Meta data – Enriched with your keywords, this is simply copy that is inserted into places like your page/profile URLs, tabs, SERPS description, main headlines, image file names and image alt text
Alt text – Alternative text version of an image. This is for people with digital readers where images are not accessible to them. Alt text should describe the image and use keywords where sensible. Don’t just put a list of keywords in hoping to boost your SEO, it won’t make sense when it gets read aloud!
URL – Uniform Resource Locator. This is unique to every page, two the same will break the links and your content will not be available. Most commonly known as web address
Hashtag - A way of joining a forum, common theme of posts or establishing a link to your expertise #Marketing
Organic – Traffic that has found you without being paid for
PPC – Pay Per Click: Advertising based on a bidding system, to boost traffic by paying for adverts. For example, Facebook or Google ads
Traffic – People! This is how we begin to quantify the number of people visiting your platforms for reporting purposes
Hilary – A brilliantly insightful way of getting your message out of your head and onto your platforms!
There are so many terms used in marketing that this blog would become increasingly boring as I went on, so I’ll leave it there for now and finish by saying this.
If you want some down-to-earth, non-jargony help and support in your marketing, give me a call or drop me an email.
It’s far less daunting with someone like me on your side.