Smart Marketing Episode 2 - Marketing Terms

Reviewing some of the $5 words that marketers casually throw around

In today's episode we discuss some of the new marketing terminology used today. http://youtu.be/3oMGtxiAbU0  

Transcription of the Video:

Hi this is Stephen Cohen, the Marketing Director here at AlphaGraphics West Valley and this is Smart Marketing. Wanted to talk today about those $5 words that marketing people throw around, myself included. If you don’t have a marketing degree and haven’t been in the industry for at least a few years some of these words may be a little complicated and go over your head a little bit. So I want to define them in normal people terms. The first word I wanted to talk about is inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is basically what activities do you do so that when someone is looking for a service that they find your service. Inbound marketing includes content or website content so that when someone searches online for your product that your website comes up and those people come inbound. We basically call it the low hanging fruit or it’s the people that are looking to purchase from you and are searching for your services. A common strategy nowadays is to go after inbound leads a lot more than just doing outbound activities since they are ready to buy and obviously have shown interest in your product through finding you. So instead of you having to go out and find a customer they are actually finding you. That’s inbound marketing. Wanted to talk about Search Engine Optimization or as everyone calls it SEO. Search engine optimization is really just making sure that you have optimized or made your website easily findable by people who are searching for it. So that is how you write your content so that your keywords appeal to the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo and you have relevance. So if I’m searching for let’s say printing services in West Valley City that our website AlphaGraphics West Valley shows up. That’s search engine optimization, so optimizing, primarily your website, so that a search engine can find it. Wanted to talk about Pay Per Click or PPC. Pay per click is basically you paying to get a click. So if you search on Google it has Google ads across the top and the side of the screen that are advertised, those are pay per click places where every time someone clicks on that page basically whoever has purchased that ad pays money. Pay per click is done in banner advertising so when you see banner ads across the screen and you’re clicking on that, that’s pay per click as well, you are paying for that advertising space. Another word, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is very similar to pay per click so they are used synonymous even though they don’t really mean the same thing. So most people when they say search engine marketing or SEM are actually referring to pay per click, where you are paying money to have people click on your ads. Search engine marketing is really a broader term to describe SEO or search engine optimization and pay per click. It’s marketing through search engines, so that again would be Google, Yahoo, or Bing and what activities are you doing for that. That would be optimizing your website on the SEO side and paying for advertising space on the pay per click side. Content Marketing. Content marketing is the process of generating content. Content being anything from web page articles, blog articles, something like this video where you are generating content for someone to consume and your goal when you create the content is to market your company or help accent your company and services. Content marketing we’ll see over the next few years is the word, it’s the thing that everyone’s doing. And that is because the marketing strategy is changing from outbound to inbound. So now if someone is trying to search for my services online, I need to generate content so that Google recognizes that I am an expert in my space and will drive traffic towards my site. That’s the concept of content marketing is that you generate content and that content will help appeal to inbound leads and those people will interface with you for sales. Marketing Automation is a big one. Marketing automation is the process of basically automating or making it so some of your marketing processes work without human interaction. A good example would be an email drip campaign. So I don’t know if you’ve signed up for one of those “sign up for my emails” and you get these automatic emails every couple of days. Well those aren’t emails that the person sits down and writes to you every single day it’s part of a drip campaign, where they have a certain automated flow and process and schedule of how often an email comes to you, what that email content is, and that is marketing automation. That’s another big tool that will becoming more prevalent for more and more businesses throughout the years. It’s how do you take your marketing activities and streamline them so that when you have an inbound client that comes in, someone who has found you on the website, and wants to engage with your company but isn’t quite ready to buy yet. How do you make sure that you keep them in the funnel? Marketing automation is designed to do that so you don’t have to manually or have a human look at every single prospect in your pipeline and determine which messages go to them. The final $5 word and this is probably my favorite $5 word is called integrated marketing because it sounds really complicated and I actually had to go look this one up myself because it’s a “masters” level marketing word. But integrated marketing basically means how do all of your marketing activities relate to each other. So when we talk about integrated marketing strategy it means that if, let’s say as a small business you are using email, you are using social media, your website, and you are doing a mailer for your marketing pieces. So let’s say you have four marketing pieces for this month that you are doing. Now an integrated marketing plan for the month is how do all of these four marketing pieces correlate or work together. So that means that your email looks like your website, which looks like your social media posts, which looks like your mail piece. Down to the colors. Down to the message or what you’re saying to your clients. Down to the design. So that those all work together. In sales we talk about needing seven touches before someone is really interested in buying from you or making a purchasing decision. Integrated marketing is the idea that if I have to touch someone 7 times I want to make sure that every single touch looks and feels the same so that they understand it’s coming from me. Brands that do a really good job at this, if you look at McDonalds, everyone knows what a McDonald’s ad is because they always have the same messaging. Right now, if you look around at least Salt Lake City, UT the standard marketing message from McDonalds happens to be revolving around their drinks and their fountain drinks only costing a dollar. So in their TV advertising, their billboard advertising, in their point of purchase or in store advertising all of it relates to that specific product of it’s a one dollar fountain drink. And that is integrated marketing. That’s it for today’s Smart Marketing, thanks for watching, look forward to seeing you in the future.