Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Top 10 Marketing Terms for 2014


While marketing may be a single bullet in your regular leadership team meeting agenda, how much time does your team actually apply to marketing your products or services? With all the buzz surrounding social media, traditional marketing has taken a back seat, and that’s a shame.

All types of business – whether B2B, B2C, or non-profit – need to understand all elements that fall within the marketing pie, and one important piece of the marketing pie is the lingo or terms that create their own buzz each year.

Here are my top 10 marketing terms and definitions to assist your business as 2014 dawns.

BEHAVIORAL TARGETING (also Audience Targeting):

With more social networking sites in the news as a result of their privacy policies and questions as to how they access and use customer data, behavioral targeting is a hot topic. Websites capture data generated by website and landing page visitors and determine the effectiveness of their campaigns. Ads can also be created based on this data.

BRAND PERSONALITY:
With so many brands in the marketplace and so much noise as a result of social media, now marketers treat brands as if they had personality traits. When brands are given human personality traits, such as, creative, friendly, happy, etc., brands quickly stand apart from the crowd.

CONTENT MARKETING:
Content marketing is any content (blogs, white papers, eBooks, Infographics, case studies, guides, etc.) that has been created to provide value to customers and prospects on a regular basis. The goal of content marketing is communicating as opposed to selling.

DIGITAL MARKETING:
Digital marketing makes use of electronic devices such as computers, tablets, smartphones, cellphones, digital billboards, and game consoles to engage with consumers.

ENGAGEMENT:
Engagement marketing is also called "participation marketing." This is because it strives to connect a consumer with a brand with the objective of creating a long-term connection. Once consumers are engaged with a brand, the hope is that they are no longer passive receivers of messages, but instead, they are brand advocates or ambassadors who share a brand’s strengths with others with positive word-of-mouth marketing.

LOYALTY MARKETING:
Loyalty marketing is when a business focuses on growing and retaining existing customers as a result of incentives. These incentives can be discounts, coupons, free products that correspond to purchased products, etc. Imagine that you purchased a specific brand of car or truck. An example of loyalty marketing would be a postcard via the US mail or an email offering a special price due to your previous purchase and an invitation to return to the same dealer for a unique test-drive experience.

PULL DIGITAL MARKETING:
Consumers do not actively seek marketing content. Websites, blogs, and streaming media (audio and video) are examples. In each of these, users have to navigate to specific websites to view content.

PUSH DIGITAL MARKETING:
The marketer sends a message without the consent of a recipient – for example, display advertising on websites and blogs. Email, text messaging, and web feeds can also be classified as push digital marketing when the recipient has not given permission to receive the message.

SHARE OF MIND:
As a result of social media, share of mind has limitless opportunities. This is because share of mind measures how often consumers think about a specific brand as a percentage of all the times they think about all the brands in the same category.

KPMs or KEY PERFORMANCE METRICS (also Key Performance Indicators or KPIs):

While also a member of last year’s list, this term is so important that it should be on the mind of every business person every day. All marketing campaigns must be evaluated to determine the return on investment. How many click-thru’s to your main website or campaign-specific landing pages resulted from emails? How many leads came as a result of tradeshow attendance or telemarketing? How many likes appeared on your Facebook page? How many mentions and retweets appeared on Twitter? How many of your videos were uploaded on YouTube? How many sales resulted from your social media activities?

What’s your favorite term to start the New Year?

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Image Credit: Stuart Miles via FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

3 comments:

  1. Excellent suggestions. I think email marketing and mobile marketing will remain top priorities in 2014 as they are still great ways to reach targeted customers.

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  2. Excellent! I really appreciate your knowledge about the new way of how to do Internet/Digital Marketing. All these tips are very useful for all of us, specially for newbie. In my opinion content marketing is one of the most crucial part of marketing. Do you agree with me?

    Please do visit this website if you are a dental or medical doctor: Online marketing for dentists

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