Common situation that can happen at any doctor’s office:
Doctor: Madam, you have hypertension.
Lady: Me? How’s that possible? I take care of myself—I always avoid salting my salads.
Doctor: Sure… But your hypertension is idiopathic ?
Lady: Oh, I see… ?
(Sepulchral Silence)
The lady didn’t ask—she thought she’d look stupid if she did, even if she’s not supposed to be familiarized with the doctor’s jargon. The doctor didn’t want to explain it either—he actually prefers not to acknowledge the limits of medicine (which is to say, he doesn’t want to look stupid either).
Real meaning of Idiopathic: “I have no idea what the cause is / The cause is unknown”.
The previous fragment, translated from Siete términos médicos que todo el mundo debería conocer, is a clear example of situations we all have lived at some point in our lives—some expert is using a set of technical terms we simply don’t know, and therefore we can’t follow. If the expert is nice, they might help you understand without your asking. But if they want to look like “real experts” ?, then “helping you” is probably out of the table—after all, your silly face is funny…
Well, as I do not want this to happen to you in the world of content marketing (where there is a lot of “experts” on the loose), I decided to make a selection of the 7 essential terms that you should know no matter what.
If after this post you feel like you want to know even more terms, here are some of the posts I used for presenting my own selection:
- 17 Marketing Terms You Were Too Embarrassed to Google (But Should Definitely Know) by Maggie Hibma
- The Ultimate Dictionary of Marketing You Should Know by Alec Bierdrzycki
- 10 Marketing Terms Every Small Business Owner Should Know by Deb Lee
- Digital Marketing Terms You Should Know by AIMG
- 101 Content Marketing Terms Every Marketer Should Know by GinzaMetrics
1. Content Marketing
Before talking about any other term, I think it’s fundamental that we begin by clearly defining what Content Marketing is, right? Joe Pulizzi defines Content Marketing as:
A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
It is important to emphasize that content marketing does not consist solely of mere content production. Although we all know that all information published on a website is intended to end up selling something, content marketing appeals to the needs and desires of customers without their having the feeling that you are bothering or selling something to them.
If your content is attractive and does not leave anyone indifferent, your business earns points. 8 (More) Absolutely Brilliant Content Marketing Innovations From the World’s Best Brands by Neil Patel shows you some good examples.
2. Buyer Persona
The goal of content marketing is to generate content that appeals to a target audience who ends up buying. A Buyer Persona is the archetype of our ideal client. It may seem similar to the target audience concept used in marketing, and they’re indeed quite similar. However, buyer personas also include specific demographics data and information on aspects such as their online behavior, personal, professional, and relationship with us—that is, you’re not interested in a “group of people”, but that particular “individual” that turns out to be your “ideal client”.
And why do I need this?, you may ask. Because in an environment with so much information, you have to identify what drives your customers’ curiosity and what concerns them—which is the exact information you’ll find in a buyer persona—if you want to stand out and be different from your competitors. That’s the reason why recent marketing campaigns are no longer related to the product itself, but the “interests”, “feelings”, and “emotions” of their buyer persona. For example, Burberry launched a campaign a few years ago, Burberry Acoustic, with the aim of promoting the young British musicians in whom Burberry believes. In this case, the main objective was for the brand to identify the culture of Burberry with those values that are attractive to their Buyer Persona—the proper British heritage.
3. Funnel
The definition of the sales funnel (also known as a revenue funnel or sales process) refers to the buying process that companies lead customers through when purchasing products. A sales funnel is divided into several steps, which differ depending on the particular sales model.
Why is this concept important? Because our content campaigns should focus on getting the maximum users in each of the different phases, whilst minimizing those that fall by the way. Specifically, our content has to contribute to the following steps:
- Generate Traffic to our website,
- Generate Leads, that is, web visitors that leave us their contact information,
- Interact with those contacts to retain them and, finally,
- Convert them into customers.
I think we all focus mainly on the first stage of creating—generating visibility. But what’s the point of getting more visitors, if they never become our clients? ?
Nelio A/B Testing
I was very impressed by the quality of this plugin, how easy it was to set up, and the outstanding support Nelio provides. I highly recommend Nelio A/B Testing.
Josette Millar
4. Content Curation
Content curation is the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Having ideas for generating relevant content is not just about being a creative guy. As I mentioned in 10 Blog Post Types – Which Ones Attract the Most Traffic? There are techniques and tools that can help you in the process of selecting content (for example, to know your keywords or the use of Feedly). You should also be informed about the tricks you should follow to attract more traffic—which Toni covered a few days ago in 10 Tricks to Write the Perfect Title.
5. Editorial Calendar
The editorial calendar is key in content marketing. It is your roadmap for content creation and shows you the frequency of publication, the types of content you will create, who in your team will be responsible for the creation of such content and, if it is a complete calendar, all social messages that will be published to promote such content.
Maintaining a good editorial calendar will allow you to be more organized and will help you to ensure that you are creating the content correctly. Do not miss our post of How to Create a Successful Editorial Calendar for Your Blog and learn to use it in a few minutes.
6. Conversion
We’ve already seen the importance of attracting traffic. But as we also mentioned, not only do you want to get visitors to your website, but you also want them to become customers and buy your products. The term conversion is precisely this: it is the point at which the receiver of a message that you have sent or the visitor of your website performs the action that you wanted them to perform. Such action may be to sign up for a newsletter, buy a product, open an email, reply, etc.
Once we have defined the concept of “conversion“, and knowing the number of visits to your website, we can perform a simple calculation to evaluate the success of it. The conversion rate of a web is defined as:
Conversion Rate = Number of Goal Achievements / Visitors
This rate tells us how efficient you are in converting people from mere visitors to customers. If you want to know more about this particular area, read our CRO Tips for Beginners.
7. A/B Testing
A/B tests are conducted with the aim of analyzing what type of content works best with our visitors. In other words (and using the previous term), they allow you to discover which content increases the conversions and, therefore, improves the conversion rate.
Here’s how it works in our context: you generate two versions of the same content that differ at some point (the title, the intro, the featured image… something, anything). Activate both versions and, with the right plugin, let half the visitors of your website see the original version and the other half see the alternative one.
After some time, when there has been enough traffic, you can compare the conversion rates of both alternatives and decide which of the two worked best to achieve your goals. Many of our Nelio A/B Testing customers who are conducting content A/B tests are intensely delighted with the conversion rates improvements they are getting.
And that’s all for today! I hope my selection of terms will be useful to improve your content marketing strategy. There are many more terms you should end up knowing at some point, but I think that you have enough for now. But if you insist on learning them today, I recommend that you expand your vocabulary with the references I shared at the beginning of this post.
Featured image by Hope House Press.
Leave a Reply