Owning a small business requires you to wear many hats. This includes everything from sales to service and operations to marketing. Each area comes with their own set of best practices, standards, and terms. Digital marketing is no different than any other position in your business and it has several terms that you should absolutely know and understand as a small business owner.
To help you understand essentials, we’ve compiled a list of our top 10 digital terms we believe every small business owner should know. No matter your industry, title, or niche, we believe you should know these to help your business succeed in the digital realm.
10 Digital Terms To Know
- Responsive: This is not a term to describe how quickly your employee responds to your email. However, it is a term that should be used to describe your website design. When a design is tagged as “responsive” this means no matter the size of the screen the website is displayed on, it will have the exact same look, feel, and content. Gone are the days of having a mobile website versus your desktop website. If your website is not responsive, contact your web provider immediately.
- Call-To-Action (CTA): Exactly as its name describes, a CTA entices a visitor to take action. Call-to-actions can come in a variety of forms including text, banner, form, or button and ask the reader to do something. This something can be anything that is important to the website or business. Newsletter sign-ups, product purchase, read more, and download an e-book are all common CTAs. A call-to-action is important to produce leads and sales from your website.
- Click Thru Rate (CTR): Used to measure how many users are engaging with content on a website, the CTR is presented as a percentage. It is determined by the number of visitors to your website divided by the number of impressions the site receives. You might see the CTR as a statistic for ads or email blasts your company sends out. Of course, the higher the click-thru-rate, the better the chances of a conversion. In a sense, it measures how active users are with the content on your website.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search Engine Optimization is a marketing practice that helps your website show higher in the search engine results. While there are several aspects and contributors to SEO, simply understanding that there are ways to increase your website’s visibility is what is important. If you have a website or are in the process of developing one, ask your designer how they are optimizing your web for search.
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP): This is an easy one to understand because you likely see them several times a day. Every time you search for something on Google, you are provided with results. This is a SERP – the page that a search engine shows after a user submits a search query. SERP is a term that is frequently used, but not many small business owners know what it is and why we included it on our list.
- Customer Relations Management (CRM): A CRM describes the process in which a business manages interactions with their customers and clients, stores data about them, and automates messaging between the company and customer. A customer relations management software typically houses and offers the ability to analyze large amounts of data. An efficient and effective CRM software can be used by small and large businesses alike. If you do not have a CRM in place, we highly recommend you set one up sooner than later, especially if you are ready to scale your business.
- Keywords: These are words or phrases that users might enter into a search engine query to find a product, service, or answer to a question. Keywords are an essential part of SEO and digital advertising. If you know how customers are finding your website, you can tailor future content and ads to these keywords, which further helps your website rank higher. Discussing keywords with your website provider can help you position your business in the market and support your SEO efforts.
- Meta Description: This is the small blurb that is shown under your website page title on the search engine results page. The meta description will include a short explanation of the page so users know whether the content provides what they are searching for. Small business owners should understand the meta description as a means to support SEO and further provide quality for their consumers.
- Landing Page: Typically used in specific marketing and advertisements, a landing page is a single web page executed to help with conversions. Using advertising to drive traffic to said web page, customers are then provided with further details, information, and prompted with a specific CTA. As a small business owner, if you know what a landing page is, you can make better decisions on ads, giveaways, sales, and customer acquisition.
- Conversion: When a customer takes a desired action, it counts as a conversion. A few examples of a conversion include product purchase, scheduling a service, email sign up, document download, or lead submission. Tracking the traffic that produces conversions will help you understand where to allocate marketing dollars. Google Analytics and an effective CRM can help organize the data for analysis.
Have questions about these terms or how you can scale your business with digital marketing?
Let us help! SharpFinn provides digital marketing services to small businesses accross the US. Our team has nearly two decades of experience and can help you understand more about the digital world. We are happy to grab a cup of coffee or schedule a call to discuss how to take your marketing to the next level.