Glossary of Inbound Marketing Terms
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRADITIONAL MARKETING AND INBOUND MARKETING?
Inbound Marketing can be your new secret weapon. Traditional marketing is more interruptive and can include cold calling with calling scripts and boilerplate marketing documents with set stock answers, and offers. Technology is making these techniques less effective and more expensive; SPAM filters block mass emails, caller ID block calls, etc. So whether you are marketing professional services to get your law firm legal leads, or developing the latest SaaS or IoT start-up, Inbound Marketing can be your most friendly and cost-effective method to gain qualified sales leads and customers.
What is inbound?
Inbound is a fundamental shift in the way we do business. Instead of your marketer and salesperson trying to manipulate and control, inbound is about empowering the customer. It's about creating videos, business blogs, and useful content inspiring prospects to contact you for more information.
It’s about creating a conversation that draws prospects in.
What is the Inbound Methodology?
The Four Stages of the Inbound Marketing and Sales Process:
- Attract Strangers to your website, turn them into Visitors through blog posts, optimizing your website, and social media;
- Convert Visitors into Leads by gathering their contact information (through emails), calls to action, landing pages, data analytics and content creation;
- Close Leads to Customers through customer relationship management (CRM), email, and workflows; and
- Delight Customers to become Promoters through surveys, smart content, and social monitoring.
What are the inbound best practices?
- Use buyer personas
- Use the buyer’s journey
- Create remarkable content
- Leverage your content
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of a real customer. It is based on actual data and informed speculation about customer behavior patterns, motivations, goals, and demographics.
What are the components of a persona profile story?
A persona profile story includes similarities, commonalities, and trends found through:
- Background
- Demographics
- Identifiers
- Goals
- Challenges
- How we help
- Common Objections
- Real Quotes
What is the buyer’s journey?
A buyer's journey is the active research leading up to a purchase.
What are the stages that make up the buyer’s journey? How are they defined?
- Awareness is when the buyer expresses problems or symptoms;
- Consideration is when s/he names the problem or opportunity; and
- The Decision is when the prospect has decided on a solution or approach.
What part does content play in the Inbound Marketing and Sales Process?
Remarkable content is an essential factor in the process. A blog post must provide the buyer with information about problems as well as solutions.
In terms of inbound, what is context?
Context is the creation of content crafted for those you aim to reach.
What are the different ways to leverage content?
The right distribution technique gets the right content in front of the right person at the right time and include:
- Website pages
- Business blog
- Social media
- Landing pages
- Calls to action
- Marketing Emails
What is search engine optimization (SEO)?
This is the process of improving your website to attract more strangers through search engines.
What are online directories and why are they important for SEO?
Examples of online directories are Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Chambers of Commerce. They serve to increase citations of your business name and address.
What are the three things that content can be defined by?
Content is information:
- Purpose
- Format
- Topic
What are SMART goals?
• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely
What is a social media content plan?
A social media content plan outlines the pieces of content you will promote and the social media channels you will promote them on.
What is the conversion process?
It begins with a call to action (CTA) which leads to a landing page where one fills out a form and becomes a lead.
What is a CTA?
A call to action (CTA) is an offer that leads to a landing page.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a website page designed to convert visitors to leads.
What is Smarketing?
Smarketing is the process of integrating the sales and marketing processes of a business.
What constitutes a marketing qualified lead (MQL)?
An MQL is a lead judged more likely to become a customer compared to other leads. The intelligence is based on informed by closed-loop analytics.
What is a service level agreement (SLA)?
It is a contract between a provider and the end user defining the level of service expected from the service provider.
What is closed-loop reporting?
It is the loop between marketing data and sales data.
What are inbound sales?
Inbound sales are the process of focusing on individual buyers and their personal areas of difficulty and goals.
What is a positioning statement?
A position statement is an expression of how a given brand, product or service fills a specific customer need that its competitors do not.
What are the three pillars of delight?
• Innovation
• Personal Communication
• Education
What is a value proposition?
A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It’s the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. It explains how your product solves customers’ problems or improves their situation (relevancy), delivers specific benefits (quantified value), and tells the ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition (unique differentiation).
What is a responsive web design?
A responsive web design (RWD) allows web pages to adjust dynamically for computer, mobile, tablet, and widescreen to be viewed in response to the size of the screen or web browser the visitor is using.
Describe artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is that exhibited by machines that perceive its environment and acts in accordance to achieve its goal.
Explain what an online education system is.
An Online Education system is a software application designed to take educational content and make it available to learners with access to the internet. The educational content can be authored in a way that makes it dynamic, interactive and interesting.
What is the Agile Movement?
It is a set of principles for software development whose requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of cross-functional, self-organizing teams. It involves adaptive planning, evolutionary development, and continuous improvement responding to change.
What is a virtual private server?
A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. A VPS runs its own copy of an operating system, and customers may have superuser-level access to that operating system (OS).
What is HTML?
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications.
Describe HTTP.
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web. Hypertext is structured text that uses logical links (hyperlinks) between nodes containing text.
Describe CSS.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on paper, screen, or other media. It can control the layout of multiple web pages at once.
What is XML?
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.
What is LAMP stack?
LAMP stack is a popular open source web platform commonly used to run dynamic websites and servers. It includes Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl and is considered by many the platform of choice for development and deployment of high-performance web applications which require a solid and reliable foundation.
