Speak Scout Glossary

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A/B Testing

Testing two variations of the same variable, like an email subject line or a button color, to see which variation performs better. Beware: only change one variable at a time, or you won’t be able to tell what’s actually causing the difference.

Analytics

Patterns in data, like email open rates, that help you figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how you can take your performance to the next level. Despite all the numbers, these aren’t just for people with math brains. Use them as a guide to create awesome content that vibes with your audience.

Business-to-Business (B2B)

 Describes businesses that sell to other businesses, like Google selling ad space to other companies.

Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

Describes businesses that sell directly to consumers, with Amazon as a prime example.

Bottom of the Funnel

When someone is really close to buying and about to become a customer, they’ve entered the bottom of the funnel. This is typically where you try to win them over with a delightful demo or a call from your most charming sales rep.

Bounce Rate

For websites, this is the percentage of people who land on a page and leave without engaging. For emails, this is the percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered to people’s inboxes. Make relevant, interesting content and keep your email lists up-to-date to avoid high bounce rates.

Buyer Persona

A semi-fictional, research-based representation of your ideal customer that helps you understand and target your audience. While these may sound like imaginary friends, they’re actually powerful tools to help you empathize with your audience and craft the best strategies to connect with them.

Call-to-Action (CTA)

Buttons, links, or images that encourage your audience to do something, like subscribe to your balloon animal newsletter. The more enticing and specific, the better; tell them exactly what they’re getting and exactly how it benefits them.

Churn Rate

A metric to measure how many customers you keep and the value of the full lifetime of that relationship.

To calculate the churn rate: # of customers you lost in a certain time frame/#number of customers you had at the beginning of the time frame (without including any new sales from that time frame).

For instance, if you had 100 customers at the start of August and only 50 by the end of August, your churn rate would be (100 – 50)/100 = 50%.

Click-Through Rate

The percentage of your audience that clicks through from one part of your website to the next step of your campaign.

To calculate the click-through rate: # of clicks your page or CTA receives/# of opportunities that people had to click.

For instance, if 100 people came to your deodorant website and only 5 of them clicked on the CTA encouraging them to become less smelly, you would have a click-through rate of 5%.

Conversion Path

A series of events on your website that helps you capture leads. For example, a pet shop’s site can have a call-to-action that leads to a landing page with a free ebook on reasonable lizard species to have as pets, helping your potential customers make the best choice for their new scaly friend.

Content Management System (CMS)

A platform that makes it easier for non-developers to create their own website and leverage tools like keywords for ranking higher in search results. Fear not; you don’t have to be a tech wizard to use a CMS.

Context

For inbound marketing that draws people in, context is key. Your content needs to be customized for the right audience at the right time; someone sweating poolside in Florida probably isn’t looking for down jackets in Vermont.

Conversion Rate

The percentage of people who take an action that you want them to, like subscribing to your circus newsletter or downloading your demo of How to Not Be a Jerk.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Improving your conversion rates – or the percentage of people who take an action that you want them to – by using design techniques, testing, and other CRO principles. Think of it like a video game where you level up in increments for huge gains over time.

Cost-Per-Lead (CPL)

How much it costs you to get a lead. Pretty self-explanatory.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

How much it costs you to get a new customer. To calculate CAC: total sales and marketing cost/# of new customers in the relevant period (month, quarter, or year). 

Dynamic Content

Displaying different information based on what you know about your audience. If someone just ordered a sad romance movie, you might recommend tissues with their purchase.

Engagement Rate

A social media metric that tracks how much interaction a piece of content receives. Likes, shares, comments – usually the higher engagement, the more you’re vibing with your audience (unless people are swarming to leave you hate comments – let’s try to avoid that).

Evergreen Content

Content without an expiration date, like a blog post about how to write a blog post. This content is always relevant, always valuable, and always great for ranking higher in search results.

Full-Service Creative Agency

Hey, that’s us! These agencies do it all. Building a new brand, redesigning a website, launching a powerful video marketing strategy – if it helps tell your story and drive results, we’re all in.

From the front end (how your website looks) to the back end (the behind-the-scenes stuff, like inventory maintenance for e-commerce), we’re your one-stop digital shop.

Gestalt Principles

General rules for how human brains perceive patterns, like seeing objects that are closer together as more related. These can be super useful when you’re trying to organize content on your website or design a visual layout for a social media post.

Hashtag

Hashtags are keyword phrases that help you and your audience talk about a topic on social media. When you put a pound sign (#) in front of a keyword, it becomes a searchable phrase that allows for conversations – like using #sendJerryhome to talk about how Jerry on The Bachelorette clearly isn’t there for the right reasons.

Inbound Marketing

A marketing strategy that involves attracting potential customers with valuable content that they naturally want to engage with, like how-tos or informational guides about solutions to their problems.

Inbound Link

A link on someone else’s website that leads to your website, like if Guy Fieri linked to your burger joint’s site in a blog post about the best barbecue in town. Inbound links are vital for ranking high in search results and driving referral traffic to your site.

Infographic

A piece of visual content that conveys often complex information in a simple, delightful way, like a cute illustration of a dolphin that says, “Bottlenose dolphins sleep with half of their brain at a time.” (It’s true. Look it up.)

Jargon

These technical words make sense to people in specific groups, but they make the rest of the world go, “Huh?” Limit jargon as much as possible and, if you absolutely must use it, explain each word in simple terms. Your goal is to connect with your audience, not alienate them.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Metrics that help you evaluate your success. They could be anything from the number of qualified leads to the number of blog articles you published this month. To avoid getting lost in a sea of numbers, try to stick to the 5 -7 most relevant to your business’s growth (and no, “number of times we high-fived” doesn’t count).

Keyword

Topics that search engines look for on web pages when ranking search results. Optimize your pages for the relevant words that your target audience is searching for so that they can find you ASAP.

Landing Page

Landing pages have a valuable marketing offer like an ebook that visitors get in exchange for sharing some of their information (turning them into leads! Hooray!). To make these pages super relevant for your audience, it’s helpful to create landing pages for different personas at different stages in the buying process.

Lead

A person or company who’s shown interest in what you offer. This could mean subscribing to your newsletter, submitting a form, or shouting from the rooftops how much they love your brand.

Lead Nurturing (AKA Drip Marketing)

Giving useful content to your audience when and where they need it to foster their movement through the buying lifecycle. Like any good relationship, it’s usually not a one-and-done interaction; don’t leave them hanging when they’re asking for more.

Lifecycle Stages

These stages – awareness, evaluation, and purchase – correspond to your audience’s relationship to you. Your content should be relevant to your audience’s lifecycle stage; someone who’s about to click “buy” on their third Tesla will have different needs than someone who’s buying their first car and has no idea where to start.

Lifetime Value (LTV)

A prediction of how much net profit you’ll make from the full future relationship with a customer.

To calculate the LTV for a customer: Gross margin – (revenue customer paid in a time period)/churn rate (aka cancellation rate) for that customer.

Don’t worry, you’re not judging their value as people; just what they can bring to your business over the course of your relationship with them.

Marketing Automation

Platforms that automate repetitive tasks so that you can market across various channels more effectively, like automatically sending a survey when a customer buys one of your dog sweaters for the first time.

Microsite

A supplementary, much smaller website that has a different domain and usually different branding than your main website.These sites have a specific purpose, like raising brand awareness or launching a new product. Adobe’s My Creative Type microsite is a brilliant (if somewhat unsettling) example.

Middle of the Funnel

Once a lead knows their problem and wants to conduct more research to find a solution, they’ve entered the middle of the funnel. This is the time to break out your killer case studies, glossy product brochures, and other content about your awesomeness – anything to show that you’re the solution they’re looking for (of course, only if you are the solution for them; the goal is to be helpful, not to be a trickster).

Mobile Marketing

Optimizing your marketing efforts for mobile with things like time- and location-sensitive information. If you have a pizza parlor and a ravenous family on a roadtrip is searching for great food nearby, make sure you pop up at the top of their list.

Mobile Optimization

Ever tried to pull up a website on your phone, only to curse the gods because it’s not working on mobile but you need the information right now? Yeah. Infuriating. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly (AKA optimized for mobile), you run the risk of frustrating your audience and you probably won’t rank as high in Google searches.

Native Advertising

A form of online advertising with ads that blend into the platform they appear on. It’s usually sponsored content that fits naturally into the user’s experience, like an ad on Instagram that feels like another post rather than a screaming billboard.

Omnichannel Marketing

Giving your customers a lovely, seamless experience no matter where they find you. On Instagram? Boom, delightful posts right on brand. On your website? Wow, flawless experience on a desktop, laptop, or phone. Brick and mortar store? Hello friend, warm welcomes all around.

A great and consistent presence across multiple channels doesn’t just help your customers find you. It also makes you look super put together, like that one friend who always shows up on time and knows exactly what they’re doing with their life (or at least pretends they do).

Pay-Per-Click (PCP)

A type of advertising where you pay any time a visitor clicks on one of your ads. Pretty sweet since you only pay when your audience is actually interacting with the things you’re putting out into the world.

Qualified Lead

Someone who chose to receive communication from you and wants to learn more about your company. Like two people who swiped right on a dating app, they’re probably a good match for you.

Responsive Design

Designing websites that work on all screen sizes. Whether your audience is lounging on the couch with their laptop or hiking a mountain with their cell, your designs should accommodate their needs and help them wherever they are, whatever they’re doing.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Measures how much you get back for the money that you invest so that you can determine the best use of your time and resources. If buying ten boxes of Fruit Roll-Ups for your marketing team every day has a negative ROI, it’s probably time to rethink that strategy.

To calculate your ROI: ROI = [(current value of investment – cost of investment) / cost of investment] * 100

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Designing your content and web pages so that they rank higher in search results. Use relevant keywords and image tags – along with getting reputable sources to link back to your content and making sure your site structure and design are on point – to improve your SEO.

Top of the Funnel

The first stage of the buying process, when your potential customers are identifying their problem and looking for more information. Make content that helps them define their problem and move towards a solution, like a blog post about different types of tattoos for someone who’s realizing they want to get inked for the first time.

User Experience (UX)

The holistic experience that a customer has with a business, from first entering their website to making a purchase. To create a brilliant experience, you should conduct research about your customers and their needs so that you can go above and beyond and give them what they actually want – not what you guess they want.

User Interface (UI)

The look and feel of a website or application. Colors, typography, and other visual elements like white space all tie in to making an interface accessible, intuitive, and beautiful (unless you’re going for some sort of grunge theme, which actually sounds pretty rad).

Video Marketing

Harnessing the power of video (especially mobile-first) to drive conversions, whether through paid media campaigns or directly on the homepage of your beautiful website. AKA Scout Digital’s superpower.

Voxels

Unrelated to marketing, but here’s something cool: Heard of Minecraft? Ever wondered how it renders those randomized worlds? You can thank voxels – a value on a regular grid in three-dimensional space. #alwayslearning

Wireframe

Ever written an outline for an essay at school? A wireframe is a visual outline for a web page. No color, no detail, no distractions – just the structure of each page to be filled in with that beautiful content later on.

It’s like the skeleton of a web page, only less spooky.

X-Factor

The pizzazz infused in everything we create, down to the Instagram post.

You

An awesome, wonderful, super talented person. (See also: genius.)

Zero-Cost Strategy

Plans that don’t cost any of that green, like stapling fliers to the bulletin board at your local library. Get creative to get your name out there.