Since launching Strong Brand Social, we’ve met so many small business owners with varying levels of marketing experience. To master the art, you first need to speak the language. So we’ve compiled this glossary to help if you are trying to learn the lingo of social media and digital marketing. We’ve organized these in alphabetical order if you are looking for anything specific. We hope you find it helpful!   

• A/B Test: showing two variants of creative, copy, audience etc. to different segments of users at the same time to determine which variant drives better performance.
• Audience: who will see a particular piece of content. Often referred to as cold or warm. Here’s a deeper dive on audiences.
• Benchmark: standard measurements that are used to compare your results to those of your competitors or industry.
• Bottom of Funnel: the purchase stage of the online buying process. Here, a user has traveled through the know-you, like-you, trust-you stages of the customer journey and are primed to buy. 
• Brand Equity: the social value of a well-known brand name. 
• Channel Growth: number of new followers you’re gaining on your channels.
• Click Through Rate (CTR): a frequently used key performance indicator (KPI) for measuring if a piece of content is effective at driving website traffic from email, social, and other digital advertisements. Equal to how many users clicked the links included in your content divided by the number of people who saw it. Expressed as a percentage. 
• Cold Audiences: this audience has never heard of your brand. The industry benchmark for CTR on a social ad for a cold audience is .9 –1%. The majority of ads sent to cold audiences are trying to sell off the bat. We recommend introducing ourselves with consumer-centric, value-add content first. 
• Content Calendar: a schedule of when and where you plan to publish upcoming content. Critical for efficiency and collaboration.
• Content Pillars: categories or themes, content pillars are a brand storytelling framework that help you get organized, align your content to business goals, and prioritize your storytelling.  They help increase like and trust of your brand because there is consistency in your relationship with your followers.  
• Conversion Rate: the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors. Often referred to for sales conversion rate. 
• Cost Per Click (CPC): the actual price you pay for each click in your paid marketing campaigns.
• Custom Conversions: track and retarget users based on specific actions they’ve taken that indicate where they are in their customer journey / future purchasing intent. For example, if you want to track an audience who has read a blog post or watched 50% of a video.  
• Earned media or earned content: think of the “freebies” you get when people engage with or share your content – this is people talking about you to their friends or network. It’s often forgotten, but it’s how you get the most out of the time you invest in your owned content (definition below) , and the money you invest in paid content (definition below), because earned increases the organic (aka unpaid) reach of your content. 
• Engagement Rate: number of engagements on a post divided by the number of impressions, multiplied by 100, shown as a percentage. Engagements can be likes, comments, video views, clicks, and shares. This is a KPI for how effectively your content aligns with and nurtures your community. 
• Funnel: an intentional and strategic construction of the consumer journey meant to accelerate the prospects pace of advancing through awareness, consideration, and conversion.  
• Giveaway: a piece of contest where something of value is awarded to a selected winner, with the purpose of engaging, surprising, and delighting your current fan base while extending your reach to new audiences. 
• Hot Audience: customers who have visited your website or supplied you their contact details.
• Impressions: total number of times your content was seen (counts a single user more than once).
• Key Performance Indicator (KPI): performance metrics used to determine if a campaign or piece of content is successful, at benchmark, or below benchmark. 
• Landing Page: a web page that appears after clicking a search result, marketing promotion, marketing email, or an online advertisement.
• Lead: a warm prospect that you can retarget, including website visitors, email subscribers, social media followers. 
• Lead Generation: the initiation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business.
• Lookalike Audience: a cold audience that’s modeled off of one of your warm audiences. Therefore, the quality of a lookalike audience should be greater than other types of cold audiences. For example, Facebook can create a lookalike audience from your website traffic or customer list.
• Look & Feel: also known as brand identity or visual identity and critical for consistency. If you want to increase the likelihood that when people land on your social profiles, they choose to follow you, then this is something you need to take seriously.
• Measurement Model: aligning and assigning Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to your content and social program. Knowing your benchmarks so that you can monitor performance and understand if your efforts are successful.
• Organic Social Media Content: any content on social media without paid promotion. When you post as your page but don’t put any money behind it, you are creating an organic post. 
• Owned Content: content that you have on your owned channels. Such as website, social media, and email. This is content you produce without putting any money behind it to publish on your own channels.
• Paid Content: any content that you put paid dollars behind for increased reach. 
• Paid Social Framework: aligning your paid social budget and efforts (goals, platforms, tactics) with business goals. Having a strong point of view on which platforms and tactics will best drive brand growth, engagement, and traffic. And then operating within that framework for consistency and success.
• Personification: the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something non-human. The job of social media is to personify a brand to enhance the organization’s ability to emotionally connect and build trust with its community. 
• Pixel: a piece of code that collects information about a user. When running Facebook ads, you install a pixel on the website to track anyone who visited a specific product page, generally visited the website/homepage, or any other of your custom conversions. You can go into FB Ads and retarget people who have, for example, been on your website in the last 180 days.
• Reach: total number of unique users that are seeing your content. Similar number as impressions, but users are only counted once.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM): a form of internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages with paid advertising.
• Sticky Content: content with a goal of getting more people to engage with your brand (not to sell more products immediately). Shareable, relatable, viral content. 
• Strategic Alignment: when your social media content strategy, tactics, and every day programming are aligned with your business goals.
• Top of Funnel: the first stage of the buyer’s journey where we’re connecting with cold audiences to build the relationship. It is the awareness stage of the customer journey and marketing funnel. 
• User Generated Content (UGC): content, such as images, videos, text, and audio, featuring your brand that has been posted by users to online platforms such as social media.
• Warm Audiences: people who have engaged with your brand but haven’t bought yet. They’re in the consideration phase of the customer journey and marketing funnel, including social media followers and website visitors.

If you’re looking to join a community of business owners who are on the path to better social media marketing and working together to learn about greater growth, engagement, and website traffic from social, join Strong Brand Social today for $37. Some testimonials to help guide your decision making, below: 

“This was very informative! You’re learning from experts in their industry which was exactly what I was looking for…Thanks so much for offering this incredible value of information. Definitely worth the purchase!!”

“This course is fantastic. I’ve tried out way too many in the past that just ended up feeling inauthentic and empty, and inevitably useless. You actually learn stuff, I mean A LOT, and it’s a screaming deal. So glad I clicked the button”

“I’m loving this program. You guys weren’t kidding when you said you pack in a lot of knowledge! I’m through the videos and working on the workbook entries right now. Just the content prompts alone are worth it. Thanks for doing such an amazing job.”

“I did a “new boost” and changed my average 12-15 likes per IG post to over 200 likes for the post I boosted with your awesome suggestions.”

“I really appreciate you and your team. You are really different from other programs I’ve taken a look at. Once they get my email address I get flooded with so many emails and pushy salesmanship that I end up just unsubscribing. But you are a class act and I appreciate your methods and professionalism.”

But Katie, if it’s so good then why is it so cheap?

Because most of the world needs to catch a break right now. Consider this yours and meet us inside Strong Brand Social.