Marketing Terms AV Business Owners Should Know

Marketing Terms AV Business Owners Should Know

As a new AV business owner, you might not have imagined all the information you’ll need to learn. From establishing a billing strategy to understanding international shipping complexities, it can feel like you’re spending more time figuring out how to do things than working on your business. You know what you shouldn’t have to figure out, though? Marketing terms.

One of the most impactful projects you can take on when launching a business is to hire a marketing and PR agency to establish your brand and create a relationship with your audience. Just like in every other industry, marketing professionals manage many terms that you might not be familiar with. Here are some of the most popular marketing terms that will help business owners understand marketing slang to look like a marketing pro:

Branding

The term branding refers to how your customers experience your business. It includes everything from your company’s mission to your core values, visions, business voice, etc.

Branding includes things like your corporate identity (logo, slogan, color scheme?), but it goes beyond that. As Jeff Bezos famously said, “Branding is what people say about you when you are not in the room.”

Check out our blog post on how to create an effective corporate identity here.

MarTech

Short for marketing technology, this includes all the apps and online tools that marketers use to support their efforts. Also referred to as the marketing stack, MarTech includes everything from automation platforms such as MailChimp to social media scheduling tools such as Sprout Social. The MarTech landscape is extremely complex and broad, with some going as far as incorporating AI to make smart predictions on your marketing efforts.

Marketing Funnel

This is the journey that a person takes from the moment they first learn about your brand to the time they make a purchase and beyond. The marketing funnel is useful because it allows marketers to create relevant messages for each stage of the journey.

There are many funnel models out there, but to keep it simple, think about it this way. Regardless of the product or service, a person will go through four stages when making a purchase: Identify a problem, research a solution, evaluate options, make a purchase.

Personas

Because not all customers have the same motivation or interests, marketers like to divide the audience into personas. Personas group certain common characteristics to create stereotypical customers. Personas are important because they create strong bonds between companies and their target audiences. With this intimate knowledge of each persona, companies can connect with each group in channels that are relevant to them and address them in ways that they will identify and respond to.

SEO/SEM

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are two of the most common buzzwords in online marketing. Though they are similar acronyms, they are immensely different. Both SEO and SEM are important strategies to get discovered through online searches and are complementary, but that’s where the similarities end.

SEO is the practice of optimizing content and websites to increase your chances of appearing in relevant online searches.

SEM are paid ads placed in search engine results pages.

Here’s an example that illustrates both:

Notice the word Ad in the first for search results, this is the giveaway that this is a paid ad. SEO, on the other hand, is earned placement in search results based on your website’s keywords. The importance of being high on the list is extremely important, therefore you should either work to get on the first page of results either, organically (through keywords), or by paying for ads. Both require a lot of marketing work.

CTA

Call-to-action. Usually presented as buttons on websites or emails, call to actions are an important element in all your marketing messages because they prompt the reader to go to the next step. CTAs have come a long way in recent years: Contact us now, Special Offer and Learn More are not as effective as they used to be, and marketers are stepping up to make every single word count.

These are only a very small sample of some of the most common marketing terms you might run into when working with an agency. What other marketing terms would you like us to feature next? Shoot us a quick email and let us know!

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