Have you considered adding the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to your inbound marketing campaigns? Are you calculating keyword proximity to boost your SEO results? Have you leveraged the power of lookalike audiences on Facebook’s advertising platform? Are you optimizing your AdWords rating by working to boost your Quality Score?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, congratulations—you’re ahead of the marketing game for 2018. These four terms and six others listed in this post are among the hottest digital marketing terms for the new year. This short list will give you a quick overview of terms you must know. You can also check out our complete list of Must-Know Digital Marketing Terms.
For our 2021 list, check out 19 Digital Marketing Terms You Should Know in 2021.
AI became the most influential marketing term of 2017. But in 2018, the technology itself is poised to accelerate in actual use. “It’s not just the marketing word of the year. It’s the transformative phenomenon that’s going to reshape the world as we now know it,” said one anonymous Association of National Advertisers member. AI is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans, including speech recognition, deep learning, planning and problem-solving. According to Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, the search giant’s AI wing, AI is the “science of making machines smart.”
What does AI mean for digital marketers? Many predict that the marketers who begin to deploy AI will see outsized benefits—in fact, so great that inbound marketing without some type of AI won’t make economic sense. The industry movement birthed by HubSpot will finally achieve its ultimate goal: attract, convert, close and delight at scale.
AI can already produce results at all four stages of the buyer journey:
Contextual marketing is all about delivering the right content at the right moment based on a potential client’s preferences using behavioral targeting and enabling brand awareness, recall and engagement. It fuels targeted ads based on user information such as recent searches and web histories. The purpose is to offer products and services to customers who are already interested in them.
Contextual marketing offers marketers several benefits including:
CPA is the measurement of the cost of acquiring a customer who clicks on a website link or completes any action—in other words, the return on marketing investment, in particular, total marketing spend over total front-end conversions.
Here are a few more distinctions of CPA:
To build a loyal local customer base, it’s important to be accepted as part of the community. Hyperlocal advertising is an efficient way to accomplish this goal. Hyperlocal means an area close to home—the people within walking or driving distance to a particular destination or those united in one identifiable community.
Marketers can optimize their hyperlocal campaigns with these tips:
When it comes to keywords, a factor that’s weighted by Google’s search algorithms is keyword proximity. Keyword proximity refers to how close two or more keywords are to each other. You will achieve higher rankings if you place your keywords close together in a natural sounding way.
Here is an example of considering keyword proximity: a website is hoping to rank for the search term “digital marketing agency Cleveland.” The heading reads, “Your digital marketing agency for growing your business in Cleveland.” Good, but an even better option may be, "The digital marketing agency Cleveland businesses trust to help them grow."
Along with proximity, other important keyword factors that Google ranks for include density, frequency and prominence:
Search engines group search results not only by exact keyword matches, but also by variations of keywords in semantic groups, such as singular-plural, related suffixes and synonyms. Search engines view these similar keywords as synonyms. As a result, “keyword stemming” can subsequently help extend your reach.
Use these tips to leverage keyword stemming:
This is a mathematical method used to determine the relationship between keyword phrases within a piece of content. Search engines use it to form a better understanding of text’s subject matter. Google rewards sites that include relevant LSI keywords with higher rankings and more traffic.
Benefits of LSI to each “stakeholder” includes:
Facebook’s lookalike audiences is an advanced targeting option in its ad services that goes beyond basic interest and demographic targeting. It provides the ability to find new people based on their resemblance to your customers using a percentage sample of people in your target country (from 1 to 10 percent)—effectively cloning your ideal audiences.
Tips to leverage lookalike audiences include:
Lost impression share (budget) is the percent of impressions an ad lost out on because of an insufficient budget. Lost impression share (rank) is the percent of impressions an ad lost out on because of a low ad rank. In paid search, impression share is used to evaluate the marketplace opportunity (or consumer demand) for a defined set of keywords. Impression share is meant to answer the question: “How often is my ad served when consumers are searching my keywords?”
Impression Share is a vital metric for a campaign’s health and overall performance for several reasons including:
Quality Score is Google AdWords’ rating of the relevance and quality of keywords used in PPC campaigns. It is largely determined by the expected click-through rates (CTR), the relevance of ad copy, landing page quality and relevance and other factors. However, CTR is the biggest part of a Quality Score at up to 60 percent, according to Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist.
Understanding your Quality Score is important because:
Digital marketing is not a static enterprise. Everything is always changing—including advances in technologies, digital marketing services and terminology. To be successful and thrive in this fast-moving and ever-changing world requires staying on the forefront of new tools, strategies and terms. This short list of important terms to know in the coming year is part of our ever-expanding knowledge base. Also, check out our complete list of Must-Know Digital Marketing Terms for 2018.