“Either write something worth reading about or do something worth writing about »- Benjamin Franklin
Community management, SEO, B2C, CMS, Copywriting, Account management, CSS, Newsletter… Do any of these terms ring a bell? They tend to regularly pop up in job (or internship) offers, but do you really know what they mean? In our society, where social media gains more and more importance , effective web marketing has become both easier and more complicated at the same time.
As the competition on the market grows ever tougher, the techniques need to be innovative to work. Knowing the lingo of the sector, is the first step in becoming a web marketing wizard, which is why we decided to try decrypting some terms for you. Who knows, it might come handy during or after your master’s in multilingual communication.
Search engine marketing
As you can imagine, every company wants to direct potential clients towards their homepage. Today, several tools are available to help them do so. Different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are of course all useful for this purpose, through what the pros tend to call social media optimization (SMO), an umbrella term for different techniques that strive to make a brand’s presence on social media as effective as possible. But did you know that companies also have several ways of affecting how high they will place in the results of a search engine?
An important and fairly complicated branch of web marketing is called search engine marketing (SEM), which aims at making the different search engines as useful as possible for the brand. One of its two types, SEO, stands for search engine optimization and is a free technique. In a nutshell, it consists in choosing highly relevant keywords or keyword phrases and using them on the site to obtain better natural results on search engines like Google. A good tool for WordPress, one of the most used content management systems (CMS), is Yoast which is a free widget that helps you get better at producing SEO content.
The paying version of SEM is called search engine advertising (SEA), and as its name gives away, means buying ads on search engines to appear among the first results. The most common tool for SEA is Google Adwords, which allows companies to pay for small ads that look similar to normal search results.
If this sounds tempting, your future title could be account manager, which would involve handling ongoing marketing campaigns.
More traditional tools
You probably receive tons of marketing e-mails every day too? Newsletters and e-mail marketing are indeed some of the more traditional tools that are still largely used by companies worldwide. Newsletters are destined for clients already familiar with the brand and tend to become more and more personalized based on the data that the company collects.
Written by Julia Virtanen