Marketing is one of the quickest developing industries in the world. It can sometimes seem like just as soon as you’ve gotten up-to-date with the latest industry trends, techniques and influencers, there is already a new wave of marketing trends to learn. If this sounds familiar, don’t worry! Most of the marketing trends are short-lived and the buzzwords you hear thrown around in meetings are frequently meaningless “industry speak”. To help you get to grips with what you really need to know about marketing in 2018, we’re going back to basics with 7 meaningful and measurable buzzwords that you should be using.

1. Analytics

Simply put, analytics is the process of measuring and analysing key statistics and data in relation to the growth of your business or website. Common factors that are analysed are impressions, conversions and sales. Looking at the change in these vital statistics allows you to monitor how well your business is finding new customers and retaining old clients. You can also use this information to make estimations about the scalability of your company. Analytics are the key to many marketing strategies, particularly Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

2. Impression

An impression is basically the measure of how many people have seen your ad. This can be through digital marketing such as social media, pay-per-click advertising or through sponsorships of smaller websites. Note that an impression is not the measure of how many people are clicking on or are interacting with your ad but simply the number of people who have seen your ad in some shape or form.

3. Conversion

The term conversion is sometimes mistakenly used just in correlation to sales, but this is not always the case. While a sale is one form of conversion that is tracked, there are a few other successful conversions that should be measured. A conversion is when your marketing technique leads to the consumer response you were aiming for. This can be contacting the store, signing up for emails or becoming a club member.

4. ROI

ROI stands for return on investment. It is the measure of how much money you have profited from your initial investment. ROIs are used to measure the success of a marketing strategy.

5. Brand Compliance

Brand compliance may sound like a complex legal term, but actually it is referring to brand consistency. By being brand compliant you are using one tone of voice, one colour scheme and one logo across all of your platforms.

6. Transparency

This is a simple but important buzzword. Transparency means being completely honest with clients. If a marketing technique isn’t performing as well as you expected, your client deserves to know. This ensures that your client remains satisfied with your working relationship and don’t have any unrealistic expectations of business growth.

7. Disruptive Innovation

This is quite a new buzzword but it’s one to keep an eye on in 2018. Disruptive innovation is often overused by marketers who don’t fully understand the concept. Simply put, disruptive innovation occurs when a company takes advantage of an overlooked niche demographic and provides a cheap reliable service. Once the service has been established, they encroach the services and demographics of well-established competitors in the industry until the niche service becomes the norm. Once the niche service becomes part of the parcel of the more popular service and becomes expected then disruptive innovation has occurred.

Now you know the most important buzzwords to use in 2018, make sure you build a marketing strategy that works for you!