Marketing Terms You Need to Know to Build a Profitable Brand

Start With the Four P's

A lot of these words have been around for decades. I'm not going to give you anything complicated. I'm going to give you an overall list of words that I believe you need to understand right now, because in the marketing world, you have to have these things really clearly established from the beginning if you want to win the game.

The first one is the marketing mix. I also call it the four P's: product, price, place, and promotion. Think about it with an influencer. If an influencer doesn't have a product, which means he doesn't have a price, and he doesn't have a place to sell these things, like fulfillment or brick-and-mortar stores, and he doesn't have promotion of the product, what does he have? I can tell you what he doesn't have. Money.

Talk to Everybody and You Talk to Nobody

Target market is a specific group of consumers a business aims to reach with its products and services. Here's why it matters. There are somewhere around 8 billion people on the planet. A brand like us at Attention Grabbing Media has only serviced somewhere around 1,000 businesses. Look at how many other businesses we've never touched. Having a target demographic is essential.

You have to know who you're going after, because let me guarantee you something. Most of these people are not interested in what you have to offer. They're not interested in your products or your services. So if you just do broad marketing, shotgun marketing, and you try to go after everybody, you're going to end up broke. Your advertising is going to go to waste because you talk to everybody, which means that you talk to nobody.

If you're selling makeup, for example, you have somewhere around 2 billion men actively on social media platforms that you want to NOT target, and maybe 2 billion females that you do want to target. You have a business that can only service a little fraction of this planet or it will break. So all you've got to do is service the correct people and do your best at finding your target demographic.

Segmentation: Not All Audiences Are Equal

Segmentation is the process of dividing a market into distinct groups of buyers who have different needs, characteristics, or behaviors. Let me give you an example from my own brand. When I'm running campaigns at Attention Grabbing Media, if I want to sell a service that's going to cost clients somewhere around $50,000 a year, I'm not going to sell it to people who don't know who I am. I'm going to sell it to the people who have bought things from me before.

Segments are basically these divisions. Former customers. Existing customers. Social media following, people who follow you but have never bought anything. There's already a point of contact there, but they need to be segmented separately because they have never opened up their wallets. They have never given you a penny, so they don't trust you as much as the people who already gave you money, got value from it, and were happy because you delivered a quality service. Then you have cold audiences, cold traffic, cold people. They have no idea who you are.

And in between all of those, you segment by ages, how long they've been a customer, how much they've spent on your brand, how frequently they buy, how many products and services they've bought. Creating all these segments is an essential part of the marketing game.

Positioning, Brand Equity, and Your USP

Positioning is how you position a product so people think about it in a certain way. In my case, I want to be known as a marketer. My positioning is that when you need marketing help, you come to my company to ask for help, because you know we must have some good things happening here.

Brand equity is the value of a brand, product, or service based on consumer attitudes, recognition, and loyalty toward the brand. How much power does that brand have by itself, even without the products?

USP is your unique selling proposition. What makes you special? You need to know that. That needs to be printed on your wall. It's the factor that differentiates you from your competitor. And tied to all of this is the customer journey: the complete sum of that customer's process with you, from the first contact on social media or a traditional campaign, to buying products, buying again, and eventually becoming testimonials and brand ambassadors for you.

The Numbers: Conversion, CTR, PPC, and ROI

Conversion rate is simple. You send 100 people from a video to an offer and seven people buy. You got a 7% conversion rate. The important word is optimizing. You want to make the website faster, more user-friendly, and present opportunities for first-time visitors, because most traffic is not going to convert. SEO works the same way, and it's not just websites. How do you get your videos to show up when somebody is searching on YouTube? The titles have to do with it, the thumbnails have to do with it. If you're not optimized, you're not going to win.

Pay-per-click, PPC, is what you pay for every single click on platforms like Amazon or Google. Click-through rate tells you, out of 100 people who see the ad, how many actually click on it. When you have a very low click-through rate, the platforms show your ads to fewer people and your cost of advertising goes up, because it really means people are not that interested. A 4% or 5% click-through rate is a really good rate. That signals the content is being really well received, and the platform wants to keep showing it to more and more people.

Return on investment, ROI, is a very old-school marketing term. If I put a dollar on a Facebook ad and I get $20 back from the sale to that client, I got a 20 ROI. That's incredible. It's like printing money. It's like hitting the casino and winning every single hand. You would not stop putting money on the machine.

Content, Inbound, and Your Greatest Asset

Content marketing is giving away educational content to get attention, the most valuable commodity. Once I get that attention, I can convert it into revenue, because people who are already interested in my information are more likely to buy something from me on that journey.

There are two types of marketing. Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on attracting customers through relevant and helpful content, adding value at every stage of the buying journey. I give and give and give without ever asking. Inbound is possible with social media in a way it isn't with other channels. Outbound marketing is when you cold call and reach out trying to get people on board. That doesn't mean it doesn't work. I know very successful companies that do outbound marketing.

Then there's your CRM, a customer relationship management tool where you keep all your customers, their phone numbers, emails, and history with your company, so you never waste that asset. Your customers are your greatest assets. It is seven times easier to get a customer to pay you again than to get a customer to pay you for the first time. Leverage your existing customers, and the CRM allows you to do so.

Know Your KPIs From Day One

KPI stands for key performance indicator, and every business has its own. In my case, my two most important KPIs are cost per lead and CAC, cost to acquire a customer. A lead is not a customer yet. So if I paid $10 to acquire a lead, maybe I paid $178 to acquire a customer. You might be saying, that's a lot of money. Well, my contracts might start somewhere around 40 to 50 thousand dollars a year. Is it worth paying around $180 for a customer that pays me $50,000 a year? What's the ROI on that? It's a big deal.

One of the things you've got to do at the beginning of building your brand is figure out your KPIs. What is your ideal cost per lead? Cost to acquire a customer? Cost per video view, cost per website visitor, cost per everything? If you understand that, it helps you adjust your strategies right away to get as close as possible to those numbers, or even beat them, every single step of the way.

One last thing: B2B and B2C. Can you advertise on Facebook and Instagram to acquire business-to-business customers? Absolutely, yes. You know who's using Facebook and Instagram every day? Business owners, humans like you and me. Businesses have contacted me through Facebook and Instagram. There's no platform that only works for B2B. And if you're B2C, it's a big open playing field, because everybody is a potential customer for you.