Hubspot has been in the news these past few weeks due to the $32 million investment of Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com into the HubSpot company.

Hubspot has been in the forefront of the inbound marketing trend.

Inbound Marketing is a marketing strategy where in a website/company gathers information about themselves, their product/services, and any other social news and information, optimizes them for search engines and finally share them via social networks (eg. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Social bookmarking), blogs, forums, etc to generate interest and leads which will also generate website traffic.

Why is Inbound Marketing the latest trend in online marketing?

The mere fact that Google (the company) itself has invested millions of dollars into a company that specializes with inbound marketing is reason enough to take notice. There is no doubt that inbound marketing produces good quality website traffic and leads. This only shows the growth of the market in giving importance to good unique content and creating value for users.

In all of these latest development, early adopters of online marketing and inbound marketing like The Northern Office – Innovative Marketing Support, can rest on the fact that the market is becoming more mature and seeing the value in online marketing, SEO and social media strategies.

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Are you new to online marketing? You might have hired someone to do it for you and you get confused by the language used? You do not have to be an Internet geek to understand the ‘language’.  Here are the top ten acronyms used in online marketing explained in a simple way.

HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.  This is the standard language behind most websites and what the search engines read when they look at/crawl your site.  It is made up of hundreds of tags which has all the content on your website and tell the search engines exactly what is in that content.  You can easily see this by going to any website and view the page source by hitting ctrl+u on your keyboard.  Each tag opens with an angle bracket and the tag closes with an angle bracket followed by a forward slash and another end bracket (i.e.

).

CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and dictates the way the HTML code looks and is presented.

XML
XML stands for Extensible Markup Language.  This language is more generic and is one that is read by a computer.    In online marketing, you most likely need to have a XML sitemap, which means having a map of all the content on your site because search engines specifically prefer to read this format.

CRM
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Manager.  This is great at making sure that your sales team can see what revenues have increased.  It also helps identify things like who are your loyal customers and what aspect of your business is not doing too well.

CMS
CMS is a Content Management System commonly used to manage the content of your website.  Examples of this are Joomla and WordPress.  They allow you to access a private admin area where you can either add, edit or delete pages of your website.

URL
Uniform Resource Locator states exactly where your content is located on the Internet.  Example: http://www.thenorthernoffice.com

SERPs
SERP’s stands for Search Engine Results Pages.  If you hear your SEO telling you that your site is at position 20 in the SERP’s, this means your site is appearing around the middle of page 3.  Its best to have  you site appear to a closer position.

SEM
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and can encompass just about anything that involves publicising your website on the Internet.  In includes things like SEO and PPC, social media, and Online PR.

SEO
You would probably hear this one more, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.  The purpose of this is to improve your websites visibility in the organic search engine results pages.

PPC
PPC stands for Pay Per Click.  These are the results that appear in the paid results in the right hand side under the heading ‘Ads’.  You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ads.

There are still other acronyms and marketing jargon that you might encounter later, but this should give you an idea about the basics of online marketing.  Need help with your business’ Online Marketing? The Northern Office is a marketing consultancy firm specializing in innovative marketing support for SME’s.  The Northern Office  can provide you a complete range of online marketing strategies that will help you get concrete results out of your investment. Contact us for more details.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 at 6:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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