search engine marketing

Definition

Paid advertising on search engines, primarily Google, where you bid on keywords to appear when people search for things. It's the practice of paying to skip the line in search results, assuming you can outbid your competitors.

Example Usage

Our search engine marketing budget doubled when we realized our organic rankings wouldn't appear on page one until sometime in 2047.

Origin

Term emerged in the early 2000s to distinguish paid search from SEO

Fun Fact

The first paid search ad was sold by GoTo.com (later Overture) in 1998, launching an industry now worth over $200 billion annually.

Source: Digital advertising industry standard

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rhetoric

The art of persuasive speaking or writing, or alternatively, inflated language designed to impress rather than inform. Politicians and marketers have elevated rhetoric to a professional sport where style matters more than substance. When someone says "that's just rhetoric," they mean "that sounds impressive but means absolutely nothing."

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shopping cart abandonment

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Customer Journey

A euphemism for the tortuous path a person takes from not knowing your product exists to finally buying it out of sheer exhaustion. Marketers map it out like it's the Oregon Trail, except instead of dysentery, customers die of pop-up fatigue.

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publicity

The art of getting people to pay attention to something through media coverage, press releases, and strategic information drops, ideally without having to pay for advertising. It's what happens when your brand does something newsworthy enough that journalists actually care to write about it. Unlike advertising, publicity is theoretically "earned," though publicists would argue they work pretty hard to make it look effortless.

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Pain Point

A problem that a customer or employee has, rebranded as something clinical so you can charge money to fix it. Every pain point is someone's job security -- if the pain goes away, so does the consulting contract.

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