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As marketers, part of our job is to be able to present the core concepts of any industry to the general public without resorting to jargon or buzzwords — and that should, by and large, include our own. But if you’re in business and you intend to use local Internet marketing for business purposes at all, there are several basic terms that you need to be able to use fluently. They are:

Online Presence. Your business’ Online Presence is the sum total of all of the online locations where your business information can be found or that link to a business site. The larger your online presence, the more ability you have to attract visitors.

Call to Action (CTA). A call to action is any part of any marketing material that instructs the subject on what they should do next in order to progress along your sales funnel. CTAs are the bread and butter of conversions.

The industry term for “turning a visitor into a member,” whether that means a customer, a donator, or a literal member of some club your business runs. Tracking conversions and how they’re affected by changed to your online presence is a huge part of maximizing your marketing RoI.

The art of selling things to people who have already converted. Remarketing tends to produce the greatest RoI, as people who have converted once are the most likely to do so again.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). The CAC is the amount of dollars en toto spent to convert one person. Knowing your CAC is vital for determining your RoI, which is the most important number in all of marketing.

Customer Lifetime Transaction Value (CLTV). Your CLTV is the total amount of money you can expect to get from a customer over their lifetime as you continue to remarket to them. CLTV is the number that truly determines your marketing budget.

Locale/Locality. Your Locale is the geographical area(s) in which your business can reasonably expect customers. In Internet marketing terms, a Locale is defined by the keywords which identify it, which means it can be quite flexible. From “Southern California” to “Los Angeles” to “San Bernardino” to “Highland” to “East Highlands,” almost any granularity of locality can be targeted by your local Internet marketing efforts.

Social media is a huge part of almost every modern Internet marketing scheme, and there’s two powerful reasons why: first, Google uses social media mentions as a ranking factor in the early part of the lifespan of a page, and second, your audience is on social media. Unless your target market is “Amish people” or “the abjectly povert,” you can be essentially certain that your audience is somewhere on the social media spectrum. Here’s your guide to knowing where they can be found:

Pinterest

Pinterest — the one of only two social bookmarking sites that have remained truly mainstream (Reddit, below, is the other) — is a haven of highly visual, card-based design. As you might not be surprised to learn, females make up 80% of Pinterest’s user base. In particular, if your target market is largely comprised of women between the ages of 35 and 54, Pinterest is the place to target.

Facebook

Make no mistake — darn near everyone is on Facebook, and you can reach almost any audience on Facebook. If you’re not posting on Facebook, you’re making a mistake. But, it’s important to note that more seniors use Facebook than any other major social site. In other words, if your target market is over 65 and you don’t have a very good reason for targeting a more focused social medium, concentrate your efforts on Facebook.

Twitter

Much like Facebook, Twitter has a very broad demographic; about 20% of everyone uses Twitter. However, Twitter use goes down as people get older, and more importantly for businesses, Twitter use is lowest in the middle class — it’s highest in the lower class and almost that high in the upper class, but the middle class uses it least. The best group for Twitter? Poor young males with at least some college education.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn attracts people who are in their working years: out of school, but not retired. More wealth and more education directly translate into greater LinkedIn usage, so if your target market is “well-off adults”, LinkedIn is a great place to target.

Google Plus

Google Plus has a very solid core demographic: young-adult, single men use Google Plus — and, interestingly, the groups of ‘young-adult people,’ ‘single people,’ and ‘men’ all use Google Plus more than their counterparts, so it’s not a bad place to target any of those groups.

Reddit

The ‘big dog’ of social bookmarking, Reddit is a haven for young-adult males, but other than a mild trend toward males in general, actually has almost as diverse of a userbase as Facebook and Twitter.

There are lots of businesses out there who have a marketing department (or gal or company), and then outsource SEO to a third party. Ask us how we know. Several years ago, that was a perfectly legitimate plan — but as Google updates like Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird have altered the very nature of SEO, they have forced SEO into the same role as marketing. In fact, the best of modern, affordable SEO is often called ‘content marketing.’

That’s because modern SEO consists mostly of earning backlinks, which means you have to create content that makes people want to link back to it. But every piece of content you put out absolutely must be part of your brand identity, must fit in with your current marketing plan, and must perform every job that any other piece of marketing material would perform.

In short, if your SEO company isn’t at the very minimum working very closely with your marketing gal/department/company, they’re doing it wrong. Your content producers need to be on the same page as your marketing planners, so that the content you produce can reflect the initiatives and strategies of your overall marketing drive.

At best, your SEO company should be sitting down with your marketers and coming up with content marketing material concepts at the table, with the marketers offering input and SEO people adjusting to maximize the impact on social media and the linkbait quality.

The Four Major Areas Of SEO/Marketing Overlap

Your Website should be a collaborative effort between a web designer, your marketers, and your SEO people. It’s the keystone of your entire online presence, and it needs 90% of your attention.

Your Blog is the primary display center for your content. There should be content that isn’t restricted to your blog, but almost all of your content should appear on your blog at some point. The blog itself should rank, the best content should rank independently, and it will in turn help your landing pages rank — it’s an SEO team’s playground.

Social Media is relevant to SEO in that content that hits the social scene hard ranks better in the short term and is better linkbait, so it’s also more likely to rank in the long term as well. Your SEO team should be able to create content for your followers.

DLC, or downloadable content — including reports, ebooks, white papers, and so on — should be part of your plan as well. While the content itself doesn’t have to be SEO-intensive since it’s generally a pdf, the page offering the DLC needs to be optimized, and the DLC itself should be approved by the marketing team before it goes up.