If you’re like most business owners, you’d rather be focused on offering the best real-time customer experience, then spending time on the intricacies of digital marketing trends. However, as your online reputation is now just as important as your real life street cred, maintaining a basic understanding of digital marketing is key. To help you out, we’ve compiled this quick list of the 5 most important digital marketing terms that every small business owner should know.

Call to Action
A call to action, or CTA, is text that inspires a customer to act – whether to buy, enroll, subscribe, or take advantage of a discount.

No matter how strong your online presence is and how compelling your blog posts may be, you can’t get a potential customer to participate if he doesn’t know what he needs to do to get involved. Effective CTAs use a combination of action verbs, enthusiasm, and appealing offers to incite participation, driving readers to take part in whatever a company has to offer.

Conversion
Conversion is the process of transitioning a potential customer into an actual customer – the step that urges an interested consumer to take action through your marketing efforts.

Conversion should be the primary goal of your marketing, but how you define conversion will be up to you. Business owners may seek email sign-ups, phone numbers, enrollment in a trial period, or – more commonly – a sale.

Online Presence
The effectiveness of digital marketing can, in many ways, be linked to online presence, or the reach of your business info online.

Everywhere your company is listed, from social media to your own websites and blogs, is included in this overarching category. Establishing an online presence is a strategic move, however; a wide reach isn’t necessarily as important as where your presence is emphasized. For example, 4 out of 5 web users use Yelp! to make a choice on restaurants or businesses. If your attention isn’t focused on the right destinations, you may be missing out.

Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is the price your business pays to acquire a single customer, which is calculated by taking the entire sum of your marketing expenditures, and dividing that amount by the number of new customers your marketing has attracted.

If you spend $10,000 on marketing and acquire 100 new customers, your CAC is $100. This metric is often very telling, especially when it comes to effective budgeting. If your CAC is too high for average sales per customer, it may be time to rethink your approach.

Remarketing
Remarketing, as the name implies, is essentially “marketing again” to targeted customers who have interacted with you or your marketing before.

For example, a web user who put a few items in the cart but clicked away before making a purchase is the perfect candidate to ‘remarket.’ Remarketing targets these customers on the cusp of converting, offering additional incentives to come back and try again. Studies indicate that remarketing can improve ad response by up to 400%, making the right campaign extremely valuable.

Summary
These digital marketing basics are essential for every small business owner to understand. By familiarizing yourself with these key terms and principles, you can better influence your company’s marketing strategy, providing valuable insight that can take your business in the right direction.