Branding Glossary
Branding
Freemium
A mashup up of the words “free” and ”premium,” when companies provide basic services free of cost, with the option to upgrade to a more robust offering for a price. Examples: LinkedIn, Youtube and Dropbox.
Social Media Management
Gamification
Gamification is the skill of understanding what game-based motivators may drive members and how to use those motivators to help members get value out of the community that they may not initially recognize. Often times gamification efforts appear in the form of points, badges, or ‘games’ that encourage gentle competition around engagement.
Branding
Generic Brand
A brand with little differentiation in its positioning that lacks a recognizable logo or brand assets. Typically, these brands are not advertised and serve as a lower-cost alternative. Example: Walgreens-brand Ibuprofen.
Social Media Marketing
Geotag
Directional coordinates that are attached to a piece of content on social media is called a geotag. Use geotagging while posting pictures or videos to highlight the location of the snap.
Social Media Marketing
Geotargeting
The technique of adjusting your ad content based on the location of the user. Go for localized geotargeting for customized and personalized engagement.
Branding
Graphic Style
A consistent theme of the graphic elements (e.g., typography, color and images) of a brand’s overall visual appearance. Graphic style is recognizable by the visual traits of an overall parent brand and can vary slightly but is overall consistent among the sub-brands.
Social Media Marketing
Groups
People with similar passions join together to form a group and discuss specific topics. Gain behavioral insights, and deliver customized posts to increase engagement among group members.
Email Marketing
Hard Bounce
A hard bounce is the failed delivery of an email due to a permanent reason like a non-existent, invalid, or blocked email address.
Social Media Marketing
Hashtag
Connecting your social media posts to other users or posts on the same subject or trending topic is done through a hashtag. Preceded a word or phrase with a ‘#’ to make it easily findable for users.
Social Media Marketing
Header Image
The visual you place at the top of your social media profile is called a header image. Show off your brand personality, promote your product, or an upcoming event on your header image.
Email Marketing
Honey Pot
A planted email address by organizations trying to combat spam that, when a spammer harvests and emails, identifies that sender as a spammer.
Email Marketing
HTML Email
Sending HTML email makes it possible to get creative with the design of your emails.
Social Media Management
Iceberg Effect
The theory that the visible activity of a community is only a very small part of the overall activity of a community.
Branding
Icon
A small, graphic representation of a brand or brand function, typically within a graphical user interface. An icon helps users recognize a brand, illustrate what a brand does and navigate to or through its app and website. Facebook’s “Like” button is an example of an icon.
Social Media Marketing
Impressions
A social media metric that measures how many times your post has appeared in user feeds. Count post impressions based on the number of times users have looked at your post.
Social Media Management
Inactive
An engagement profile. Members who have a profile in the community but who are inactive, which typically means they have not accessed the community in the past month.
Social Media Marketing
Influencers
Subject matter experts or celebrities with large social media following and the power to affect purchase decisions are called Influencers. Promoting and amplifying your content through social media influencers is the best way to achieve wider reach and conversion rates.
Branding
Initialism
An abbreviated version of a brand’s name formed by the first letter of each word in its name. Its appearance is identical to an acronym, but differs in that it’s pronounced letter by letter, rather than as a spoken word. Examples: CNN, NBC and AT&T, vs. NASA, which is an acronym.
Social Media Marketing
Insights
Valuable analytics about business pages and how they are performing compared to similar competitor pages are known as Insights. Subscribe to social media analytics to gain a complete understanding of your social media performance.
Social Media Marketing
Instant Messaging (IM)
Real-time, direct text-based communication between two or more people is called instant messaging (IM).
Branding
Intangibles
Elements of a brand that are incapable of being touched and often difficult to assign value to. Intangibles assets include trademarks, copyrights, patents, design rights, proprietary expertise, databases, etc. Intangible brand attributes include: brand names, logos, graphic style (e.g. Adidas three stripes), colors, shapes and smells.