Whether you’re new to the field or a seasoned professional, it can feel like marketing jargon and terms change more frequently than the weather. But we’ve got the solution for you – a glossary of terms, so to speak.
Here, we’ll cover some common terms and phrases in marketing, including what WE talk about as marketing professionals ourselves. May you come out of it appreciating our affinity for shortening sentence fragments into small clusters of letters and talking about Google Analytics all the time.
Contents:
General Marketing Terms
AI Marketing Terms
Marketing Analytic Terms
Paid and Advertising Terms
Content and SEO Marketing Terms
Website Design and Development Terms
A method that compares two versions of a webpage, email, or other digital asset to see which performs better for a specific metric, whether that be conversion rates or click-through rates. The two versions will be presented at random to your audience over a set amount of time (we recommend 2-6 weeks for websites or ads and at least four hours for emails) to see what resonates best with them, allowing you to make data-driven decisions. You’ll need to make sure that the sample size is large enough to make a meaningful conclusion. For example, sending an email to under 100 people won’t provide as reliable of results as one sent to at least 1,000.
This strategic marketing approach focuses on a select group of target accounts that are more likely to become valuable customers through personalized campaigns that build relationships and drive action. By using coordinated sales and marketing efforts like content, advertising, and direct outreach, ABM improves the sales pipeline and establish stronger customer relationships.
How people perceive or experience your business through a combination of visual elements and messaging to make it recognizable and distinct. A strong brand identity, which has consistent imagery, voice, tone, values and story, establishes credibility and builds trust across marketing channels. Other common elements include a business logo, color palette and typography.
The practice of managing and analyzing customer interactions and data through their lifecycle in your system. This is done through the use of tools and measurement technologies to help you improve your business relationships with your customers, examples of which you can find here.
A CTA is a Call-to-Action that invokes an immediate response. Some CTA phrases you’re probably already familiar with include “Call now for a free consultation!” or “Find out more!” and are usually accompanied by the option to click a button to view more content or a link that will take you to a landing page with a form. To increase the chance of someone converting, align the offers where someone might be in their customer journey. For example, a blog about a specific product should have a CTA to request a demo rather than one about an unrelated ebook.
The series of actions a person goes through before becoming a customer. Though stages can vary, common ones are Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Adoption, and Advocacy. Understanding the specific questions or problems people are trying to solve at each of these stages allows your sales and marketing teams to create tailored messaging and strategies that improve their experience and make them more likely to purchase your product or service.
Designed to ultimately drive sales, this top-of-funnel marketing strategy creates awareness or interest in a product or service by targeting and nurturing a broader audience in order to turn them into customers. Tactics include social media, email, content marketing and paid ads.
Drip campaign (which can also be called lead nurturing) is a communication strategy that sends pre-written emails to a set of customers over a certain period of time. This could be part of a re-engagement campaign, a welcome series, or a way to keep current customers engaged.
Basically another way of saying customer, this refers to the person who uses your particular product or service. In marketing, it’s helpful to understand what challenges or questions you’re solving for them so you can effectively engage with them throughout the entire customer journey.
A comprehensive marketing and sales plan detailing how a business will launch a new product or service or expand into a new market. This is done by defining the target audience, messaging and distribution channels to ensure efficacy and give your business a competitive advantage. Need help putting together a Go-to-Market strategy? Check out our Go-to-Market services.
No, it’s not marketing to marketers. It’s marketing to educate, delight and inform even before the sale. Inbound marketing is the process of attracting leads with (really good, not just excessive) content creation, social media strategy and SEO. Inbound’s antonym would be cold calling (an example of outbound marketing), and we all know how effective THAT is.
A strategic approach that aligns all aspects of your marketing plan, from content to visuals to overall messaging. This allows a consistent, cohesive experience no matter where users are interacting with your brand, helping to build trust and improve your brand recognition. Check out our free workbook to put together a strategic integrated marketing plan.
The type of lead flow we’re talking about here is a HubSpot tool that you can use to sustain website traffic and easily convert a visitor into a prospect right on the page (they don’t need to visit that resource’s unique landing page). An example of a lead flow might be when a user begins reading a blog post on your site and halfway through the content, there’s a pop-up form highlighting another relevant offer.
The process of identifying possible customers, attracting them, and converting them. It can be done in any number of ways, but the first steps usually involve creating things like buyer personas and conducting in-depth research.
Lead nurturing is the process of creating and sustaining relationships with your customers and leads at every stage of the sales funnel. For example, a lead nurturing campaign might include a welcome email series, newsletters, etc. The key is that lead nurturing doesn’t have a time limit – you should always be paying attention to your buyers’ needs.
Focused on the “how” of marketing, this collection of processes, procedures, and technologies streamlines and optimizes your entire marketing strategy. With these, your team can create and execute more efficient and consistent work.
Partner marketing has many names, but it essentially boils down to the idea of two organizations coming together to increase reach and engagement with a marketing program that’s designed to meet both of their goals. It’s collaborative marketing for people with two products that could coexist or work together as one package.
Involving all customer-facing business operations, from marketing to sales to customer success, this brand of your business is a revenue-generating machine. Alignment ensures your business is able to run as smoothly as possible so no profits fall through the cracks. Learn how we approach this work as a RevOps agency.
Top-of-the-funnel (alternatively, top-of-funnel, top funnel, TOFU or TOTF to keep in the acronym spirit) marketing refers to the process of getting your brand or business out there. Unlike its brother, bottom-of-the-funnel marketing, TOFU describes a less direct effort to engage prospects who are in the Awareness Stage of the buying cycle and who are not yet familiar with your brand. Prospects who are at the top of your funnel aren’t looking for a solution yet, so top-of-the-funnel content is primarily educational (it doesn’t tout your product or service) – and it’s designed to help users with an industry-specific issue they’ve encountered.
This simulation of human intelligence enables you to perform tasks or find solutions to complex problems in a timely, thorough way. In marketing, it can help with tasks like content creation, ad targeting, customer service, data analysis, image creation, and more. AI is impacting digital marketing every day. Learn more about our approach to AI.
This method uses AI to analyze vast amounts of customer data to identify patterns so that you can create specific segments based on behavior, preferences, or other characteristics to create more personalized marketing campaigns and improve the user experience. Like ABM, this nuanced approach is designed to improve ROI by going beyond the traditional segmentation.
An AI designed to have text or spoken customer service conversations. It can be used to help answer common questions with those calling your business or browsing your website, and is a cost-effective way to provide 24/7 support. When using these, be sure to find a balance between letting people know they are using a chatbot while also offering to connect the user with a human agent when a complex issue is identified.
A type of AI that can understand and generate content for you. These can be trained to understand and implement your brand’s tone and messaging so that anything created has consistent messaging with the rest of your website.
A type of artificial intelligence that creates new content, including text, images, music, audio and video. It uses massive datasets to recognize patterns and relationships to better inform how it creates the content. Examples of this include ChatGPT, DALL-E and MusicGen.
This software was created for handling routine, repetitive tasks without the need for (much) human interaction, like sending out mass emails or posting on social media. While this may seem like a miracle solution, it’s important to always double-check the work to ensure it’s doing what you want and need it to. Tools you can use to help with this include HubSpot, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, Zapier, Sprout Social, Grammarly and Canva.
The “what” you want AI tools to do, these instructions provide models the guidance they need to create a desired output. Let’s say you’re working on a blog. You would want to include details like the tone, intended audience, and the question or topic it should cover. The more specific and clear you are, the better the system can understand your request and produce what you want.
An automated marketing tool that you can trigger based on a lead’s interactions with your site and content. Your workflow can be triggered by several things – to send an email based on the number of times someone has engaged with your site, or based on what they downloaded, etc.
A marketing metric that quantifies the number of users who take a desired action, whether that be filling out a form or making a purchase, to show the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. This is calculated as a percent by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors or users and multiplying by 100. Conversion rates vary depending on the industry you’re in and usually fluctuate month over month.
A marketing metric that shows the number of people who click a specific link on a webpage, CTA, email or advertisement. This percentage is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the total number of viewers and multiplying it by 100. It can be used to see how well a piece of content is performing, and the higher the CTR is, the more relevant it is to your audience.
A measurement of those who find your website through searches that include your business’s name or who type in an exact URL on your website, like the homepage. This metric can be used to measure brand awareness and recognition.
A measurable value that indicates and demonstrates how effectively a company is hitting its primary business objectives. This is a multi-level concept – you don’t just measure success at one level of your sales funnel – and your keys should be laid out before you even have a chance to measure them. This means setting goals!
There are many tools available to measure KPIs – and they work best when mapped to your goals. Check out some examples here.
The data showing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. This can be collected for your website, social media, ads, emails, and more to understand their performance. With this, you can learn what resonates best with prospects and optimize your strategies to improve engagement to drive business growth and ROI. While some platforms, like HubSpot and MailChimp, have built-in analytics, other tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite can be used for a similar purpose.
At the heart of your entire marketing strategy, these goals are what you hope your business achieves in a given period of time. These should be specific and measurable, like increasing website traffic or garnering a certain number of form submissions. Setting these goals based on historical data ensures that they’re attainable and allows you to focus on the aspects of your business you hope to grow the most.
Tracks those who find and come to the site via search engines and is used to measure your website’s SEO performance. Search engines like Google use complex algorithms to determine the relevance and ranking of each website and consider factors like keyword use, backlinks, user experience, and domain authority. Your content marketing most influences this traffic source.
A measure of visitors who come to your website by clicking a link on another platform or website. Examples of this include backlinks, online directories, guest blog posts or content partnerships, and affiliate marketing. This metric can be used to understand your brand’s reputation and has added SEO benefits since it shows SERPs your website’s authority and relevance to others.
As a business owner, this one should be familiar to you. Mathematically speaking, ROI = (net profit/cost of investment) x 100. It’s a percentage used to help make financial decisions, and a formula you should be on top of, regardless of your hatred of algebra in high school.
Also consider, however, that ROI calculations don’t take time into consideration within their formula – so make sure you have a time frame for that +15% (or whatever) return in mind.
CPI is the expense incurred each time a potential customer views an ad you’ve taken out on a webpage. This would be charged by the website publisher, who might request a certain amount per viewership of the ad. Keep in mind – views are not the same as clicks (like PPC). An impression occurs when a user who fits a certain buyer persona has the potential to view your ad, such as when it is displayed in a sidebar on a website they’re visiting.
This is similar to CPI, except this is the measurement of the estimated cost of the advertisement based on 1,000 views or impressions (mille is Latin for 1,000). For example, if a website publisher charges $1.00 CPM, that means you pay $1.00 every time views for that advertisement hit 1,000.
A PPC ad is one that you might take out on a social site – LinkedIn or Facebook, for example – or a search engine (which is the most popular place to put a PPC ad). Every time that ad is clicked, your company pays for it. It’s basically the opposite of organic – you’re essentially buying visits to your website, and will show up in your marketing analytics as paid search traffic. You can earn a lot of qualified, ready-to-buy traffic as long as you have the budget for it.
Remarketing allows you to send targeted ads to visitors who have previously visited your website or interacted with past ad campaigns.
An offshoot of inbound marketing, content marketing is the process of creating content, in order to attract prospects and drive interest and engagement. But it’s not about the sell; rather, content marketing is meant to educate your prospects in your industry and help them better understand or resolve common problems they’re experiencing. Types of content that could be produced include blog articles, white papers, videos, social posts, eBooks, webinars, etc., etc., etc.
You’ll sometimes hear the word “copy” floating around – that’s another word for content in a text-based format. Therefore, “copywriting” is the act of creating this type of content.
The boxed excerpt featured at the top of a search engine results page that offers a quick answer to a user’s query. Content can be optimized to be chosen for this placement, which gives users the information they’re looking for but increases your website’s visibility and drives traffic to it.
There will come a time in your content-making experience where you’ll find that sometimes people need to be a little bit more intrigued to read your stuff. That’s where gated content comes in – it’s just content that requires a reader to obtain access through something like a form. Content that’s behind a form could range from white papers and eBooks all the way to on-demand webinars and infographics. These forms also help because they indicate to you which prospects are interested enough in what you’ve got to give you their email.
A keyword is a key word (revolutionary, I know) or phrase that helps people find your web page via a search engine. This requires a bit of research – checking Google Analytics for keyword search volume and competitive data, however, is the best place to start. The most optimal keywords will have a relatively high search volume and a relatively low difficulty score, so make sure you’re picking keywords wisely.
Okay, we get a lot of mix ups on this one – even from our own team! – so here it goes: an offer is a piece of content that a reader can learn from or use to their advantage. That might mean a white paper, eBook, trial, webinar, slideshow, consultations, what have you. It’s NOT a landing page or a “Get 10% off your next purchase!”
The page of results you see after typing in a specific query. This includes both paid and organic results, as well as featured snippets, business listings and images or videos. Though the algorithms are complex, having a general understanding of how it works allows you to better optimize your website and content to get it in front of the people you want.
A term created by our partners at HubSpot, Smarketing refers to aligning sales and marketing. This is a critical aspect of Customer Success – making sure that multiple parties in your business are coming together and are updated with each others’ goings on. This will allow your message, brand and goals to remain consistent throughout your sales process, and allow you to perform things like closed-loop reporting.
Smart content is targeted content. It’s website content that changes based on past interactions or preferences of the website user – or their geographic location, device, etc. Users could be leads who have already downloaded a certain type of content on your site, customers who have a deeper understanding of your service, prospects in a foreign country, etc. – it’s more relevant and personalized. This content can be customized to your audience via your CRM system.
The process of developing web pages, digital content and online imagery so that they show up in browser searches – preferably towards the top of the first page. It’s a culmination of a whole bunch of factors (some of which are defined in this post). For an in-depth look at those factors, check out this awesome infographic by Search Engine Land.
Using your content and team to show your expertise and competitive advantage when it comes to using your solutions to solve a problem for your target audience. By focusing on educating and inspiring rather than giving them a sales pitch, you can build trust and authority to start a relationship that can be nurtured in the future. This strategy includes detailed whitepapers or ebooks, speaking engagements at industry events, or podcast guest appearances.
Also called ADA compliance, this means designing and developing websites that can be used and accessed by people with a wide range of disabilities and abilities, including visual, auditory, motor and cognitive impairments. This isn’t a “nice to have” but a user experience requirement to ensure everyone has equal access to your content.
A brief, descriptive text that provides context about an image or visual element for those using screen readers. This should be used on both webpages and digital content to make them accessible to those who are visually impaired.
Going live happens when you’re ready to launch your website, landing page, blog post, etc. so that it will begin to rank in search engines and be available for use by the public.
Sounds delicious, but the marketing version is slightly less savory. A hamburger menu is the three-stacked-lines graphic representing the navigation that appears on your mobile screen when you’re on a website. Who knew that even had a name?
While this entry might seem random in our glossary, it highlights one super important part of creating a website – making sure it’s responsive. In 2016, mobile Internet use surpassed desktop use for the first time in history, which means you’re not serving your market if your website can’t be viewed and easily navigated on a phone.
A visual representation of user behavior on your website or app, highlighting areas where they spend the most time or interact with different colors. This allows you to optimize your design and user experience by identifying both high and low-engagement parts of your website.
For lack of a better word, it’s about the experience users have when coming to your website. Is it easy for them to find the information they’re looking for? Is it clear what your business does? Are your visuals both appealing and accessible? All of this influences whether or not a prospect will want to work with you.
And there you have it. Just a few key marketing terms to get you started. There’s a whole bunch more out there to know (and more to learn on the terms here) – if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!