Glossary of Marketing Terms

Marketing is awesome. We love marketing, but marketing is an industry that is loaded with jargon and can be hard to follow for the average person. For this reason, we decided to create a glossary of marketing terms with very simplified definitions, so that you can understand what is going on without having to obtain a marketing degree.

There are many hundreds of terms missing from this list, so check back often as we will be adding more and more definitions to the list.

A/B Testing

This is a strategy where you create two variations of a single element to determine which performs best. A/B testing helps to improve your marketing plan by eliminating ineffective strategies in your marketing funnel.

Advertisement

A message paid for by those who send them and are intended to inform or influence people who receive them.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when a marketer promotes a product for another business and is paid a commission based on how many prospects the marketer converts. Bloggers who offer links to a product that they review are usually engaged in affiliate marketing.

Analytics

Analytics is the discovery of patterns in data that help to determine the failures or successes of your marketing plan. Analyzing trends is the first step in making informed changes to your marketing strategy.

B2B

B2B stands for Business to Business, and this refers to a business who sells to other businesses.

B2C

B2C stands for Business to Consumer, and this refers to a business who sells directly to consumers.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a page of your website and the leave without clicking any other links. High bounce rates are generally good indicators of poor conversions.

Call to Action

A Call to Action, or a CTA, is literally a call for your user to take an action. A typically CTA might urge your reader to make a phone call, signup for your newsletter, or make a purchase. CTA’s give digital marketing a sense of purpose, and helps drive your user through your marketing funnel.

Click through Rate

A Click through Rate, or CTR, is a percentage of your audience that advances through your website. This rate is determined by the total number of clicks a link receives divided by the number of opportunities that a user had to click.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a marketing strategy where a business builds content around their industry, but doesn’t necessarily promote a specific brand or product. Bloggers and YouTubers are the most common examples of content marketers.

Conversion

Conversion is the act of convincing a prospect to take an action, whether they are buying a product or signing up for your mailing list.

Cost-per-Lead

The Cost-per-Lead, or CPL, is the dollar value that it costs you to acquire a lead. Knowing your CPL is important in determining your customer acquisition cost.

Copywriter

A copywriter is a writer who specializes in understanding marketing research strategies and understands how to appeal to a user’s desire to solve a problem.

Copywriting

Copywriting, often times reduced to “copy”, is any written content that is based on strategy or serves intent.

CPC

CPC stands for Cost-per-Click, and it refers to the cost in a pay-per-click traffic building strategy.

CPI

CPI stands for Cost per Impression, this is similar to a Cost per Click, but instead of paying for a prospect to click your link you pay for a prospect to view an ad for your product or service.

CPM

CPM stands for Cost per Mille, or Cost per Thousand. This is the estimated costs of an advertisement per 1000 views, or impressions.

CRM

A CRM, or Customer Relationship Manager, is a piece of software of that helps to keep track of customer engagement. You can use a CRM to manage your client database as well as all of your customer engagement through email, SMS, or phone calls.

Customer Acquisition Cost

The customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is your total sales and acquisition cost divided by your successful conversion rate.

Customer Focus

Customer focus is a marketing and business strategy where a business puts the majority of their effort into satisfying customers and building brand loyalty.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is when a business uses a digital platform, or collection of digital platforms, to build a bridge to potential prospects. Some examples of digital marketing are building a website, building a social media audience, podcasting, vlogging, or any other means of digital communication.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing is when a business uses a strategy that communicates directly with their prospects. This is typically a pretty common strategy for most small to mid-sized businesses. Mail and e-mail marketers are examples of direct marketers.

Drip Campaign

A drip campaign is a strategy of sending pre-written emails or content to a customer over a certain amount of time. This is an effective method of nurturing leads.

Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is a form of online sales, where a customer buys from a website who then forwards the customer’s order to a third party for fulfillment. Essentially, a drop shipper markets a company’s product for them, sets a price point over the wholesale costs, and then the shipping company pays the drop shipper the difference.

E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is a valuable technique for building a lead database by sending regular emails of value to your prospective clients. This is usually an exchange of something like an e-book for a subscriber to join your database.

Gated Content

Gated content is content that requires a reader to obtain access through a form which adds prospective leads into your lead database. Gated content can also be referred to as a lead magnet.

Keyword

Any phrase, or term, that helps users find your website through a search engine.

KPI

A Key Performance Indicator, or KPI, is a measurable metric is used to demonstrate how effective a company is at hitting its primary marketing objectives. Tools to help measure KPI could be SEO analytics, sales statistics, or audience building.

Lead

A person, or company, who’s shown interest in your service or product. In order for a lead to be viable, you must be able to track it, and this is where a lead generation and CRM to nurture your leads will come into play.

Lead Generation

Lead Generation is a strategy created with the intent to create a lead database, which a business can use to nurture conversion from prospect to client.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is the offering of a product of some value in exchange for a user to sign-up for your lead database. Lead magnets can be digital files, free e-books, or even special access to web content. A lead magnet must have some valuable to a prospect to be effective.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of developing a relationship with prospective leads through a series of communication that help to escort a prospective through your marketing funnel.

Lifetime Value

The Lifetime Value, or LTV, of a client is a total of the net profit attributed to a prediction of the entire future of your business relationship with a customer, minus the Cost of Acquisition.

Lifestyle Brand

A lifestyle brand is a form of marketing which convinces the prospect that the brand is important to living a satisfying life style. Apple and its line of smartphones and computers are an excellent example of a lifestyle brand.

Mail Maketing

Mail Marketing is a marketing strategy where a business communicates with potential prospects through a post card or letter sent through the mail.

Market Focus

Market focus is a marketing strategy that puts the majority of a business’s energy on tracking and responding to market trends in their industry.

Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel is a path for conversion, where you take a member of your audience and convert them into a prospect and then eventually a customer.

Market Research

Market research is the gathering of information about consumers’ needs and their preferences in order to build a marketing strategy.

Product Focus

Product focus is a marketing and business strategy where a business puts the majority of their efforts into creating a high quality and consistent product.

Promotion

Promotion refers to an entire set of activities or actions that communicate with prospects about a brand, product, or service to their audience. Promotion is the action of trying to build awareness.

Prospects

Prospects are any members of your audience who have not committed to purchasing your offer. Lead generation is about finding prospects, and moving them along a path to conversion.

Publicity

Publicity is the act of giving out information about a product, person, or a company for advertising or promotional purposes. Some examples of publicity are press releases or press tours.

Public Relations

Public relations are the management of a business’s public image and trying to inspire a positive outcome. Some examples of this are when a business financially supports local charities or does something outstanding for their employees.

PPC

Pay-per-Click advertising, such as through Google AdWords, is a traffic building technique where you build a keyword strategy and pay for every person who clicks your link at a value that is determined by the keyword. Keyword values can range from as low as $0.25 to as much as $5.00.

PVP

1) Perceived Value Pricing is a marketing term where potential buyers are used to estimate the price point of a new product compared to other products which are already in the market.
2) Personal fulfillment, Value to the market, and Profitability, these are three factors to help determine your market focus by evaluating the services you offer by a measure of your personal enjoyment by the value of the service and on its profitability. The service you offer with the highest score is where you should build your product focus.

ROI

ROI stands for Return on Investment, and it is a measure of dollars earned per dollars spent.

Sales

Sales are the exchange of a commodity for money.

Social Media

Social media is a website, or application, which enables its users to communicate with each other by posting information, comments, and other content.

Strategy

In marketing, a strategy is a collection of planned actions that are built to increase conversion and inspire business growth.

Touchpoints

A touchpoint is any point at where a company’s advertising or promotion can connect with a user. A website, social media page, billboard, or magazine ads are all examples of touchpoints.

Tactic

A tactic is an individual action that is taken as part of a marketing strategy.

User Persona

A user persona is a fictional idealization of your business’s ideal demographic based on market research and data about your existing customers.

USP

A Unique Selling Proposition is a unique benefit that a user will experience by doing business with a company as opposed to others.