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After five years in the marketing game, I've learned that knowing the lingo isn't just helpful—it's essential. Whether you're just starting out or already deep in the field, this blog will be a great resource. Save this post, dive in, and get ready to step up your marketing game!
Here are 50+ marketing terms you need to know
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): This refers to techniques used to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through organic search engine results. SEO strategies focus on improving a site’s rankings in search engines like Google through content optimization, keyword research, and link building.
2. Content Marketing: This strategy involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a defined audience, with the objective of driving profitable customer action. Content can include blogs, videos, social media posts, and more.
3. PPC (Pay-Per-Click): A model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it's a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.
4. CRM (Customer Relationship Management): This term refers to practices, strategies, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal is to improve customer service relationships and assist in customer retention and sales growth.
5. Brand Equity: The value that your brand adds to your product or service over and above the generic value that it would have otherwise. This value arises from consumer perceptions of the brand name rather than from the product or service itself.
6. Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors. A high conversion rate indicates successful marketing and web design.
7. Influencer Marketing: A form of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand's message to the larger market. Influencers can be well-known celebrities, but more often they are Instagram or YouTube personalities with a huge niche following who can help spread the word about your business or product through their social channels.
8. Viral Marketing: Marketing phenomena that facilitate and encourage people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly.
9. Market Segmentation: The process of dividing a target market into smaller, more defined categories. Segments usually share similar characteristics such as demographics, interests, needs, or location.
10. Lead Generation: The initiation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business. Leads can be created for purposes such as list building, e-newsletter list acquisition, or for sales leads.
11. B2B (Business to Business): This term refers to transactions between businesses, such as one involving a manufacturer and wholesaler, or a wholesaler and a retailer. B2B marketing involves building valuable relationships to guarantee lasting customers.
12. B2C (Business to Consumer): The process businesses use to sell products and services directly to consumers, with no middleperson. B2C marketing tactics are closer to the consumer and involve social media campaigns, emails, and promotions.
13. Marketing Funnel: A model that represents the customer journey from the awareness stage (when they first learn about your business) to the purchase stage. Marketers use this model to outline various stages in the buyer's journey and tailor marketing strategies accordingly.
14. Affiliate Marketing: A performance-based marketing strategy in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. It's essentially a commission-based system.
15. Digital Marketing: The component of marketing that utilizes the internet and online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones, and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services.
16. Retargeting/Remarketing: The technique of serving targeted ads to people who have already visited or taken action on your website. This form of digital advertising is used to keep your brand visible and engage customers after they leave your site.
17. Social Media Marketing: The use of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to promote a product or service. It is a popular way to connect with new audiences and foster relationships with customers.
18. Native Advertising: A type of advertising, usually online, that matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears. In many cases, it manifests as either an article or video, produced by an advertiser with the specific intent to promote a product, while matching the form and style which would otherwise be seen in the work of the platform's editorial staff.
19. Brand Awareness: The extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or services. Creating brand awareness is a key step in promoting a new product or reviving an older brand.
20. KPI (Key Performance Indicator): A measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs
at multiple levels to evaluate their success at reaching targets.
21. Geofencing: A location-based digital marketing tool that lets marketers send messages to smartphone users in a defined geographic area. For example, some retail stores use geofencing to send promotions to customers who are within a one-mile radius of their store.
22. User Experience (UX): Involves a person's emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership.
23. Call to Action (CTA): A prompt on a website that tells the user to take some specified action. A CTA is typically written as a command or action phrase, such as ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Buy Now’ and can be a button or hyperlink.
24. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The cost associated in convincing a customer to buy a product/service. This cost is incurred by the organization to convince a potential customer. This is an important business metric used to evaluate the cost of scaling up a business.
25. Lifetime Value (LTV): The prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. Understanding LTV helps marketers understand how much they can afford to spend on acquiring new customers and still achieve profitability.
26. Churn Rate: The rate at which customers stop doing business with an entity. It is most commonly expressed as the percentage of service subscribers who discontinue their subscriptions within a given time period.
27. Programmatic Advertising: The use of software to buy digital advertising, as opposed to traditional processes such as requests for proposals, tenders, quotes, and human negotiation. Programmatic media buying utilizes data insights and algorithms to serve ads to the right user at the right time, and at the right price.
28. Sentiment Analysis: The process of computationally determining whether a piece of writing is positive, negative or neutral. It is often used in social media monitoring to understand the attitudes of customers and target audience towards a brand or topic.
29. Growth Hacking: Marketing techniques used by technology startups that use creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure. Growth hacking focuses not only on traditional marketing strategies but also on product development, data, and engineering.
30. Interactive Content: Content that requires the participants' active engagement—more than simply reading or watching. In return, participants receive real-time, hyper-relevant results they care about. Examples include polls, quizzes, games, assessments, etc.
31. Webinar: A live, web-based video conference that uses the internet to connect the individual (or multiple individuals) hosting the webinar to an audience of viewers and listeners from all over the world. Hosts can show themselves speaking, display slides, or demonstrate products and services.
32. Omni-channel Marketing: A sales approach that seeks to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience whether they are shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, or in a brick-and-mortar store.
33. Personalization: The act of tailoring an experience or communication based on information a company has learned about an individual. Personalization can increase customer satisfaction, digital sales conversion, marketing results, branding, and improved website metrics.
34. Permission Marketing: A concept introduced by Seth Godin that represents a change in traditional marketing by asking permission before advancing to the next step in the purchasing process. It can be as simple as asking if the consumer wants to continue receiving more emails.
35. Thought Leadership: A method of marketing, which solidifies you as an expert and authority within your industry. The goal of thought leadership marketing is to become recognized as a go-to resource for information on topics related to your niche.
36. Mobile Marketing: Marketing on or with a mobile device, such as a smart phone. Mobile marketing can provide customers with time and location sensitive, personalized information that promotes goods, services, and ideas.
37. Visual Merchandising: The practice in the retail industry of developing floor plans and three-dimensional displays in order to maximize sales. Both goods and services can be displayed to highlight their features and benefits.
38. A/B Testing: Also known as split testing, it compares two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. A/B testing is an experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.
39. AdWords: A Google's pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform that enables businesses to create ads that appear on Google’s search engine and other Google properties. AdWords operates on a pay-per-click model, where users bid on keywords and pay for each click on their advertisements.
40. Behavioral Targeting: A technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. Behavioral targeting uses information collected from an individual's web browsing behavior
, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual.
41. Click-through Rate (CTR): The ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. It is used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns.
42. Demand Generation: The focus of targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and/or services. Commonly used in B2B, B2G, or longer sales cycle B2C sales.
43. E-commerce: The buying and selling of goods or services using the internet, and the transfer of money and data to execute these transactions. E-commerce is often used to refer to the sale of physical products online, but it can also describe any kind of commercial transaction that is facilitated through the internet.
44. Engagement Rate: A metric that measures the level of engagement that a piece of created content is receiving from an audience. It shows how much people are interacting with the content. Factors that influence engagement include users’ comments, shares, likes, and more.
45. FOMO Marketing: Based on the fear of missing out, a technique to make consumers feel the urge to buy due to the idea that they might miss an opportunity if they don't act quickly. It is often used in deals, limited edition items, or event-driven sales.
46. Inbound Marketing: A business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. Unlike outbound marketing, where marketers attempt to find customers, inbound marketing earns the attention of customers and makes the company easy to be found.
47. Lookalike Audience: A way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they're similar to your best existing customers. Platforms like Facebook identify the common qualities of the people in your audience (e.g., demographic information or interests) and then find people who are similar to them.
48. Marketing Automation: The technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically. Through automation, businesses can target customers with automated messages across email, web, social, and text.
49. Net Promoter Score (NPS): A customer loyalty and satisfaction measurement taken from asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others on a scale of 0-10. It is often used to gauge the customer's overall satisfaction with a company’s product or service and the customer's loyalty to the brand.
50. Positioning: Marketing strategy that aims to make a brand occupy a distinct position, relative to competing brands, in the mind of the customer. Companies apply this strategy either by emphasizing the distinguishing features of their brand (what it is, what it does, and how, etc.) or they may try to create a suitable image (inexpensive or premium, utilitarian or luxurious, entry-level or high-end, etc.) through advertising.
51. Search Engine Marketing (SEM): A form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.
52. SWOT Analysis: A strategic planning technique used to help a person or organization identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to business competition or project planning. This helps you focus on your strengths, minimize threats, and take the greatest possible advantage of opportunities available to you.
53. User Generated Content (UGC): Any form of content—text, posts, images, videos, reviews, etc.—created by people, rather than brands. Brands will often share UGC on their own social media accounts, website pages, and other marketing channels.
Each of these marketing terms is critical for anyone involved in marketing to understand, as they encapsulate different strategies, tools, and approaches that can be used to target audiences effectively and achieve business objectives.