We've all Googled a definition while in a Zoom meeting, right?
Marketers love any kind of jargon — especially acronyms. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting, it can be tough to keep up with the latest industry terminology or sometimes even know the standard ones.
That's why we compiled a list of 80+ key marketing terms that you should know. To help you comb through these terms, we've split them into the following categories:
Understanding marketing terms isn't just a matter of impressing your colleagues at networking events (although that's a bonus!). It's about making informed decisions and understanding strategies that can propel your business forward. It's important to 'talk the talk' in this sense as it is to 'walk the walk.' This glossary will help you unpack some of the jargon around you and learn the language of marketers everywhere.
Digital marketing is any form of communication aiming to persuade people to purchase a product or service that occurs through some form of digital device.
At New Breed, we classify marketing efforts as “digital marketing” when they occur through an internet-connected tool. Examples could be paid advertising, content downloads, or your website as a whole.
Brand positioning is how you differentiate yourself from your competitors and how consumers identify and connect with your brand. It’s comprised of the key qualities and values that are synonymous with your company.
Brand positioning can be conveyed through a variety of means including tone and voice, visual design, and the way your company represents itself in person and on social media.
Brand awareness is the extent to which people can recall and recognize your brand. It has two components: brand recall, which is a measure of how well a brand name is connected to a product class (e.g. Do customers know that Toyota is connected with the product class of cars?), and brand recognition, which is when a consumer recognizes a brand by its attributes (i.e. a company’s logo or brand colors).
In short: Brand awareness is successful when customers can see (and recognize) your brand or product and know that you can provide them the best solution to their problem.
Demand generation encompasses — you guessed it! — generating demand for your product or service. More formally, it is the data-driven focus of marketing programs to produce awareness and interest in a company's offerings through the use of technology.
Revenue performance management ensures the functions of acquisition, retention, and expansion are aligned to maximize profits within a business.
Part of the goal of revenue performance management is to break down organizational silos and establish a shared set of data, a shared process, and a shared language that enables teams across the company to work toward the common goal of generating revenue.
Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach that focuses on drawing high-fit customers in as opposed to blasting your message to anyone and everyone.
Through tactics like blogging, social media, and SEO, inbound marketing attracts customers to your company using helpful, relevant content. Inbound tactics will continue to help your company grow after you’ve finished investing in them (unlike outbound tactics like paid ads or call lists that are more time-bound) and ultimately serve to provide scalable, long-term ROI.
Lead nurturing is the process of educating and building trust with your prospects to guide them through the buyer’s journey. The ultimate goal of lead nurturing is to provide your prospects with a unique experience that keeps them coming back for more — and eventually converts them into customers.
Introduced in 2018, the flywheel represents a shift in how marketers think about B2B marketing success. The flywheel places customers at the center of a business and highlights the opportunity for repeat business through relationship building and customer service engagement. It represents how you keep your customers coming back leads to the success of your company.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers.
Buyer personas should include demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information, and they tend to go more in-depth about the role and influence these people have within their companies, emphasizing their goals and motivations.
An ideal customer profile is a hypothetical description of the type of company that would reap the most benefit from your product or solution. These companies tend to have the quickest, most successful sales cycle, the greatest customer retention rates, and the highest number of evangelists for your brand. An ICP looks at the firmographics of a company that your business should be targeting.
Sales enablement is a combination of coaching, tools, and content to help your sales team be more efficient and effective. Your sales team needs to be properly enabled to carry out a successful sales strategy.
By providing key elements of sales enablement, you allow your team to work better within an inbound sales process so that they can provide contextually relevant information, carry out helpful conversations, and see — in real-time — which of their efforts are working.
Contextual marketing is a strategy that’s guided by the behaviors and conditions surrounding your marketing efforts so all content is relevant to the person receiving it.
To deliver contextually relevant information, you need to understand the psychographics of your buyer personas to know how to speak to them and what content will resonate with them. B2C and B2B content marketers specialize in this strategy.
Word-of-mouth marketing (WOM) is the oral or written advocacy of a good or service from a satisfied customer (or evangelist) to a prospective customer. It’s widely considered to be the most effective form of promotion.
According to Drift, who coined the term “conversational marketing,” it is “the fastest way to move buyers through your marketing and sales funnels through the power of real-time conversations. It builds relationships and creates authentic experiences with customers and buyers.”
Chatbots are the most common channel through which conversational marketing occurs, but you can also leverage social media platforms that allow real-time engagements.
Account based marketing (ABM) is a marketing approach that flips traditional marketing on its head. Rather than developing buyer personas and then casting a wide net to attract those personas to your brand, ABM focuses on finding ways to engage with people from targeted accounts based on your ideal customer profile (ICP).
ABM is all about sending tailored messages to targeted accounts. Marketing will fuel the strategies behind a successful ABM approach, and sales will provide insight regarding the impact of the interactions marketing is having with the targeted accounts.
Focuses on building a personalized and highly targeted strategy for individual accounts. This is appropriate for high-value accounts with significant revenue potential or strategic importance. Each account is treated as a separate market to penetrate with unique marketing campaigns tailored to needs, goals, and pain points of that specific account. For example, a list size of 10 target accounts have different buyer groups, and would need personalized content.
Targets a small group of accounts with similar characteristics such as industry, size, or location. For these groupings, organizations will create semi-personalized marketing campaigns that address the shared needs and challenges of this group, rather than on an individualized level.
This allows for greater efficiency than 1-to-1 ABM while still maintaining a targeted and tailored approach. For example, this might be a vertical target looking specifically at the challenges of industries (manufacturing, Saas, etc.) or the company stage (companies that are looking to expand globally, companies that have been through layoffs, etc.).
Targets a larger number of accounts with broadly similar characteristics. 1-to-many ABM leverages technology and automation to create personalized marketing experiences at scale. This differs from demand generation as demand generation seeks to create broader awareness and interest through the traditional funnel of Awareness, Interest, Consideration and Purchase, whereas ABM starts with identifying the targets and then engaging those directly to purchase.
Target accounts should have the highest probability of closing based on shared ICP attributes.
Process of segmenting your TAL based on priority and revenue opportunities.
Key decision-makers, influencers, and end-users in each of your target accounts.
Overall knowledge you have of a target account, meaning you understand who they are and what they really want and need. Gathering account intelligence typically requires FIRE data (see below) and a mechanism for centralizing data.
An acronym that refers to a well-known, four-pronged model of ABM success:
Churn rate is a measurement used to calculate customer retention and is significant for recurring revenue companies. It helps companies identify how many customers they lose in a given time period.
To calculate the churn rate, you divide the number of customers lost during a time period by the number of customers you had at the beginning of the time period.
Customer acquisition cost is exactly what it sounds like — the cost associated with turning a lead into a customer. CAC is typically expressed as the ratio:
Cost per lead refers to the amount spent on acquiring a lead. This cost is factored heavily into CAC. The most common use case for cost per lead can be found in paid advertising where there is a direct correlation between the amount of money you are spending on something like Google Ads and the number of leads you are generating from that spend.
Key Performance Indicators are used to track progress toward marketing goals. By setting the right KPIs for your business, you can continuously evaluate performance and make adjustments to optimize your marketing strategy.
Leading performance indicators (LPIs) and tactical performance indicators (TPIs) can help you understand which specific efforts are propelling you toward your goals.
The Customer lifetime value is the predicted net profit associated with the future relationship with that customer.
To calculate CLV:
The Net Promoter Score measures how likely someone would recommend your company to others on a 1–10 scale. Using this customer satisfaction metric, you can easily identify how loyal your customers are and divide them into three categories: promoters (9+), passives (7–8), and detractors (0–6).
Checking your NPS regularly allows you to identify ways to improve your product or service.
Growth Marketing is the process of designing and conducting experiments to optimize and improve the results of a target area. If you have a certain metric you want to increase, growth marketing is a method you can utilize to achieve that.
Growth marketing can be applied across your business to areas referenced within the acronym AAARRR (sometimes referred to as pirate metrics) which stands for Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, and Referral. By improving these categories of metrics, you can grow over time.
A tech stack, also called a software stack, is the set of technology and software an organization uses to run its business. For most businesses, that probably involves having a CMS, CRM software, sales acceleration tool, marketing automation platform, and project management program.
It also includes any integrations and servers you need to operate the platforms in tandem.
CRM (customer relationship management) software is more than a contact database; it's a sales acceleration tool that identifies business insights and analytics. It's a comprehensive and easily accessible platform that houses the sales process.
The main feature associated with CRM software is its ability to hold contact information, such as names, phone numbers, emails, and other records related to a given contact. It can associate individual contacts with their companies so salespeople can track their interactions with every stakeholder.
Popular examples include HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoho.
A CMS (content management system) is a software that allows marketers to create, design, host, edit, manage, and track the performance of all of their website content.
Popular examples include HubSpot, WordPress, and Squarespace.
In a nutshell, marketing automation refers to software that is designed to automate your marketing tasks. It's centered around nurturing leads through the buying process by leveraging targeted content that addresses your prospect's needs when they want it. You're sending them information based on their behavior which is much more powerful than just blasting out emails to everyone.
Overall, marketing automation software allows marketers to streamline various tasks, boost their overall efficiency, draw key insights, and drive ROI.
Marketing operations is everything that happens in your marketing automation and CRM platforms to enable the delivery of the right message at the right time to people who are interested in your products and services.
Marketing operations live behind the scenes. For example, while marketing operations specialists aren’t sending emails, they’re making sure they’re sent to the right person.
Sales operations are everything that happens in your CRM and sales acceleration platforms to enable your sales team to communicate effectively with clients and control their sales process.
Like marketing operations, it lives behind the scenes, supporting your sales team’s execution of strategy and objectives.
Service operations include management of all the workflows, tools, and processes required to maintain and improve the overall customer experience.
It includes implementation, management, and adoption of CRMs, ticket management, automated campaigns, product usage, knowledge base content, and customer feedback.
Revenue operations are the alignment of marketing, sales, and service to drive accountability and increase efficiency across your business. The goal of revenue operations is to provide more predictable outcomes and accelerate your company’s growth by organizing people, data, and processes to help your business run more effectively.
Even though the flywheel has arrived, the funnel still represents how you turn prospects into customers. The top of the funnel refers to the first stages of the buying process. During this stage, buyers are becoming aware that they have an issue and are looking for more information. Whether it's subscribing to a blog or watching a video, you want to have helpful content that prompts visitors to take the desired next steps.
The middle of the funnel represents the middle stage of the buying process. Buyers have identified that they have a problem and are continuing to do more research; however, now they are looking at content, such as a case study, that brings your business in as a solution to the problem they are trying to solve.
This is also where responsibility for leads is typically transferred from marketing to sales.
The bottom of the funnel represents the last stage of the buying process. This is when the buyer has identified a problem, researched possible solutions, and is getting ready to buy. At this stage, buyers are typically requesting either a free demo or consultation & beginning a conversation with a sales rep.
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is the third of six lifecycle stages in the buyer’s journey. MQLs indicate the number of visitors you’ve converted who are good fits for your organization.
When a company confirms a lead is a good fit, that lead becomes an MQL. Once a lead becomes an MQL, the company works to further qualify the contact and nurture them down the funnel.
A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is the fourth of six lifecycle stages (occurring right after the MQL stage) in the buyer’s journey. An MQL is characterized as an SQL when sales agrees with marketing that the contact has demonstrated enough interest and is a good enough fit to initiate a sales conversation.
The SQL stage also happens to be both one of the most important and most difficult stages for a company to define because it’s where the marketing-to-sales handoff occurs.
The length of B2B sales cycles can vary greatly, with an average cycle length of around 6-9 months.
Conversational marketing and chatbots are becoming increasingly important in today's marketing landscape. A Conversation Qualified Lead is someone who has expressed interest in buying via a conversation with an employee or a bot. These leads are coming to you with specific questions that they want answers to in real time.
The buyer’s journey is the progression that a contact follows when researching and purchasing a product. It starts with the awareness stage, when buyers realize they have a problem, moves to the consideration stage, when they evaluate different solutions to that problem, and concludes with the decision stage when they decide which contender best aligns with their needs and objectives and purchase it.
The buyer’s journey differs from the customer's journey because not every prospective buyer becomes a customer. Individuals might go through some of the buyer’s journey stages without ever making a purchase.
Multi-touch revenue attribution is the process of organizing, collecting, and cataloging all of the interactions that occur as an individual decides to purchase with your company. It helps businesses understand how their marketing is contributing to the company’s bottom line, giving marketers the credit they deserve for their efforts.
Customer marketing is a set of strategies and tactics aimed at your customer base to improve their experience with your brand and increase the value they gain from their engagement with you. Through customer marketing, you can boost retention, evangelize your customer base, and nurture existing customers toward future sales.
Customer acquisition refers to all of the steps, processes, and resources involved in attracting a first-time customer to your business.
Brand awareness, lead generation, product marketing, nurturing, and sales strategies all fall under the umbrella of customer acquisition — but the concept of customer acquisition stops as soon as your prospects officially close as a customer.
Customer retention is the act of renewing your existing customers so they continue to work with your company. It’s the inverse of churn.
The first step of retention is acquiring good-fit customers in the first place, but there are other components like customer support, customer success, and customer experience that contribute to a customer’s likelihood to renew.
Customer expansion is the act of increasing the MRR you see from existing customers. This is typically accomplished through upsells and cross-sells.
Customer success is partnering with your customers to help them meet and exceed their goals. It’s a proactive function that aims to help maximize the value customers gain from working with your company so they’re more likely to renew and expand.
Customer support is solving the problems your customers have when things go wrong. This is a reactive function that uses tools like a ticketing system or self-service knowledge base.
Customer service is assisting your customers with the offering they bought from you and ensuring it’s meeting their needs. Customer service can be thought of as a proactive version of customer support. It’s outreach meant to provide customers with value before your customers need to go looking for it.
Customer satisfaction is the management of client sentiment. When tracking this, you should look at not only how your main point of contact feels about your product or service but also how that sentiment trickles down to the rest of the company.
Satisfaction is the baseline of a happy customer. Not every customer will necessarily become an evangelist who recommends your company to their entire network, but you should be able to satisfy every customer your company takes on.
The customer journey is a way of tracking a customer’s experience with your company from a visitor’s first interaction through when they sign a deal. It’s a framework for a greater philosophy of client nurturing.
The customer journey is not one-size-fits-all. What the overarching framework will look like depends on numerous factors, including your industry, sales cycle, and product or service.
“By providing the right segmentation, by triggering the right actions in an approach to proactively progress your relationships, it allows you to be responsive to your client,” says New Breed’s Client Success Manager, Dylan Berno.
Product marketing is the process of bringing a specific product to market and ensuring that that product is successful.
As a product marketer, your job entails guiding a product’s internal strategy. It is your duty to enable all of the marketing activities surrounding the product within your organization.
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a plan specifying how you will present your product’s unique value proposition so you can reach your customers and achieve a competitive advantage. The purpose of a GTM strategy is to provide a roadmap for launching a product in a way that will achieve product-market fit — the end goal of your launch.
When your product fulfills a market’s needs, you achieve product-market fit. Product-market fit occurs at the intersection of the introduction and growth stages of the product lifecycle.
To obtain product-market fit, you first need to create a minimum viable product (MVP).
A minimum viable product (MVP) is an offering that has enough features to initially satisfy your target market.
Producing an MVP is the end goal of the product development stage (which precedes the introduction stage) of the product lifecycle. Your GTM strategy is essentially a blueprint outlining how you will introduce your MVP.
Total addressable market (TAM) is the amount of potential revenue your company could earn if everyone with a demand for your product or service actually bought it.
For most companies, the amount of achievable revenue is nowhere near TAM, but understanding your total market can help inform how to define the target market you’ll focus your marketing and sales strategy toward.
Product-led growth is a strategy coined by OpenView Venture Partners that relies on product features and usage as the primary drivers of customer acquisition and retention. It leverages a free product for initial usage and begins enforcing paywalls only after value has been delivered to users.
A Product Qualified Lead is someone who has tried your product and indicated purchase interest through their usage. These leads tend to close at a higher rate since they have already interacted with your product.
A lead generation website’s primary objective is to educate your visitors on your product or service and the industry you operate within. On top of that, it should give visitors the opportunity to provide qualitative information to your sales team, helping your organization capture qualified leads for your product or service.
As for website traffic benchmarks, as of 2021, companies that blogged 16+ times per month got almost 3.5 times more traffic than those that published zero to four monthly posts. The power of consistent, quality content cannot be underestimated for driving traffic.
Simply put, the conversion rate is the ratio between the number of people who complete the desired action on a given webpage and the number of people who visit that webpage. That desired action could include filling out a form on a landing page or clicking a CTA on a blog post.
Average landing page conversion rates for most industries hovered around 2-5%. However, companies in the top 25% were achieving 5.31% or higher, showcasing the potential for high conversion rates with optimized inbound strategies.
Based on the principles of the scientific method, conversion rate optimization (CRO) focuses on systematically increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action on a given page. For example, they might convert on your site by filling out a form or providing information to a chatbot.
By identifying key metrics, you can better understand how customers interact with your site and the actions they take. These metrics help to test and determine what strategies work best for generating leads and closing customers.
Wireframes are blueprints for your website. They provide the framework upon which the functionality and design of your final website will be built. The focus of wireframes is not on the look and feel of your website, but rather the structure and layout of content that will prompt the intended actions of your ideal user.
There are many different forms a wireframe can take, and their level of fidelity is characterized by the level of depth in functionality and content. Low-fidelity wireframes can be as little as sketches on paper and generally utilize all placeholder text. High-fidelity wireframes often incorporate some clickable elements to demonstrate user flow and often feature draft or even finalized copy.
A web content outline is the raw copy version of a website page. It reflects the structure the finalized page will take, but it isn’t designed at all.
In addition to all titles and body copy, web content outlines also include technical information like SEO metadata, page title, and where the page exists within the site architecture.
Information architecture is the organization and structuring of content before developing a website. It defines how your content is connected and categorized.
Information architecture encompasses the planning of a site’s main navigation, auditing all existing URLs, determining what to keep, consolidate, and delete, and then establishing URL structures. When complete, it enables users to find the content they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.
A landing page is a webpage optimized for lead generation. Using a form, companies can leverage meaningful content in exchange for visitor information. Successful landing pages have well-defined content and clear conversion paths.
After submitting information on a landing page, customers are immediately redirected to a thank you page that thanks them for their submission and provides them with potential next steps. Thank you pages are important in your lead nurturing strategy because they deliver the offers individuals are seeking and they can position other relevant content as the next logical step.
An A/B split test is an experiment that compares two variables by presenting those variables to a randomly “split” audience over a specific period. As long as the experiment is controlled and unbiased, A/B split testing is a great way to understand which marketing tactics reap the best results for your business.
Responsive design refers to the way a website automatically adjusts to the screen size you're viewing it from. This will ensure that no matter what device your visitor is using, whether it's their computer, their phone, or their tablet, your website will always look great.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of positioning your content and website so it can rank well on and draw traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO includes both on-page SEO, where you attempt to make alterations to your web code and content to improve its ranking, and off-page SEO, where you try to reach out to individuals outside of your company to acquire backlinks and traffic from other sources.
Paid search is the practice of displaying ads on search engines based on the terms, or keywords, individuals search for. Paid search works on a pay-per-click basis, meaning you only pay when someone clicks your ad for a given keyword.
Keyword research is the process of identifying the search terms that your prospective site visitors are looking for online. It is critical to ensure your content can be found on search engine results pages.
Such research isn’t the only element that impacts your digital visibility, but if you’re trying to drive traffic to your website, you should actively investigate which keywords work best.
The open rate is a crucial metric that tells you the percentage of recipients who opened your email. It helps you gauge the effectiveness of your subject line and preview text to grab the attention of your audience.
Open rates typically range between 15-25%, with click-through rates (CTR) around 2.5%, according to various sources. However, this can vary greatly depending on the industry and the specific campaign.
The click-through rate measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within your email. It indicates the level of engagement and interest generated by your content and call-to-action. A higher CTR suggests that your email content is compelling and resonates with your audience.
The average click-through rate for email campaigns is around 2.5%. However, the CTR can vary based on factors like the quality and relevance of the content, the strength of your call-to-action, and the clarity of your email design.
The bounce rate indicates the percentage of emails that were not delivered to the intended recipients' inboxes. Bounces can be classified as either hard bounces (permanent delivery failures) or soft bounces (temporary delivery issues). Monitoring your bounce rate helps you maintain a clean and up-to-date email list. A bounce rate of 2-3% is generally considered acceptable for email campaigns. However, it's important to monitor your bounce rate regularly and take steps to address any issues, such as removing invalid or inactive email addresses from your list.
The average unsubscribe rate for email campaigns is typically around 0.2-0.5%. The unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of recipients who opted out of receiving future emails from your list. While it's natural to see some unsubscribes over time, a high unsubscribe rate may indicate that your email content or frequency is not aligned with your audience's expectations.
The list growth rate shows the rate at which your email subscriber list is expanding. It helps you track the success of your efforts in acquiring new subscribers. A healthy list growth rate indicates effective lead generation and a growing audience to engage with. A healthy list growth rate is generally considered to be around 10% annually.
The email sharing or forwarding rate measures the percentage of recipients who share or forward your email to others. It reflects the level of interest and engagement your content generates. A high sharing rate indicates that your email content resonates well and is deemed valuable by your subscribers. Research suggests that the average email sharing/forwarding rate ranges from 0.2% to 0.4%.
Marketing is filled with terms that can seem like a foreign language to the uninitiated. Understanding these 73 key terms will not just help you wade through that, it’ll also help you optimize your inbound marketing and demand generation efforts.
This post was originally published January 2, 2020.