Complete Marketing Glossary

Sometimes marketing lingo can be confusing and hard to understand. Here is a glossary of marketing terms to help you navigate the marketing world.

A

• A/B Testing- A/B testing, also known as split testing, compares page variants of two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. A/B testing is essentially an experiment where two or more page variants are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.
• Above the Fold – the term refers back to days of print newspapers where the primary or leading story was positioned above the horizontal fold across the newspaper – this was prime placement because of how newspapers were stacked and delivered and guaranteed it was the first item seen; in web terms, it means to copy or images that appear on a page before the user needs to scroll.
• Affiliate - an organization or individual attached to another larger corporation. 
• Algorithm - a process or set of rules that are followed in calculations or problem-solving operations, typically by a computer.
• Analytics - Large sets of a business's data using mathematics, statistics, and computer software 
• Anchor Text - The visible text you see as a link you can click. Typically appears in various colors, different than that of the main text.
• API (Application Programming Interference) - API stands for application programming interface, a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. APIs let your product or service communicate with other products and services without having to know how they’re implemented. 
• Audit - an official inspection of an individual or organization's property, assets, and other records.
• Authority Site - A website that is trusted by its users, industry experts, and other websites and trusted by search engines.
• Automation –  tools, usually software that helps you streamline tactics, workflows, and marketing measurements to save time and money; automation tools are often behavior-based to trigger other actions instead of manually sending emails one by one after you learn of an action or intent. Many marketing automation systems deal heavily with email marketing, but others incorporate social media and website actions.  Automation is also about the planning and strategy of designing marketing workflows so that they can be automated to degrees. Automation tools are often directed at large companies with larger budgets. For example -  your system will automatically send emails based on specific activity on particular pages of your website, or the system will send one set of email messages to new list subscribers, another set to those who read a particular ebook, and another set to those who purchased a particular product.
• Automation tools/software -  Pardot, Silverpop, Marketo, Act-on, HubSpot
• Autoresponder is part of an email service that allows you to send out pre-scheduled messages to your email list, often in emails. You decide the order and the frequency, they send automatically based on a trigger (for example -  signing up for your email list triggers the first email on day 1, another a week later, a third a week after that – no matter when someone signs up). Autoresponders are usually a paid feature of an email marketing service.
• Awareness – the degree to which a person can easily recognize and identify (unprompted) an organization or brand and link it to the products or services it offers, to its marketing campaigns, and/or to its tagline or slogan; sometimes referred to as ‘top of mind awareness,’ or ‘brand awareness.’

B

• B2B (Business-to-Business) – used to describe marketing for products and services whose primary customers are other businesses. Example -  Home Advisor and Angieslist sell their services directly to businesses, not individuals; Comcast and American Express have products they sell to consumers and ones they sell to businesses, each with different campaigns and messages. B2B marketing may use the same tools and tactics as those directly to individual consumers.
• B2C (Business to Consumer) describes marketing campaigns that promote products or services directly to individual consumers. Your local plumber, Walmart, Adidas, and Burger King are all B2C marketers.
• Backlinks – Backlinks are links from outside domains that point to pages on your domain, essentially linking back from their domain to yours.
• Benchmarking –  a point of reference comparison or measurement on some standards or metrics, often used versus similar organizations to yours.
• Blogging - Short for either web log or weblog. A blog for a business is typically useful information about their industry or field, customer feedback, updates, and product or service information. They can include e-books, diagrams, charts, etc...Blogs are very useful in marketing because they help with material to post for ads, copy on the website rich with keywords, and can help increase your domain authority. It does not, however, do your taxes.
• Body copy – the main text in a piece of content, which provides details, benefits, features, or other necessary information; more detailed and more prolonged than headlines or subheads. Refer to the text in a blog post, a paid ad, a flyer, or any other text-based marketing piece.
• Bounce Rate – percent of visitors to your website who navigate away from that page after viewing only that page. 
• Brand - A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s product or service as unique as opposed to other sellers. 
• Buyer Persona - A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone representing your target audience. This persona is fictional but based on deep research of your existing or desired audience. 
• B-Roll – film or video footage that is not part of the original or main script or shooting plan or doesn’t feature whoever is talking on-camera; often used to give context, sense of place or surroundings, actions, crowds, or visual information while a narrator or voice-over gives additional info; b-rolls ‘shows, not tells.’
• Byline – the ‘about the author’ information, often at the end of an article or blog post – especially on sites other than yours. Contains a link back to your website or a call-to-action link for readers. 

C

• Call To Action (CTA) – each marketing piece should have some CTA – asking the reader to do something. You could invite them to sign up for your email newsletter, go to the page to donate to your nonprofit campaign, click a link for a product or service you use and recommend, use the button for your online appointment scheduler, or click a link to buy something. The point of marketing is to inspire action – so content should have directions on what action to take.
• Case Study – for content marketing context, share the story of one of your clients, customers, patrons, or reader of your blog. Tell about their experience using your services, programs, or advice.
• Channel – can refer to types of media, e.g., TV, print, radio, internet, social media, and even the specific platforms or sources themselves; or could mean the method or manner of distributing goods or products – linking a business to an end customer.
• Click-through-Rate (CTR) – With online marketing, the click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of visitors viewing a web page who view and then click on a specific advertisement on that page. Click-through rates measure how successfully an ad has captured a reader's attention. The higher the click-through rate it has, the more prosperous the ad was in generating interest. A high click-through rate will help a website owner support the site through advertising dollars measured in cost-per-click. Commonly used as a metric for email marketing (Percent who clicked the link in email = signal of real engagement) or for an online ad (percentage who clicked on an ad vs. saw ad).  Clicks ÷ Impressions = CTR  [if 100 people see the link and 10 of those people click on it, your CTR = 10%]
• Collateral – the printed (sometimes means electronic) information used to explain or give background on a company or organization and to help a person buy a product or service or make a donation, e.g., brochures, information sheets, rack cards, business cards, print (or email) newsletters, fact sheets, press kits, media kits, staff or team member biographies, websites, and annual reports.

1. Org Fact sheet – to help employees, key stakeholders, or media members to learn important facts about the organization at a glance, inc founding or history information, key dates, location(s), images of key buildings or facilities, names, and brief background of crucial staff, founders, historical figures in organizational history, essential photos, contact info; usually all on one attractively designed page, ready to send out or download as PDF.
2. Product/Service Fact sheet – keep one for each critical service or primary product; company function or value, key customer benefits, distinctive features that set it apart, comparison to similar products/services, a statement on quality or reliability, pricing, and/or availability.
3. Press/Media Kit – all the information a reporter or media member needs to know about your organization at a glance; they can be collected in one place or page on your website, available to download, or printed physically and sent on request or handed out at events; Business: logo and appropriate way to display it; company/org fact sheet, key product/service fact sheets, copy of recent articles or press mentions of your org; a current press release; card or contact information.

• Color Codes –  also known as ‘color models’; because we need more precise ways to consistently represent and display the same color in web and printed materials, each color has a set of codes (and because ‘blue’ could be anything between ‘sky’, ‘ocean’ or ‘denim’); if you are getting material printed, you may be asked for CMYK, if it’s purely on the web, use RGB or Hex.  The nifty site to find hex codes for all variations of a color (0to255.com), find or translate codes across models (color-hex.com), and select color palettes (Colors).

1. RGB – a projected light color system; that represents colors with three separate numbers from 0 to 255, one number each to represent R(red), G(green), and B(blue) values that make up a color; most computer devices and screen use RGB colors.
   Example - Black = (0, 0, 0) Red = (255, 0, 0) magenta (255, 0, 255)
2. CMYK – ‘process color’ – represents the four colors in the physical printing ink, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key Black for paint, pigment, and inks where you add various percentages of colors, and if you keep adding, you’d eventually get black (but in practice, it comes out muddy, hence the use of the fourth color, K (pure black).
   e.g Black = 0.00, 0.00, 0.00, 1.00       Red =  0.00, 1.00, 1.00, 0.00  Magenta =  0.00, 1.00, 0.00, 0.00
3. Hex Codes (hexadecimal) – computer-friendly, six-character alpha-numeric combination beginning with # to also represent the spectrum of values of Red, Green, and Blue; hex codes are used in ‘legacy’ HTML and CSS; Example -  Black = #000000 Red=#FF0000 Magenta = #ff00ff

• Competitive Analysis - Competitive analysis identifies competitors and evaluates their strategies to determine their weaknesses and strengths to improve. your company. (Resource: Airfocus)
• Content – any information you share with readers for instructional, educational, entertainment, or persuasive purposes. It can be long or short, text or visual, audio, video, etc. Blog posts, white papers, slide shows, videos, podcasts, short ebooks, social media posts, and infographics are all types or formats of content.
• Content Management System – a web application or framework that allows users to quickly develop, add, edit, and manage website content via a familiar user interface and can support multiple users working in the same system, collaboratively as infor  files, media, articles, and other digital content. Examples - Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Wikis, Moodle, Rainmaker, etc.
• Conversion – someone taking a desired action; some actions include: subscribing to an email, downloading something, donating, signing up for the event, watching the video, sending the follow-up contact form, initiating a chat, sending an email, or making a purchase.
• Conversion Rate – the number of visitors who ‘convert’ into or through a desired action out of the total number of visitors who visited a web page, saw an ad, visited a landing page, etc.  Example – how many visitors filled out an opt-in email form vs. the number who visited the page or clicked the link to open the opt-in. (Conversion rates tend to be low (<10% is standard) but can vary and increase depending on factors like what’s being offered, good headlines, emotional appeals, clear benefits, social proof, or on-page graphics.)
• Copywriting – writing to promote something and inspire action – for a business, organization, nonprofit, person, opinion, or idea. Copywriting’s goal is persuasion through compelling, engaging, targeted writing.
  Copy – text or writing, usually for marketing purposes; can be headline copy, body copy, footer copy, disclaimer copy, policy copy, sales copy, etc
• Cost Per Action (CPA) – an online advertising model where the person/org buying pays only for the specified action (i.e. a click, an impression, a sale)
• Cost Per Click (CPC) – an online ad model where the advertiser pays a pre-set amount whenever that ad is clicked.
• Cost Per Thousand (CPM) – the cost to reach 1,000 people via a specific advertising channel or medium (1000 viewers on TV, 1000 page views, etc.); or cost per thousand impressions.
• Crowd-sourced – usually referring to content; when you let your customers, users, or other 3rd party subject experts create quality content for you to share on your site or other social platforms under your brand or organizational name. Content may come from a contest, as part of testimonials, or guest posts. Always give credit fairly to all contributors, including social media handles.
• Curation – collecting, organizing, and sharing already published content via a blog, social media, or email newsletters.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – often refers to software designed to help you keep track of contacts, leads, and customers at different phases of interaction with your organization; the system holds all contact information, details of meetings, personal info (birthdays, anniversaries, hobbies, interests – anything to help you personalize your contact or products with potential customers). Some systems include social networking information and profiles. Examples include Nimble, Insightly, Salesforce, Zoho, Infusionsoft, Act!, SugarCRM, Pipedrive, and HubSpot CRM.

• Demographics – personal info about users or customers (usually collected, studied, or used in marketing in the aggregate – i.e.,, not identifiable to a specific individual); Example age, gender, occupation, education level, zip code, number of people in the household, marital status, group affiliations.
• Distribution – how your products, goods, services, or cause are delivered to your users or customers; also method your products or services are marketed, promoted circulated into the hands of users; Channel of Distribution = network or system of resources, organizations that are connected to bring a good or service from beginning producer into hands of the end consumer, completing a marketing cycle.
• DM (Direct Mail) – targeted advertising, fundraising, or news delivered to prospects, customers, users, or patrons via postal mail.

E

• Editorial Calendar – a publishing schedule for your content that helps you organize, plan and coordinate what you are creating, publishing, and sharing, when and where. A calendar might include: timed themes for your content (April is Library Appreciation month; February will feature ‘best huddle with blanket and fireplace reads’; Wednesdays will be website tips; share archives or local history on#TBT, #Caturday, etc.); topics for blog posts; days you send emails, plans for each social media platform including links and promotions; what events you will promote on which channels, etc. You can keep it as simple as a Word doc or Excel chart, a team Google calendar, or use free and paid tools online. There are online sample calendars and tools to help plan and execute.
• Email Marketing – targeted communication to users or customers for promotion or sharing of news about products, services, or causes via email; email marketing is a more technologically savvy, cost-effective, and trackable form of direct mail marketing; proper email marketing always involves wanted communications, not spam – users or customers have opted-in to receive the message(s) [in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act]
• Engagement –  or Engagement Rate – a popular social media metric to describe or measure the amount of interaction between accounts. Shares, RTs, likes, or comments can indicate an interaction, a level beyond just reading your posts, Tweets, or pictures.
• Event Marketing – promotional strategy linking an org or company to a specific event (festival, fair, sports event, competition, music event, trade show, conference); often includes sponsorship of some aspect of the event, but not always – having a booth or physical presence at an event is ‘event marketing’. This does not mean ‘how to market an event’ – that would be part of your overall plan or promotion.
• Evergreen Content –  a gardening analogy to describe types of content – ‘Annuals’ are posts or content that is time-restricted or time-based, meant to bloom and last a short time; ‘Evergreen’ content gives good info and values no matter when a reader finds or sees that content, it is timeless and lasts and doesn’t have a season.  Evergreen content tends to get higher search engine rankings for your site and higher traffic and can be a page you refer to internally for some time. This is content that will help you for a long time after you publish it.

 F

• Focus Groups – a way to gather qualitative research about users or customers by gathering them in a group, physically or virtually, and asking guided questions or exercises; learn more about behaviors, values, beliefs, desires, or reactions to concepts; in recruiting, often preferable to have multiple, varied, homogeneous groups to encourage free discussion and then compare results across groups; focus groups are small by nature and can gather more in-depth information than a questionnaire or other methods; data is not always representative across all users or customers unless well-designed with variety of users or customers, or desired users/customers.
• Funnel –  the process or ‘journey’ of a prospective user/customer/donor through phases or levels of commitment, from a lack of awareness to greater awareness and trust, towards a purchase, donation, or otherwise becoming a customer or user.  The wide top of the funnel is where someone has the slightest awareness of your organization or its services and the lowest level of commitment; the narrow bottom of the funnel represents the smaller number of people who are aware of the org and become its fans and have made a more significant commitment. Marketing actions are taken to bring people through the funnel, with the understanding that not everyone filters down to the bottom or tip. Different marketing strategies and tactics may be used at different funnel stages.
  Monetary donations.
• Frequency – the number of times a person, household, or another member of a target audience is exposed to media or paid ads over a specific period; in paid advertising, it’s considered necessary for a customer to be exposed to an ad multiple times in a campaign for it to be considered adequate. Still, there are also caps because too high a frequency is unhelpful.

G

• Geotargeting – a way of detecting a website visitor’s location and using that info to serve targeted, location-specific messages, ads, coupons, or content.
• Goal – short-term measurement of the desired achievement; what you pursue to meet an objective.
• Guerilla Marketing – a marketing tactic or technique considered ‘unconventional,’ usually a low-cost initiative designed for maximum impact/results for minimum effort/resources.
• Guest Post - Guest blogging, or “guest posting,” is writing content for another company’s website.
  

H

• Headline – the attention-getting sentence at the top of a page to attract readers and entice them to read further. Important for all web pages, sales pages, blog posts, articles, and emails. Headlines often appear in a different font style and larger size, bolded or otherwise made to stand out.
• Heat Map – a graphical representation to show varying degrees of a single measure; on websites, a heat map can show concentrations of clicks or eye-tracking.

I

• Impression – a single instance of a post or online ad being ‘displayed’ to a viewer. 
• Inbound Marketing – is often used interchangeably with ‘content marketing, but they are NOT the same; Inbound draws visitors, potential customers, and prospective patrons towards you into your organization's ‘traditional’ or old-school advertising, which pushes its message out. Inbound is about attracting visitors, being easily found online, and having visitors come back to your site repeatedly who can, usually with high-quality, helpful content.
• Influencer – A person or organization influences potential product or service buyers by promoting or recommending the items on social media. 
• Infographic – visual content that uses graphs, icons, arrows, or other elements to visually present statistics, a timeline, or a story.
• Integrated Marketing – process/system/framework that emphasizes planning and connecting all marketing elements is preferred; to ensure all the points of contact and communication between a brand and a consumer are coordinated and consistent over place and time.
• Incentives – something offered to reward or motivate action by sellers, users, consumers, or donors; bonuses, promotions, contests, competitions or games, give-backs, freebies, premiums, sales promotions, pass-along deals; can be coupons, discounts, prizes, money, virtual or physical items.

J

• Jargon – that language, set of terms, acronyms, created words, and more that are special and specific to a profession, niche, trade, or group. Words that members of the group know and understand (or they come to know), but which are confusing to the ordinary public or non-members. These are often technical terms, industry-specific words, or words whose meaning differs for the ingroup vs. others. 

K

• Keyword Phrase – a phrase that someone enters in a search engine to try and find something they’re looking for. Website creators and owners attempt to build pages to best rank for these phrases in search results by writing content that features a phrase and related words.

L

• Landing Page – a single web page where one sends traffic to encourage a single action; it doesn’t have additional navigation, links, or ways for someone to quickly leave without completing the desired action. The goal usually involves capturing a visitor’s information in exchange for an offer of something of value for email marketing and follow-up contacts.
• Layout – the physical design or format of a physical piece of marketing material, showing the placement of artwork/images, header, headlines, subheads, body copy, contact info, and any other graphical elements; mainly used to describe printed ads, pieces of direct mail, publications, and other physical collateral.
• Lead Generation - Lead generation generates consumer interest in a product or service to turn that interest into a sale. Online marketing typically involves collecting a visitor's contact information (called a “lead”) via a web form. 
• Lead Magnet – an enticing, practical, educational, helpful piece of content or free resource offered to visitors in exchange for contact information (usually a name + email address); content is emailed or digitally delivered after completion of the form, and further follow-up takes place.
• Lifecycle –  stages or phases to describe the evolution of the relationship between you and your audience, users, or customers. There are various lifecycles discussed among marketers and marketing experts.  
• Longtail – a search phrase with three or more words, usually a key term and additional descriptors. They are more specific than a single or two-term search, and if your content matches these longer phrases, the visitor who follows that longtail search term to your site is more qualified and more interested in your site's offers. More and more online searches use longtail phrases, so it’s useful for your web pages and posts to use the exact long phrases your audience will search on.

• Marketing Channel - A marketing channel is described as a set of people, organizations, and activities that work together to transfer goods (products and services) from the point of origin to the point of consumption. A marketing channel's primary purpose is to connect the organization that creates a product or service and prospective customers who may want to purchase it.
  
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Content marketing
  • Email marketing
  • Social media marketing
  • Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM)
  • Influencer marketing
  • Offline advertising
  • Online advertising
  • Partnership marketing
  • Community building

• Marketing Mix – the mix of tactics, channels, and variables that an org uses to achieve desired business and marketing goals; see the 4 (or 7) Ps model  [the combo of price, product, promotion, place]; the mix includes what to budget to each variable, amount of time/resources, how to measure, and timing.
• Metadata - Metadata describes other data. It provides information about a certain item's content. 
• Metatag - This is a unique HTML tag that is used to store information about a Web page but is not displayed in a Web browser. For example, meta tags provide information such as what program was used to create the page, a page description, and keywords stored relevant to the page. Many search engines use the information stored in meta tags to index Web pages. 
• Metrics – a system or set of measurements to help quantify marketing elements or characteristics such as overall traffic, search engine traffic, conversions, top traffic-driving keywords, and keyword rankings; social media metrics include impressions, engagement, reshares, and followers.
• Mobile marketing –  there are now more searches on mobile devices than desktops/laptops; responsive web design is key, and your organization and site need to be easily found and seen on mobile devices – so it makes sense your marketing needs to work on mobile too. Mobile marketing refers to optimizing your messages, visuals, site, emails, and more for viewing on mobile devices, being seen, and sending promotions in time- and location-sensitive ways.
• Multichannel – interacting with a customer via campaigns designed to appear simultaneously across multiple channels to promote goods or services; increasing the number of channels increases the odds that a brand or org will reach a consumer in their preferred method or channel; direct channels = org proactively reaches out to the customer via a physical location, catalog, direct mail; indirect channels, websites, social media, email, text messaging, mobile marketing.

• Newsjacking – piggybacking on, or taking advantage of, a breaking news event or hot item/trend in a news cycle (overall or in your given industry, niche, field, or local market) to insert your brand/organization into the news stream. Requires fast action and treading carefully, not negatively affecting the brand.
• Newsletter – either printed or online via email, a digest or collection of organizational news, tips, or noteworthy info to share with a specific audience; newsletters can be free, paid, available to the public or a limited membership/audience; generally a quicker production and distribution than a magazine, less formal than a newspaper, different from a blog post.
• Niche – specialization, segmentation, or subset of an overall market or audience; a small, specific, well-defined portion of the total population; marketers create niches by using research to find the needs or wants that aren’t being addressed or met by other brands or organizations and developing a way to identify similar members of that niche and deliver their goods or services to them; a big fish in a small pond strategy.
• NoFollow – a website and SEO-related term; it tells SEs (search engines) NOT to count that link or pass on its ‘trust’ factors to the destination URL. By not passing on ‘credit’ or ‘trust,’ you can avoid associations with potential spammy sites, sites with questionable content (but that you might still have a good reason to link to or show as an example of something), or to not run afoul of specific webmaster guidelines.
• Nonprofit Marketing – marketing of a product, service, or cause for which the overall goal is not to make a monetary profit for the organization/marketer; may include promoting or selling goods or services to support the organization, but profit is not primary; often includes the same marketing mix, channels or tactics as for-profit marketers.