The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Terminology

Beth Comstock, former CMO & Vice Chair of GE, said, “Marketing’s job is never done. It’s about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day.” She’s right. Effective marketing is difficult.

For the consumer, content is produced every day, and information is instantaneously accessible. We’re constantly bombarded with brand messages, so creative marketers must discover a way to stand out among all the digital noise.

Marketing departments can appear busy with lots of activity, but effective marketing is more than just busy work; it begins with a great strategy. While reciting definitions doesn’t count as a key step in implementing any marketing strategy, there are some terms that anyone interested in marketing and sales should familiarize themselves with. Let’s take a look at some top marketing terms.

A/B Testing

The process of comparing two versions of a web page, email, or other marketing assets with just one varying element. (The Daily Egg)

• Pro Tip: A/B testing takes the guesswork out of optimization strategies. Perhaps you’ve always wondered if the text you’re using on a web button is impacting clicks and subsequent web traffic to a landing page. By implementing A/B testing, you can test your hypothesis in real-time to determine and quantify desired results and the impact of a change.

• When thinking about A/B testing in web design, multiple factors can affect a desired action: button text or color, layout, the presence or absence of graphics, the headline, etc. It’s important to A/B test only one change at a time to accurately measure its impact.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

The practice of structuring and formatting content so AI-powered tools and voice assistants can easily understand, trust, and cite it as direct answers to user queries. (Profound)

B2B (Business-to-Business)

A type of commercial transaction where the purchasing and selling of merchandise are performed between two businesses, such as an entity providing services to another. (Key Differences)

B2C (Business-to-Consumer)

A business model in which a business sells its goods and services to the final consumer. Companies whose products and services are consumed directly by end users are known as B2C companies. (Key Differences)

Bounce Rate

A “bounce” occurs when someone visits your website and leaves without interacting further. Your bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who leave your site after one page. (Neil Patel)

Call-to-Action

A prompt that tells the user to take some specified action. A call to action is typically written as a command or action phrase. (Optimizely)

• Pro Tip: A call to action can appear in many places, including on your website, in social media posts, and in display advertising. This marketing tool guides your audience on what to do next.

• Simple and straight to the point is essential when building your calls to action. Typically, there’s not a lot of space available; use strong action verbs to leave no doubt in your audience’s mind of what they should do. Use words that create enthusiasm and answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Collateral

The collection of media used to promote the brand and support the sales and marketing of a product or service. It’s the tangible evidence of the brand, designed congruent with the brand’s core values and personality. (Persona Design)

Content

In inbound marketing, content is information intended to be consumed, engaged with, and shared. Content typically comes in the form of a blog post, video, social media post, photo, slideshow, or podcast, though there are many other types. (HubSpot)

Conversion Rate

The percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors. (WordStream)

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

A technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. (Salesforce)

• Pro Tip: Often, customer data and contact information are stored in spreadsheets and inboxes. Companies focused on growth can get by like this for a while, but at some point, inefficiencies creep in, items get dropped, and things break. A CRM centralizes all customer information in an easy-to-use system accessible to both sales and marketing.

• A CRM will not fix inefficient or missing processes, and it won’t hand-deliver leads to you. However, a CRM provides a solid, consistent framework for your growth.

CTR (Clickthrough Rate)

An advertising metric that measures how many users clicked an advertisement, link, or call to action and went to the landing page or website linked to that ad, link, or CTA. (Lyfe Marketing)

Hashtag

Words or multi-word phrases that categorize content and track topics on social media (The Balance Everyday)

Inbound Marketing

A strategy that utilizes many forms of pull marketing, content marketing, blogs, events, SEO, social media, and more, to create brand awareness and attract new business. (Marketo)

• Pro Tip: Outbound marketing is seller-centric, while inbound marketing is buyer-centric. If you think about outbound marketing techniques like cold calling, SPAM, and advertising, consumers have figured out ways to block these interruptions, whereas inbound marketing techniques are geared toward attraction and providing value to your audience.

• Inbound marketers create and distribute content that solves prospects’ needs. These prospects are then nurtured along the buyers’ journey to ultimately become promoters of your company.

Landing Page

A standalone web page, created specifically for the purposes of a marketing or advertising campaign. (Unbounce)

Lead

An individual or organization with an interest in what you’re selling. Interest is expressed by sharing contact information, such as an email address, a phone number, or even a social media handle. (LeadSquared)

Long-Tail Keyword

A type of keyword phrase that has at least three (sometimes as many as five) words in the phrase. (Brick Marketing)

Marketing

The activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. (American Marketing Association)

Outbound Marketing

When you actively reach out to potential customers to promote your products or services with the intent to capture attention and generate interest in your offerings. This approach is often called "push" marketing. Because you’re reaching out to potential customers instead of waiting for them to come to you. (Semrush)

PPC (Pay-per-click)

An advertising channel where marketers don’t pay per impression or solely for ad placement. The bid amount may affect placement, but the advertiser only pays when their ad is clicked by an online user. (Portent)

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. (Moz)

• Pro Tip: Venturing into the world of SEO is constantly evolving and can be quite complex; yet understanding the basics and implementing some simple SEO strategies can make a world of difference for your marketing efforts.

• You need to first understand what they are searching for, what keywords they are using, and how they’re behaving online. Through crawling and indexing, search engines discover and catalog all available web content. Search engines then rank the web content and deliver results to a user’s search query based on how well the content matches.

UI (User Interface)

A conduit between human and computer interaction; the space where a user will interact with a computer or machine to complete tasks. (Every Interaction)

UX (User Experience) Design

The process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful, relevant experiences for users. This involves designing the entire process for acquiring and integrating the product, including branding, design, usability, and functionality. (Interaction Design Foundation)

If you’re interested in growing your brand, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with these marketing terms. Techniques are constantly emerging, and you definitely need to stay up to date with the latest trends. Just be careful not to get lost in the what and forget about the most important piece of marketing, the why.

Best-selling author and marketing consultant Simon Sinek says it best, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”