Marketing glossary
Quickly find out the meaning and explanation for marketing terms, concepts and abbreviations. Marketing for IT projects is what we do.
Same as the IT world, the marketing world is no less intertwined with jargon, technical terms and abbreviations people outside the field have little chance to understand. No worries! We prepared a list of those most commonly used so you can navigate yourself confidently.
Nevertheless, be sure that when you come to us for help with creating engaging content or building and promoting your website, we won’t drown you in any jargon. We want you to feel comfortable and confident when you talk to us. Like with your partner.
| English term | English explanation |
| Target audience | The people you want to reach and who are most likely to be interested/buying your product. |
| Marketing strategy | Long-term approach to achieving set goals, understanding customers and their needs and how to most effectively reach them. From competition analysis to positioning, it is a comprehensive game plan. |
| Marketing plan | The how-to plan on executing marketing strategy. |
| Content marketing | Strategy to attract and retain customers by creating content. Helps build industry authority and increase brand awareness. |
| Content strategy | Approach how to attract customer at every stage of the funnel and keep them engaged. CX, brand and content distribution must stand at the core. |
| Content plan | The who, what, when, where and how often in terms of content creation, distribution and promotion. |
| Performance marketing | Form of digital marketing when company only pays to platform providers when users do an action (typically a click). |
| Brand marketing | Process of growing relationship between a brand and customers. |
| Social media marketing | Uses social media as a channel to attract customers, introduce them to the brand and build a relationship with them. |
| Buyer persona | Profile of an imaginary person based on real data that marketers and copywriters target. |
| Demographics | Demographic data such as gender, age, residence used for basic segmentation of cutomers. |
| Psychographics | Your audience’s values, beliefs and behavior that helps markerers segment them into more relevant subgroups. Improves targeting. |
| Audience segmentation | Marketing strategy based on identifying subgroups and delivering them more tailored message. Marketers typically use demographic and psychographic data. |
| Email marketing | Promotion of your business or product via email. The content of the emails vary but given the high competition, the art here is to make your emails appealing enough for your readers to open them, read through them and do the intended action. |
| Affiliate marketing | Online advertiser pays website publisher for every lead or revenue coming from the website. It is a partnership based on commission sharing. |
| Copywriting | It is a persuasive writing motivating people to take a specific action (registration, sale, follow,…). |
| Copy | Copy is a text whose purpose is to sell. |
| Microcopy/UX copy | Words that guide user in an app and provide clarity when interacting in an online environment. |
| Proof-reading | Activity in which a specialist finds and correct mistakes in a text. |
| Copyediting | An expert activity focusing on making a text clearer, concise and more comprehensible for a reader. |
| SWOT | Strengths. Weaknesses. Opportunities. Threats. A method of identifying all factors that could affect marketing activities. |
| STDC | See. Think. Do. Care. Stages of buying process described by Avinash Kaushik. Essential for every marketing strategy. |
| Funnel | An idea of customer journey leading from learning about brand to becoming their loyal customer. |
| TOFU | A stage of marketing funnel. It stands for top-of-funnel – widest part of the funnel where customers meet our brand. Useful for creating an appealing content and converting leads. |
| MOFU | A stage of marketing funnel. It stands for middle-of-funnel where we show customers our solution to their problem. Useful for creating an appealing content and converting leads. |
| BOFU | A stage of marketing funnel. It stands for bottom-of-funnel where we actively convince customers to buy our product. Useful for creating an appealing content and converting leads. |
| Brand advocate | Brand advocate is your loyal customer who recommends your business or product both online and to other people. It is a highly valuable customer. |
| Marketing mix/4P | Product. Price. Placement. Promotion. They are inextricably linked to marketing strategy. Especially helpful when putting a product on market. Sometimes there’s an extra P for packaging or positioning. |
| Market research | Gathering information about a market we want to enter. Several methods such interviews or surveys are typically used. |
| Brand | Brand publicly represents your product, service or company. It needs to be distinguished so it can be easily communicated and marketed. |
| Insight | A deep understanding of your audience, a surprising truth. Something that is common knowledge but not actively realized. |
| Brand persona | An imaginary person with set of characteristics a brand associates with. It can also be a real of movie person that serves for your brand as a communication inspiration. |
| Brand essence | 2-5 words you’d describe yourself that defines your personality. When done for companies, that’s their brand essence. |
| Brand symbols | From visuals to mascot or song, it can be anything that a brand consistently uses in their communication. |
| Tone-of-voice | It’s the way brand communicates with their audience. It helps businesses connects with their customers. |
| Positioning | It’s a place that company wants to attain in their customers’ mind. The goal is to differentiate from other brands. There are 5 different positioning strategies you should consider: market, product, brand, price and competitor-based. E.g. a handbag can position itself as a status symbol. |
| Mission | A statement based on values describing what a company wants to achieve. Mission describes how the company wants to achieve their goals (vision). |
| USP | Unique selling proposition. It’s the essence of what makes your product different from competitiors. |
| Vision | Inspirational emotional statement summarizing what a business wants to become. It’s an ideal or goal towards which a company acts on. |
| Marketing goal | Specific objectives described in a marketing plan. It should be SMART defined. It can be to attract traffic to website, generate leads or increase brand awareness. |
| Brand awareness | It stands for the degree customers recognize a product by its name or symbols and how powerful their associations with the product. |
| Website traffic | One of the marketing goals usually critical for making online sales. |
| Leads generation | Marketing process of attracting a customer and by nurturing and stimulation turning them into buyers. |
| Competition analysis | Research and evaluation of strong and weak sides of major industry competitors in order to find better positioning, improve product and such. |
| Marketing specialist | Performs various marketing tasks, supports marketing team and reports to marketing manager. |
| Marketing manager | Leads marketing team, sets marketing strategy, plans campaigns, coordinates team and analyzes and evaluates market, trends and competition. |
| Brand manager | Brand manager researches market to make sure the company’s products lines fit with the brand and with the customers. They also develop promotion strategies and manage them. They maintain brand’s long-term vision and execute it to the right fit with market and customers. |
| CMO | Chief marketing officer aka marketing director. Responsible for all marketing activities, leads marketing to contribute short-term profits. |
| Content format | It can include blog articles, videos, podcasts, emails, newsletters, case studies, infographics and others. |
| Case study | It describes and analyzes a specific project (campaign, strategy, action) – its development, successes, challenges and failures in order to gain a deeper understanding of similar projects. In marketing, it is a powerful tool to turn prospects into clients. |
| Testimonial | It is a recommendation from a client, usually a few sentences describing how particularly you helped them during your cooperation. It is a powerful tool to convert a prospect to client. |
| Success case | Analyzing and describing a method that led to a successful case. It combines a method od analysis, case study and storytelling. |
| Referral | It can either stand for a person who has been recommended (typically from your client) to use your product – a highly effective source of acquiring new clients. Or it is source of traffic in your GA that measures your link building efforts. |
| Use case | Description or a list of steps of how will users behave on your website or description of all the ways your users can use your product. |
| Social proof | It is a psychological phenomenon based on an idea that people copy actions of others. E.g. if an expert or a famous person recommends a product, people will more likely buy it. |
| Distribution channel | A way how companies get their products showcased to their customers. Nowadays a major channel is online (e.g. website, social media, eshop or affiliate partner). |
| Remarketing | A subsequent ads targeting of customers who previously visited your website. You can precisely target the group, thus invest your marketing resources effectively. |
| Customer Journey | Customer journey map is a visualization of customer’s experience with the company. Typically, there are 5 stages of marketing funnel and marketers aim to take the customers through all of them. |
| Keywords analysis | Identifying keywords that bring customers to your website through organic and paid search. A critical part of SEO. |
| Meta tags | Metadata provide information on html pages to search engines. The most known ones are meta title, meta description and heading titles (h1-h6). |
| SERP | Search engine results page. It is a page of results a search engine shows after a query is entered. |
| CTA | Call to action. Text that prompts a website visitor to perform an action. It is often shown on a button or at the end of an article. E.g. it reads ‘Buy now, Read more or Sign now’. |
| Landing page | A standalone webpage created for marketing campaigns. Visitors who click on a link land on this page that sells them product. |
| DX | Digital experience. An overall experience and mainly the emotional takeaway that a customer has with a brand in the online experience. |
| CX | Customer experience. An overall experience and mainly the emotional takeaway that a customer has with a brand across his whole customer journey. It is the plan of positive experiences that a company wants to provide a customer with on all the touchpoints. |
| BX | Brand experience. An essential part of brand building. It is closely related to CX. |
| UI | User interface. Frontend (graphical) part of website or app that a user interacts with. UI designers to make it intuitive and accessible. Good UI is a basis for a good UX. |
| UX | User experience. It is the user interaction with the product and is based on utility, easy-of-use and efficiency. Good UX is critical for making sales. |
| B2B | Business to business. Transaction between businesses. It focuses on business relations. The demand cannot be artifically stimulated as in B2C but is given by the business’s own state of business, thus the communication is different. |
| B2C | Business to customer. Interaction between a business and an end customer. Typically ecommerce, direct sale to customer with no middleman. Companies have to elicit an emotional response of customers to their product. |
| SEO | Search engine optimization. Process of attracting users to a website via organic search. |
| Backlinks | It’s a link leading from one website to another. An important part of SEO, a great credibility booster. Typically you find it in an article referring another website. |
| Web analytics | Measurement, collection, monitoring and evaluation of web data to understand and optimize the web. |
| Conversion rate | Conversion rate stands for a percentage of users who take the desired action (visit a website, buy product, sign up for newsletter). It is calculated by a number of conversions divides by the total number of ads interactions or total number of visitors in a given period. |
| CTR | Clickthrough rate. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks users do by the number of times your ad is viewed. The result number shows the effectivity of the ad. |
| CPA | Cost per acquisition. It shows how much you paid to get a customer through the marketing funnel, from the first touchpoint to a the final conversion (typically sale). It’s usually calculated by dividing the overall marketing cost by the number of new customers in a given period. |
| GA | Google analytics. If you connect it to your website, it will give you data to better understand your customer from sources of traffic, to ads performance to customers demographics. It is an essential tool for any online marketing activites. |
| Google Search Console | It is a tool for webmasters to monitor indexation, search queries, errors and optimize visibility of the website. It essentially helps you understand how Google sees your site. |
| Organic search | Unpaid search. It is your website showing in the SERP naturally without any paid boosting. High organic traffic is a sign of great SEO and the goal of every SEO specialist and marketer. |
| Paid search | It is a digital marketing strategy how to attract visitors to your website by appearing high in SERP. Most used model is PPC. |
| Robots.txt | It is a file you can create in GSC that shows search engines which part of your website they should visit or not. It is an important part of SEO. |
| Campaign | It serves to promote a product, enhance a brand or increase sale. It employs various channels to reach customers at various touchpoints (media mix). |
| A/B testing | It is a user experience research methodology. It involves two variants tested simultaneously and detetermining which one is more effective for reaching the set goal. |
| Impression | Metric used to show number of views and engagaments of an ad in the digital environment. |
| Engagement | It stands for interaction with a brand. It is a crucial tool to raise brand awareness and ultimately sales. |
| Heat map | It is data visualization technique that shows visitors’ behaviour on a website. Intensity of activity or different values are shown in different colors. |
| Ads | It is usually a paid communication of product or brand promotion used in order to reach marketing goals. |
| PPC | Pay-Per-Click. You pay only for every interaction of users with the ad. |
| KPI | Key Performance Indicator. It is a metrics of showing performance of a specific objective. |
| Bounce rate | It is a metric used in web operation showing how many people entered the website but immediately left instead of browsing the website more. |
| Indexing | Process how search engine organizes information on a website so when a search is performed, the response is fast. |
| Google Data Studio | An app by Google enabling web masters to have all their data at one place in a transparent and organized way. |
| CMS | Content management studio. Software for managing content for website. |
| Transactional email | Automatic email following a commercial transaction or another specific action such us purchase, newsletter sign up, abandoned cart reminder and such. |
| Cold emailing | It’s an unsolicited email without any prior contact. They are sales oriented although the good ones don’t mention direct sales right away. |
| E-commerce | General term for doing business online. |
| End user | Person who ultimately uses product. End user should stand in the focus of anyone involved in product design, development and maintenance. |
| Product lifecycle | Tool evaluating product’s journey. It includes 4-5 stages – introduction, (development), growth, maturity, decline. It helps product manager and marketers to find strategies related to the product. |
| Go-To-Market strategy | Company strategy introducing a product to the market. It should involve the following sections: product analysis, target audience, market intelligence, product messaging, sales and marketing strategy. |
| Public relations | The goal is to create and maintain positive image of the organization towards the general public. It is a strategic communication that builds relationships and helps to increase company’s public image. |
| Upsell | Sales and marketing strategy compelling buyer to buy a more expensive version, extension or upgraded services. |
| Cross-sell | Sales and marketing strategy compelling buyer to buy other related products or services to their bought goods. |
| Employer branding | Marketing focused on building attractive employer’s brand mainly to its employees and potential hires. |
| POC | Point of contact is any person from your company that your customer comes in contact, typically a sales or support person. POC represents company’s interests. |
| Company culture | Company culture describes company’s shared values, attitudes and practices. In practice, it is mainly the working environment, employees’ behavior and company’s policies. |
| Questionnaire | Research tool to collect data from respondents. They can include open and closed questions or questions using lickert scale. |
| HR marketing | Employing marketing principles in HR agenda from hiring processes, keeping employees satisfied to terminating employees’ contracts. The goal is to build employer’s brand. |
| Qualitative data | Data involving information on respondents’ understanding and interpretation of the world. They describe qualities or characteristics. |
| Quantitative data | Data counted or measured in numerical value. |
| Likert scale | Psychometric scale used for evaluating qualitative data in questionnaires. There is always an odd number of items, typically 5 or 7. Question typically asks a person if they agree or disagree with a statement. |
| Graphic designer | They create visuals to communicate ideas and capture customers’ attention. |
| Pitch | Presentation of a business idea to target audience, often investors. Often limited by 3 min time frame. Typically, its goal is to raise funds. |