Have you ever been to a meeting or any sort of business conversation where you weren’t familiar with a term everybody was talking about? Marketing and sales are a field that quickly moves forward so there is a bunch of new terms emerging every now and then.
With that in mind, we’ve analyzed dozens of our own marketing team meetings in order to see which terms come up most often. Based on our own data, we’ve put together a useful glossary of marketing terms and sales terms you’re likely to encounter at a typical marketing team meeting in 2020.
Different Forms of Marketing
Affiliate Marketing: A type of marketing based on promoting and recommending somebody else’s products and services for a certain commission. It’s used by brands to get more customers and increase revenue.
Content Marketing: A form of marketing based on creation and distribution of valuable content that has the purpose to educate users, establish credibility and eventually convert them into customers.
Email Marketing: A component of digital marketing where emails are sent to leads, prospects and subscribers, with the purpose of engaging with them, nurturing them and convincing them to buy your product or service.
Resource:
Email Marketing 101 – the Best Email Marketing Practices for 2019
EDM Marketing: EDM stands for Electronic Direct Mail. EDM is defined as a marketing form used by companies and brands to target large groups of (potential) clients, and focused on building relationships, generating leads, and increasing sales.
Resource:
What is EDM Marketing and How It Beats Regular Email Marketing
Influencer Marketing: A type of marketing that involves hiring people influential in their fields to promote and market your business on social media to their broad audiences. Instagram influencers have recently taken over the field and dominate this form of marketing.
Social Media Marketing: This marketing form is based on posting content on social media with the aim of generating website traffic.
General Marketing Terms and Sales Terms
Marketing Funnel: A marketing funnel, in simple terms, is a set of steps a customer needs to go through before reaching a conversion. In the simplest of terms, it’s a path your customers-to-be take from the moment they find out about you to the moment they make a purchase from you and maybe even become your loyal customers.
Remarketing: It is a marketing strategy based on the follow up activities aimed at leads that had already expressed interest but had never made a purchase.
Business-to-business (B2B): This term describes companies and organizations which do business with other businesses and not general public. HubSpot and Google are a perfect example.
A/B Testing: A/B testing (also referred to as split testing) is the process in which a control sample/page is compared to a variety of test samples/pages in order to improve conversion rate. For instance, a sample page can be tested for a single changed variable such as a call-to-action, button copy or color.
Resources:
7 Reasons for Split Testing your Next Quiz
How Do I Setup A/B Split Testing For My Quiz?
Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes
Buyer’s Persona: A buyer’s persona is a profile of your ideal customer. It is created on the basis of market research and real-life data obtained from your current customers. By using a buyer’s persona, digital marketers can tailor their marketing efforts to better suit their potential customers’ specific needs.
Target Audience: Target audience is a group of people who you target because they fit your buyer’s persona and are most likely to consider or even buy from you.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management): CRMs are tools used by companies and organizations to manage their relationships with customers.
Marketing and Sales Metrics and Indicators
KPIs: Short for Key Performance Indicators. These represent measurable data points which help marketing professionals assess their performance against certain metrics and track whether they are meeting their marketing goals.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who complete your campaign goal. In other words, the percentage of people who complete the action you wanted them to take, like clicking on an ad, filling out a form, completing the checkout, and so on.
Resource:
Double your Conversion without Increasing Traffic
CTR (Clickthrough Rate): CTR is the ratio that shows the number of people who clicked on your content and ended up on your landing page after seeing your content. CTR is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks received by the number of page views or emails sent out.
Return on Investment (ROI): It is a metric used to measure the marketing campaign performance by calculating the profitability or efficiency of an investment.
Churn Rate: Customer churn rate is the percentage of customers lost (customers that don’t buy your products or services anymore, have switched service providers, cancelled their subscription, or closed their account). Churn rate is calculated by dividing the total number of customers lost by the number of customers you had at the beginning of a certain time period.
Let’s say, at the start of June, a company had 500 customers, but only 450 at the end of June. Their churn rate is: (500-450)/500 = 50/500 = 10%.
Bounce Rate: It is the percentage of people who visit your website but leave without taking an action or navigating further. The lower bounce rate the better, as it indicates your content is engaging and resonates well with your audience.
Domain Authority: Developed by MOZ, DA is a search engine ranking score that shows domain scores ranging from 1 to 100. It’s similar to Ahrefs’ Domain Rating.
SEO and Content Marketing Terms
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The process of improving a website’s ranking on search engine results page through unpaid or organic search traffic is called SEO. It involves applying on-page and off-page SEO techniques.
Keyword: A keyword is a search phrase users type in a search engine when they want to look something up. From a marketer’s perspective, keywords enable them to optimize their blogs, websites, and landing pages in order to rank better in the search result pages.
Long-tail Keyword: A long-tail keyword is a specific, targeted search phrase, usually containing three or more words. Using long-tail keywords is a great way of getting more qualified leads likely to convert. There are certain free tools that can help you find potentially lucrative long-tail keywords.
Search Intent: In the simplest of terms, it’s what user expects to find when they enter a search query. Do they want to find a particular website? Have they decided to buy a product or are they ‘just looking’? Once you know why the user is on your site and what they’re looking to find, it’s easier to create content that matches their intent.
Viral Content: It is such content that spreads like wildfire in the social media world. It’s what gets you maximum likes, comments, and shares.
Meta Description: It is an HTML tag which appears right below the webpage link on a search results page and summarizes a page’s content.
No-follow link: It is a link that instructs search engines not to crawl an outgoing link or give authority to the destination page. On the other hand, there is a do-follow link and all links are by default do-follow links unless modified with a no-follow attribute.
Marketing and Sales Documents
Creative Brief: A creative brief (also referred to as a marketing brief or an advertising brief) is an outline of all the project’s requirements, objectives, goals, and resources. It is the very foundation of every successful creative marketing campaign and it is created in order to ensure everybody involved in the project is on the same page. A creative brief helps set realistic and accurate expectations between stakeholders and creative professionals.
Resource:
Brief but Effective: What Makes a Great Creative Brief? (+13 Samples)
Case Study: It is an analysis of a project, campaign or company that identifies a situation, recommended solutions, implementation actions and identification of those factors that contributed to failure or success. Basically, it is your business’s success story that shows how your products or services helped your clients achieve their goals or overcome their obstacles.
It is a powerful tool that can influence your potential customers decision-making, which is why it may be a good idea to dedicate an entire section of your website to case studies.
Resource:
40+ Case Study Template Ideas to Showcase Your Company’s Success
Press Release: Whether you refer to it as a ‘press release’, ‘media release’, ‘news release’, or ‘press statement’, in most cases it’s one and the same thing. Hubspot broadly defines a press release as an official announcement that an organization issues to the news media and beyond. It can be either written or recorded.
Resource:
7 Press Release Template Ideas That Speak Clearly to Your Audience
White Paper: White papers are used in politics, business, technical fields, and marketing. In the most general of terms, a white paper is an authoritative report that addresses certain issues and offers solutions for them.
The original definition comes from politics, where a white paper represents a legislative document that explains and supports a new political solution. In the tech world, on the other hand, a white paper represents a theory behind a new piece of technology. In the world of marketing, a white paper has become a powerful marketing tool used to provide information on or promote new product solutions.
Resource:
20 Creative White Paper Template Ideas to Increase Your Lead Capture
Interactive Content
Interactive content is the type of content that engages the user and requires their participation. The most common forms include quizzes, calculators, surveys, polls, and so on. Interactive content helps marketers profile and segment their leads in order to make it easier to move them further down your sales funnel.
Survey: It is a type of interactive content used to obtain people’s feedback. It’s especially useful to marketers as it enables them to collect and analyze data and use it to take further action.
Poll: It is a type of interactive content used to obtain people’s opinions on a certain topic.
Straw Poll: A straw poll is an unofficial or ad-hoc vote that tells you what’s the public opinion on a given issue or person. Its main purpose is to help people make more informed decisions.
Resource:
How to Use an Online Straw Poll to Gauge the Public Opinion
Quiz: One of the most popular types of interactive content, especially popular among marketers when it comes to lead generation. Their highly engaging and interesting nature makes them a perfect lead magnet. In fact, our own data shows that, on average, online quizzes have a lead capture rate of 33.6%. Why don’t you try creating your own right now?
Infographic: It is a visual representation of information that is easy to understand and visually appealing. It contains elements like images, charts, graphs, text, etc.
Webinar: It is a seminar conducted in real time over the internet. In addition to being educational and informative, it is a great lead magnet.
Podcast: It is an audio show that can be streamed online or downloaded to listen to later. It usually focuses on a certain topic or niche. Journey to 7 Figures is a great example.
Lead Generation
Lead: A lead is a person who has shown interest in what your business has to offer. That interest is expressed by sharing their personal information (usually email address or phone number).
Lead Generation: Lead generation is the process of stimulating interest in leads, with the purpose of converting them into prospects or customers.
Landing Page: A landing page is a specific page on your website that promotes one marketing offer (it can be a webinar, guide, ebook) with the particular aim of generating leads. The visitors are expected to fill in a lead form in exchange for the offer.
Resources:
Comprehensive Guide to LeadPages – Make Landing Pages that Convert
How to Use Marketing Psychology to Create Landing Pages that Convert
Call-to-action (CTA): A CTA is a button text or a text link that invites a website visitor to take a certain action. Common CTA examples include “Download Now”, “Get Started”, “Try It Free”, and so on.
Of course, this is just a small selection of marketing terms and sales terms that most commonly come up during our meetings and not a comprehensive dictionary. But still, it may be a nice introduction to the world of marketing and sales or a handy overview to return to when stuck for a term.
Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes
