Marketing itself is an important part of the business world. When people think of marketing, they think of it like it is just one small part of a business. While yes, it is a part of business, it is definitely not a small part of it.

One of the ways that we know this is the large amount of terminology associated with the marketing side of the business. You’ve probably read many marketing blogs and learned new terms in each of them. The usage of these terms can be pretty overwhelming especially to someone new or unfamiliar with the marketing industry.

Because of the seemingly endless amount of marketing terms out there today, we have compiled a list of 25 marketing terms you should know. We’ve narrowed down the list of marketing terms to these 25 terms as they are the terms you NEED to know.

The 25 Marketing Terms 

There are 25 marketing terms along with their definition to understand what each of them means. Some of the more complex terms may also include examples to better understand them. The 25 terms have also been divided into their own categories, just to get a better idea of where they belong. Now that you know what to expect, let’s jump into the good stuff!  

Forms of Marketing

1. Digital Marketing: A form of marketing that utilizes digital technology, such as phones and social media, to advertise to people to purchase products. Digital marketing is much different from some of the more traditional marketing channels. Instead of using something like billboards as an advertising channel, you might end up using email or videos to reach out and advertise to people. 

2. Word of Mouth Marketing: Word of Mouth marketing is exactly that, marketing that is conducted via word of mouth. It works when someone, whether orally or in writing, praises and recommends your products or services to other potential customers. This form of marketing is a powerful tool because, by simply providing good customer experiences, you can get new people to find your business, which can lead to more conversions.

3. Inbound Marketing: Compared to traditional forms of marketing where you just send a mass message or email to people in hopes of getting some of them to visit your website, inbound marketing is all about getting the RIGHT people to visit your website. It’s great for businesses who are looking to grow their business as it is pretty scalable with long-term growth. Because the type of content you are putting out is being used to attract the right people, you might have a higher return on investment than if you just reached out to a list of random people. 

4. Account-Based Marketing: Account-based marketing refers to when a business sends messages to targeted accounts. Targeted accounts are ideal customers so you’ll want to send them tailored messages to nurture them and convert them. 

5. Paid Search: Paid search refers to when you pay someone like Google to show your ads on their search engines. You only pay whenever someone clicks your ad, not if they just view it. Paid search is a good option if you are not worried about driving organic traffic to your website. You simply want people to visit your website and see if they can potentially make a conversion on it. Of course, the only negative from using paid search is that you have to pay for every time that someone clicks your ad, and that doesn’t necessarily mean the person will even convert. 

6. Remarketing: Remarketing refers to the process in which you target people who’ve already visited your website or expressed interest in your business and send them various marketing messages, commonly ads, and informative material. Using a remarketing campaign can be beneficial to your business as it can help you reach out to people that you know are interested in your business. With it, you can hopefully gain their business back. 

Marketing Metrics

7. Brand Awareness: Brand awareness is the extent to which people can recall or recognize a brand or business from various forms of media. For example, think about the many times you’ve heard the famous Apple startup chime. Whenever you hear it, you immediately think to yourself, “Oh that’s an Apple product”. That’s because you recognize that aspect of the brand, the chime, which means you are aware of it. 

8. Customer Lifetime Value: Customer lifetime value is the total estimated profit you can possibly generate from a certain customer. For example, you might spend 50 dollars trying to gain a certain customer, but then they only spend 20 dollars on your business. In this case, the customer lifetime value would be a negative one for your business. If they spend more than what you spent to obtain them, then it’s a positive CLV. 

9. Customer Acquisition Cost: Building off of customer lifetime value is the customer acquisition cost, which is the amount of money you have spent trying to turn leads into full-fledged customers. Ideally, you’d rather avoid spending too much on trying to acquire customers, so budget wisely. The formula for calculating your CAC is marketing expenses divided by the number of customers you acquired.

10. Lead Nurturing: Lead nurturing is one of the most important parts of the buyer’s journey. In lead nurturing, you are trying to provide a great experience to potential customers to hopefully get them to come back and eventually make a purchase. To do this, you must build trust with those customers and develop strong relationships with them. Lead Nurturing is accomplished by educating the customers about your business and the products that you offer. 

11. Customer Retention: Customer retention refers to how your business works to ensure that your current customers stay with you. Ideally, you want to have a high customer retention rate as that means you will still have that customer’s business. With each customer you lose, there goes some of your revenue. The best way to ensure that you have high customer retention is by recruiting high-quality customers as they will likely stay as customers.  

12. Click-through Rate: Click-through rate refers to the ratio between the number of clicks your ad has gotten versus the number of impressions. For example, you just started running an ad and after a week, you see that it has gotten 27 clicks. The next thing you analyze is the number of impressions it has made and it shows 168. You divide 27/168 and get a 16% click-through rate. In this case, you have a pretty dang good click-through rate. As a result, your ad can be deemed a success.  

13. Return on Investment: ROI refers to the ratio of net income generated and investment. The goal to shoot here for is having a high ROI. To achieve this, you have to make sure that the profit you generated is higher than the amount invested in trying to generate that income. The formula for ROI is the profit earned on the investment divided by the cost of that investment.

14. Bounce Rate: Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users that leave a page on your website without completing an action, such as a click. A high bounce rate can tell you that people aren’t making conversions on your website, can lower rankings on search engines, or if people don’t like the content that you currently have displayed. Use this data to try and improve your web pages’ performance. 

15. Conversion Rate: Refers to the percentage of people who complete the desired action on a page on your website. Pages with a high conversion rate have a high percentage of people who’ve completed the desired action. Some of these desired actions are things like filling out a form, subscribing to your channel, and even signing up for newsletters. Having appealing content can increase the likelihood of conversions. 

16. Engagement Rate: Engagement rate represents the percentage of people who’ve engaged with your content. Examples of engagement are clicks, likes, shares, and comments. Think about how many likes your posts get on Instagram. Is it where you want it to be? If not, take the necessary steps to improve your posts’ engagement rate.

SEO Terms

17. Search Engine Optimization: A key part of any successful marketing strategy is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the practice of enhancing your website’s rankings on search engines. To increase your website’s ranking, you must adjust your on-page elements as well as any off-page elements. Making adjustments in these 2 areas of your website can help your website rank higher in search results. 

18. Landing Page: A website page used for generating leads. To have a successful landing page, you need to cater to leads in different parts of their buyer’s journey. Marketing materials, such as an ebook and other written resources, can help make your landing page look more appealing to each person who lands on it. Successful landing pages can turn those website visitors into leads. 

19. On-page/Off-page Optimization: On-page optimization means optimizing on-page elements of your website so that it can rank higher in search engines. Off-page optimization refers to all the activities you do outside of your website to help improve the rankings of that page in search engines. Things such as outbound links and social media can help improve that page’s off-page optimization. 

20. Keyword Research: Keyword research is an important part of SEO. It refers to the research that you conduct to identify keywords that leads use when they search through search engines. Implementing these keywords into your content can help your website become more visible to those leads. That is why content, like blogs, is important when it comes to utilizing the right keywords. With the right keywords, your website can start appearing more in peoples’ search results. 

21. Inbound/Outbound Links: Inbound links refer to links on your website that take people to other pages on your website. These links can take people to your contact page or other lead generation pages. Outbound links are links that take people to pages on another website. You can find these in informative content, like blogs, as they refer to research on other websites to validate claims. 

22. Blogging: Blogging in marketing refers to the content that you write to educate people more about your business and product. The content that you write can be of great value to certain people which can help them build more trust for your business, which can make them more likely to convert on your website. A good blog can make your website more SEO-friendly as well. 

General Marketing Terms

23. Key Performance Indicator: A KPI is a certain mark that you’ve set that helps you track your performance in reaching your marketing goals. Setting the right KPIs can help you determine if you have to modify something within your strategy to make sure you stay on track to reaching your goals. 

24. Buyer’s Journey: The buyer’s journey is the entire process from which a lead turns into a loyal customer. Typically, the buyer’s journey consists of 3 stages. The first stage is the awareness stage. The next stage is the consideration stage. Last is the decision stage. As a business, your goal is to guide these leads throughout their buyer’s journey to the end so that they end up doing business with you. 

25. Buyer Personas: The simplest way to put buyer personas is that they are representations of your ideal customers based on data you’ve collected from research that you’ve conducted. Identifying your buyer personas can help you attract high-quality prospects to your business, and hopefully, they end up converting. 

Understanding these 25 terms is a good starting point to become familiar with marketing terminology when reading marketing content. Be sure that you have a good depth of understanding about them since some of those terms are a bit more complex than others. 

Knowledge Is Power! 

Knowing what most of these terms mean can help you better understand the various pieces of marketing content out there. Hopefully, the next time you see these terms in the future, they don’t seem foreign to you. Plus, understanding what these marketing terms mean can open your eyes to many new opportunities in the marketing world. 

These terms are meant to be a good starting point in your foray into the marketing world.  From here, you can expand your marketing terminology and keep on educating yourself! Just like the old cliche says, knowledge is power!

Looking for help with your marketing efforts? Then feel free to contact us here so that way we can get started!