Marketing Terms: A to Z Glossary

Marketing is the practice of conveying a brand’s value through messaging distributed across an array of channels. Often, this messaging is done with the aim of increasing sales for a business’s products or services, but it can also achieve other goals, including bolstering brand visibility and customer engagement. Marketing is a broad term that encompasses an array of types, strategies, and efforts. In this article, we’ll go over common marketing terms worth knowing when you’re working in the field—or interested in beginning a new career. 

Below, you’ll find common marketing terms listed in alphabetical order. 

Marketing Terms: A to Z Glossary

Marketing is the practice of conveying a brand’s value through messaging distributed across an array of channels. Often, this messaging is done with the aim of increasing sales for a business’s products or services, but it can also achieve other goals, including bolstering brand visibility and customer engagement. Marketing is a broad term that encompasses an array of types, strategies, and efforts. In this article, we’ll go over common marketing terms worth knowing when you’re working in the field—or interested in beginning a new career. 

Below, you’ll find common marketing terms listed in alphabetical order. 

A/B Test

An A/B test is a way of comparing two options to see which does better. This can be especially useful in digital marketing, such as testing two email subject lines. 

B2B Marketing

B2B marketing (short for business-to-business marketing) is a strategy that entails marketing to businesses rather than individual consumers. 

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a web page without performing an action. 

Brand Equity

Equity refers to value. Brand equity is a way of thinking about a brand’s value in the larger marketplace and more specifically with its customers.  

Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is when customers prefer a brand and continue to purchase its products or use its services over time. These customers typically don’t require significant marketing efforts because the brand already has their allegiance. 

Brand Manager

A brand manager is a key marketing role responsible for developing strategies to distinguish a brand from competitors and building lasting relationships with customers. 

Brand Marketing

Brand marketing entails developing marketing strategies and campaigns that earn a brand—and subsequently its products and services—more attention. Instead of focusing on sales, brand marketing is about fostering a relationship with potential and existing customers. 

Buyer Persona or Avatar

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of a brand’s target audience to help guide and set marketing strategy. It often incorporates specific demographic details and behavioral traits based on research. 

Call-To-Action

A call to action is an invitation to perform a desired action, typically used at the end of an email, social media post, or other post that provides potential clients or customers with knowledge on the next steps to take. 

Competitor Analysis

A competitor analysis—sometimes called a competitive analysis—is a process that involves researching a brand’s main competitors to analyze their branding, marketing, and products. Understanding these elements can lead a brand to develop more specific and distinctive marketing strategies.   

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a facet of marketing that aims to develop relevant, authoritative content through blogs, podcasts, videos, and other types of media in order to attract and engage a target audience. 

Content Strategy

Content strategy is a plan to develop, publish, and maintain content, such as blogs, podcasts, and videos. Developing a strategy often involves, among other things, researching your target audience, deciding which content types to implement, developing a process for creating content, and measuring each content type’s success. 

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is an important marketing metric that tracks the percentage of people who complete an established goal, such as signing up for a newsletter or completing a purchase. In these instances, potential customers move closer to becoming paying customers and therefore “convert.” A high conversion rate signifies an effective marketing strategy or advertising campaign. 

CTR (clickthrough rate)

CTR (clickthrough rate) is a marketing metric that tells you what percentage of people perform an action after seeing an advertisement or webpage. It’s usually measured in relation to impressions, which refers to the total number of people who see an advertisement.   

Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition is a process that involves attracting customers to purchase your products. More than simply getting their attention, the process typically requires nurturing potential customers (leads) over time. 

Customer Segmentation

Customer segmentation is the process of grouping customers by distinguishing features so you can develop more specific marketing strategies to reach and engage them. 

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a form of advertising that uses online digital channels, such as SEO, websites, and social media, to connect and engage with customers. 

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing is a way to reach customers by sending them messages directly through channels such as mail, e-mail, or text messages. Rather than using other types of indirect media to reach a broad array of customers, direct marketing communicates with individual customers in order to generate a more immediate action, like a purchase.   

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a marketing channel, usually housed under digital marketing, that uses email to reach customers, promote current products, and run on-demand campaigns.

Go-to-Market Strategy

Go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a plan that businesses design and implement when they’re getting ready to launch a new product or service. It usually includes target market profiles, a marketing plan, and a concrete sales and distribution strategy. 

Guerilla Marketing

Guerilla marketing is a cost-effective strategy that involves using the element of surprise to attract brand attention or promote a product. 

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a strategy that uses content and experiences to attract consumers and pull them “inbound,” so that they eventually transition from consumers to customers. 

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a strategy in which businesses collaborate with well-known people who have a strong online presence (often called “influencers”) to promote their products or services, or bring greater visibility to their brand.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the process of improving visibility for local businesses that need to reach more targeted markets in a specific geographic area. 

Market Research

Market research is a process wherein businesses gather a very detailed understanding of consumers’ behaviors and needs by conducting surveys and interviews, and tracking other qualitative and quantitative data in a specific industry. 

Market Segmentation

Market segmentation is the process of segmenting prospective customers into groups based on a set of characteristics (demographics or behavioral) to better understand their unique needs—and market directly to them. 

Marketing Analytics

Marketing teams use data to understand what’s working and what’s not. Marketing analytics refers to marketing-specific data that teams can track to explain a range of efforts, including engagement, bounce rate, and conversion rate. 

Marketing Channel

Marketing channels are the pathways through which you advertise a business’s products and services. There are several different types of marketing channels, including email, content, direct, and social. 

Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel describes the journey that a customer typically takes. It’s broken down into stages that include becoming aware of a business’s products, completing an action, or making a purchase. It’s often used to help marketers understand how they should engage and support customers at each stage. 

Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is a roadmap that organizes a marketing team’s various efforts by laying out the concrete actions they will take to implement their larger marketing strategy. 

Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy is a broad overview of a business’s long-term marketing vision that outlines its value proposition to customers. 

Niche Market

Niche markets refer to highly specific groups of consumers—often within a larger customer segment—who share certain qualities, behaviors, or needs. Niche markets differ from mass markets because they tend to be narrowed and more focused, but they often encompass customers who are more likely to make a purchase. 

Omnichannel Marketing

There are many touchpoints that a customer might experience as they interact with a brand across various channels, such as web, e-mail, social media, and in-person. Omnichannel marketing is a way to create a seamless experience across those touchpoints.

Online Marketing

Online marketing is another way to describe digital marketing, and refers to the use of online channels, such as SEO, social media, and e-mail, to connect and engage with customers.   

Owned Media

Owned media refers to all of the media channels that a business has direct control over, such as e-mail, newsletters, and blogs. Unlike earned media—or publicity—owned media is something a business oversees and therefore must invest in. 

Paid Media

Paid media is any digital marketing effort that features a paid advertisement. These can include video ads, banner ads, and search ads. 

Paid Search 

Paid search is a digital marketing strategy wherein businesses pay search engines to place their ads in more visible positions. Doing so can drive additional traffic to a business’s website. 

Pain Point

A customer pain point is a persistent challenge your target customer faces. It’s often described as an area of friction, inconvenience, or disruption in their daily personal or professional life. You address customer pain points through your product, ancillary services, and customer experience.

The four main types of customer pain points are :

• Physical — tangible problems, such as a lack of time or resources.
• Financial — financial loss or damage incurred from either using a different solution or not having one at all.
• Emotional — mental or emotional stress caused by the complexity or effort required to complete a task or acquire a reasonable solution.
• Logistical — a lack of efficient processes or structure, such as an ineffective supply chain or a cumbersome process for getting what they need.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click (PPC) is the most common type of paid search. It means paying to have your ad appear on the top page of a search engine results page (SERP). Often, the fee you pay is connected to how many people click on your ad. 

Promotional Marketing

Promotional marketing is one of the four Ps of marketing. It’s a process that entails sharing knowledge about a brand, product, or service through various marketing channels to increase awareness. 

Public Relations (PR)

Public relations (PR) is the set of techniques and strategies related to managing how information about an individual or company is disseminated to the public, especially the media. Its primary goals are to disseminate important company news or events, maintain a brand image, and put a positive spin on negative events to minimize their fallout.

Remarketing

Oftentimes, marketing is about engaging with new potential customers. However; remarketing involves engaging customers who have already interacted with your business in some way and prompting them to complete an action. 

ROAS

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is an important marketing metric that determines the success of an ad campaign. By quantifying how much a business spends on ads compared to the increase in sales that those ads generate, they can determine the success of a campaign. 

ROI

The return on investment (ROI) of a marketing campaign compares the cost of the campaign to how much money it brought in. 

SEO marketing

SEO marketing—or search engine optimization marketing—is a facet of digital marketing that entails optimizing your website and its content for greater visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. 

SERP

Search Engine Results Pages or SERP are the results that a search engine—like Google, Bing, or Yahoo—displays after a user conducts an online query. They are typically displayed in order or relevance. 

Target Market

A target market is a group of potential customers who are most likely to purchase a business’s product or service. 

Trade Promotion

A trade promotion is a marketing activity between two business. It is a tactic designed to increase demand for a specific product based on a marketing message, sale of products, giveaway of gifts or prizes, or a product demonstration that increases consumer education.

User Journey Maps

User journey maps are a way to visually represent a user’s experience and can be especially helpful to UX and UI website design teams as they set about working on designing or redesigning a product. 

Value Proposition

A business’ value proposition is the benefit the business offers customers that purchase its products or services.