Every Marketing Term You Need To Know

The world of marketing is filled with jargon, like category creation. So it pays to pay attention.

Marketing terms to get comfortable with:

Analytics – Refers to the tracking and analysis of data used about prospects, customers and competitors. Legendary marketing leaders, learn to love data. Data should inform all marketing efforts. Data used in marketing analytics can be website traffic, conversions, social media engagement, number of clicks, revenue, product usage, product returns, customer satisfaction/feedback, etc.

Bounce Rate – This is the amount of people who visit a page of a website but exit without clicking on anything or visiting any other page on the said website.

Buyer Persona – This is a representation of the ideal buyer based on market insight, research, data, and hypothesis.

Brand – This is a name, term, symbol, design, or any other feature that identifies one seller and their products from others. A legendary brand is often the company/product/service that dominates its market category. Brands that are not category leaders, are generally much less valuable.

Business-To-Business (B2B) – This is a business that markets or sells to other businesses.

Business-To-Consumer (B2C) – This is a business that markets or sells to consumers.

Business-To-Business-To-Consumer (B2B2C) – This is a business that markets or sells to other businesses and consumers.

Category Design (Category Creation) – the management discipline of creating and monetizing new markets.

Category Queen & Category King – the company that dominates its market category.

Chief Marketing Officer – the senior executive responsible for worldwide marketing. Often reporting to the CEO.

Chief Product Officer – the senior executive responsible for product development. Often reporting to the CEO.

Chief Revenue Officer – the senior executive responsible for worldwide sales and field operations Often reporting to the CEO.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) – To calculate this, take the number of clicks people make as they move through your website and divide it by the total number of actions they could have taken.

Closing – the process of completing a sale with a customer.

Comparative Advertising – This is the method of using direct comparison with another brand, firm, or organization in advertising. Generally this strategy is a recipe for failure. Most legendary category designing companies, do not compare themselves to others. They want others to be compared to them.

Copywriting – the art of the written word in marketing. See Cole Shafer.

Content – This refers to any information created to inform, educate, or influence a specific audience. It may come in the form of text, image, video, or audio.

Content Management System (CMS) – This is a program that manages all aspects of content creation.

Conversion Rate – This is the percentage of people who take a desired action, which is often purchasing a product, filling out a form or downloading a product or a document.

Corporate Identity – This refers to all symbols, colors, logos, and other elements that make up the public image of an organization. Ties to brand.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – This is software that helps you organize marketing, sales and customer service activities, including storing contact information, tracking emails, sales forecasting, resolving customer support issues, storing deals, etc.

Cost Per Lead (CPL) – This is the total cost required to acquire a lead.

Cost Per Click (CPC) – This is an advertising metric that determines the amount a company will pay for an ad based on how many clicks the ad receives. It is a term often used in conjunction with Google Adwords.

Customer Acquisition Cost – This is a measurement that helps you assess the cost of acquiring a new customer.

Ding Dong – term of endearment for executives (“She’s a big ding dong at our company) and description of anything high-end, or up market (“that was some seriously ding-dong wine”)

Earned Media – any third party reference to a company or brand. Sometimes the result of a public relations effort.

Ecosystem – the group of suppliers, partners, resellers that center around a vendor company. Often associated with a category queen company.

Engagement Rate – This is a metric used to analyze the number of comments, shares, and likes a piece of content receives on social media.

Evergreen Content – This refers to content that will stay relevant for years to come. Typically not about a particular event in time, but something that is timeless.

Evangelist – people inside a company who promote the category, POV, and brand. Often executive management and marketing leaders.

From-to’s (Frotos) – the articulation of how a market category works now (from) and the vision for how it could work in the future (to).

Fuck – the most flexible working in the English language.

Inbound Marketing – This is advertisement through content marketing, podcasts, videos, eBooks, e-mail, SEO, and social marketing rather than through paid media.

Landing Page – This is a page on a website that houses a form to be filled out by prospects with personal information (to be used in marketing) in exchange for a free offer or discount.

Lead – This refers to an individual or a company that has shown interest in one of your products or services. Generally, marketing creates leads. Sales follows up, in an effort to “close a sale”.

Lightning Strike – an event meant to explode onto the market, grab the attention of customers, investors, analysts, and media, and make any potential competitors shit their drawers.

Magic Triangle – the equal focus on designing a company, product and category at the same time.

Niche Down – the process of focusing on a narrow, differentiated position. Also an international bestseller by Christopher Lochhead and Heather Clancy.

Owned media – typically content created by a company/brand designed to educate customers and prospects. Often in support of a POV.

Point of View (POV) – a story that articulates a problem/opportunity for customers and a different approach to solving the problem or capitalizing on the opportunity.  A POV is often a critical component of category design.

Play Bigger – a top 1% best selling business book. The first to introduce category design as management discipline.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This is a method used on blogs and other content to increase a webpage’s performance in web search results.

Shave the dog – slang for cutting out the unnecessary (“we need to shave the dog on that press release”)

User Experience – This refers to someone’s experience with your website or brand starting from the moment of discovery to conversion.

These are the basic marketing terms that will help you navigate the ins and outs of marketing. If you would like to learn more about marketing, subscribe to Christopher Lochhead’s podcast today.