Marketing Glossary

In marketing like other professions we have developed a wordy often confusing list of terms that to an outsider are like another language. So I have been hunting the web for the best glossary to explain some of these terms to the small business owner like you.

Here are my favourite lists

• Hubspot marketing glossary - list of inbound marketing terms
• Smartbug media has another good list of terms
• Marketo has a list for each section of marketing worth looking at.

Some terms in Marketing

Customer-centric marketing uses customers (not products, not channels, and not events) as the center of all analysis and decision-making. It embraces the all-important metric of customer lifetime value (CLV) as a platform for measuring the impact of marketing actions.

Lead Nurturing: Sometimes referred to as "drip marketing," lead nurturing is the practice of developing a series of communications (emails, social media messages, etc.) that seek to qualify a lead, keep it engaged, and gradually push it down the sales funnel. Inbound marketing is all about delivering valuable content to the right audience -- and lead nurturing helps foster this by providing contextually relevant information to a lead during different stages of the buying lifecycle.

Closed-loop marketing: The use of analytics and data throughout a customer's lifecycle to improve marketing and sales strategies. To "close the loop", marketing and sales teams unify their reporting and strategies to generate higher ROI. Considering 69 percent of CEOs believe they are wasting money marketing initiatives, according to Forbes, the majority of marketers have adopted closed-loop marketing in one form or another.

Content marketing: Similar to inbound marketing, content marketing is the use and distribution of content that provides valuable information to help a company grow and retain website visitors and customers. Altimater cites that 70 percent of marketers do not have a consistent or integrated content strategy.

Inbound marketing: A marketing strategy that builds interesting and valuable content to attract the attention of people to your company rather than seeking them out as is done with outbound marketing like purchasing lists, cold calling, trade shows and sending snail mail. According to Hubspot data, inbound practices produce 54 percent more leads than traditional outbound practices.

Marketing automation: The use of software and technology to streamline various marketing channels and make them automated. Over 50 percent of top-performing companies have adopted marketing automation (Forrester).

Buyer's journey: The process and journey a prospective customer goes through to reach your company. It involves research and communication with your company, as well as within the buyer's network of those involved in the buying process. According to Forrester Research, almost 75 percent of B2B buyers spend more than half of their buyer's journey doing online and independent research before researching offline.

Buyer/marketing persona: As defined by HubSpot, "A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers." Using a buyer/marketing persona makes 2 to 5 times more effective and easier to use by ideal users (HubSpot).

On-Page Optimization:This type of SEO is based solely on a webpage and the various elements within the HTML (see "H" if you skipped here directly). Ensuring that key pieces of the specific page (content, title tag, URL, and image tags) include the desired keyword will help a page rank for that particular phrase.

Off-Page Optimization:This is the free-spirited cousin of on-page optimization. Off-page SEO refers to incoming links and other outside factors that impact how a webpage is indexed in search results. Factors like linking domains and even social media play a role in off-page optimization. The good news is that it's powerful; the not so good news is that it's mostly out of an inbound marketer's control. The solution? Create useful, remarkable content and chances are people will share and link to it.

Persona: Sometimes referred to as a "buyer persona," a persona is a basic profile of a target consumer. It helps an inbound marketer visualize the ideal prospect, their behavior, demographic profile, and psychographic information. A complete and accurate buyer persona profile can help inbound marketers better define their target audience and make better-informed marketing decisions.

PPC PPC, (or Pay-Per-Click): is an advertising technique in which an advertiser puts an ad in an advertising venue (like Google AdWords or Facebook), and pays that venue each time a visitor clicks on the ad. I couldn't think of anything witty to place at the end of this definition, so let's move on to "Q."

Call extensions/ click-to-call: A feature of paid search ads that includes the business phone number on the add. With click-to-call, the user can click the phone number to make the call.

Clicks: The total number of users who actually click the ad or paid search result. In the 2012 WordStream study, it was also found that 193.2 million clicks were generated per day on Google AdWords.

Cost-per-click (CPC): The amount of money paid for each click-through to the company's website that an advertisement generates on search engines or other publication websites. The average cost-per-click on the AdWords search network is between $1 and $2 (WordStream).

Cost-per-conversions (CPA): This term, in relation to paid Facebook and Twitter ads, is the amount of money paid per converted event. The term, as it relates to Adwords, is the total cost of generating clicks or impressions divided by total amount of conversions. Since statistics vary widely on cost-per-conversion, I'm going to share a completely random statistic. There are 293 ways to make changes with a dollar.

Cost-per-impression (CPI): The amount of money paid for each view of an advertisement rather than paying per click. This method of tracking ROI is most relevant to paid social promotions since Google AdWords calculates based on cost-per-thousand. The average cost-per-impression on Facebook is lowest at $1.54, while Twitter is $12.16 and LinkedIn is $27.90 (The Connected Business).

Cost-per-thousand (CPM): A tracking metric only relevant to the Google AdWords display network, cost-per-thousand is the amount of money paid per thousand impressions with the maximum being a set bid. According to MontetizePros, the average cost-per-impression for technology companies is $5.25 in 2015.

Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of people who click an element or link in an email, ad or web page. It is also used interchangeably with view-to-click rate. The average click-through rate for emails sent by companies with over 50 employees is 2.98 percent (MailChimp).

CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) is a prediction of all the value a business will derive from their entire relationship with a customer. Because we don't know how long each relationship will be, we make a good estimate and state CLV as a periodic value that is, we usually say "this customer's 12-month (or 24-month, etc) CLV is $x".

Bounce rate: A term found in Google Analytics, which is defined by Google as, "Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page)." A good bounce rate for a website falls between 26 and 40 percent (RocketFuel).

Direct traffic: Traffic that comes directly to your website, which means the user types your website URL directly into their browser. A word of caution is needed when defining this term, however, because experiments by Groupon showed that up to 60 percent of direct traffic was actually organic search traffic or an unclassified source of traffic.

API: An application programming interface (API) is a set of rules or protocols developers must use when working with a service or application. Since there aren't many juicy stats floating around on APIs, did you know there are about half a million pieces of space junk orbiting the earth?

CMS: A content management system (CMS) is an application that allows marketers to edit, manage and publish content. WordPress CMS is used for 24.7 percent of all websites (W3Techs).

CSS: Cascading style sheets (CSS) describes a code language that describes how HTML should be visually displayed. Here's a fun statistic: 0.3 percent of all accidents in Canada involve a moose.

Domain name: An identification that helps an entity or organization be found on the Internet. It's somewhat like a physical address on the Internet. There are 294 million domains and counting in 2015 (Enterprise Networking Planet).

UX: The user experience (UX) is a combination of interactions with a product, website or app a user goes through, which may lead to positive or negative emotions and attitudes. If content is not optimized in the UX, 79 percent of users will search for another site (Experience Dynamics).

Wireframe: A set of lines and images used to plan website structure and functionality. Although there isn't a statistic readily available on a quantifiable benefit of using wireframes, they do help to save time and minimize revisions in the website design process.

SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of enhancing where a webpage appears in search results. By adjusting a webpage's on-page SEO elements (see the letter "O") and influencing off-page SEO factors (again, see the letter "O"), an inbound marketer can improve where a webpage appears in search engine results.