Marketers today have a lot on their mind. Gone are the days of simple print and TV advertising and here has arrived the digital era. Everyday, a marketer has countless processes, strategies and tactics to think about – photography, engagement, white papers, lead generation, email campaigns, influencers, analytics, differentiators. The list could go on for a few pages.

In a world where the landscape is in a constant state of change, and new medias are launched every day, it can be hard to keep track of the lingo. While there are terms, phrases and abbreviations that vary company to company and person to person, there are a few simple marketing 101 terms all professionals can be armed with.

• Demand Generation: generating demand for your product or service. Lead Generation is commonly interchanged in B2B with the overarching “demand generation” term.
• Acquisition, Retention, Expansion: common lenses used when building a marketing strategy.
  • Acquisition: the focus of attracting new buyers
  • Retention: keeping the buyers you have
  • Expansion: increasing share of wallet of existing buyer
• Lead Nurturing: building a targeted buyer’s journey typically serving digital content through an automated system that moves the buyer through the funnel from interested buyer to loyal customer.
• Gated Content: content that requires a reader to obtain access through something like a form. Content that’s behind a form could range from white papers and eBooks all the way to on-demand webinars and infographics.
• Attribution: all of the interactions that occur as a person decides to make a purchase with your company.
• Demographics, Firmographics, Psychographics: used for created targeted campaigns.
  • Demographics: tangible characteristics of a person such as age, ethnicity, gender, location
  • Psychographics: intangible characteristics of a person such as interests, habits, attitudes, emotions and preferences
  • Firmographics: tangible characteristics of an organization such as company size, industry, location
• Contextual Marketing: a strategy that uses psychographics to provide content that is relevant to the person receiving it.
• Net Promotion Score (NPS): measures how likely someone would be to recommend your company to others on a 1-10 scale.
• Remarketing: the process of reconnecting with previous visitors of your website. It allows you to position targeted ads to a defined audience (one that has previously visited your site) as they browse other pages on the Internet.
• Smart Content: website content that changes based on the past interactions and preferences of the website user.
• Cookie: information stored on a user’s computer by a website, so preferences are remembered on future requests.
• Data Studio: a free tool from Google that lets users make custom reports with data from Google’s marketing services and external sources.
• Geo-targeting: a method of detecting a website visitor’s location to serve location-based content or advertisements.
• Interstitial: ads that load between two content pages (retail ex: get 10% off your first order if you join our mailing list)
• Bounce Rate: the percentage of people who land on your website and leave without clicking or navigating anywhere else on your site.
• Micro-Moments: an intent-rich moment when a person turns to a device to act on a need to-know, go, do, or buy
• Martech Stack or Marketing Stack: a suite of applications an organization uses to manage its marketing activities.
• A/B Testing: a data-founded strategy that is used to determine the best version of two versions for a specific marketing campaign.
• Evergreen Content: content that can be repurposed for years to come with the information never becoming outdated or irrelevant.
• Chatbot: an artificial intelligence program that can automate customer interactions for a company55
• Smart Content: website content that changes based on the past interactions and preferences of the website user.
• Inbound Links: links that come from another website to your own website. The more inbound links you have to your website from high-quality websites, the more Google trusts your site and will serve your information via organic search. (Also known as backlinks).
• Algorithm: a set of rules that determine which posts come first in your social media newsfeed or which websites Google displays first.
• B2B (Business-to-Business): sells products or services to other businesses, like a consulting firm or a business software company. B2B brands frequently attempt to position themselves as thought leaders in their industries and provide professional advice to their business peers.
• B2C (Business-to-Consumer): A B2C business deals directly with consumers, like a hotel or retail store. B2C companies often focus on creating a community around their brand and providing excellent customer care.
• Boilerplate: a short, standardized paragraph at the end of a press release that provides journalists with a high-level background on your company.
• Sentiment Analysis: is the way software analyzes the attitude of a piece of text. On social media, sentiment analysis tools can be used to automatically detect whether customer feedback is positive, negative, or neutral. Social media marketers can also look at the average sentiment of their customer interactions over time to see the general mood of their audience or the overall response to their content.
• Social Listening: how social media managers track conversations around key topics, terms, brands and more, often with a specialized software tool.
• Social Selling: Social selling, is using social media to make sales. Often, this takes place when salespeople interact with potential customers on social, establishing a relationship they can leverage for a future sale. This could be done by answering prospects’ questions, sharing company content, or mentioning their brand in a post comment.

Head into your next meeting, sales pitch or job interview ready to talk shop. Listen, be attentive, but most importantly, be confident!