Marketing glossary: 109 terms, each answered in one plain sentence
A
- Advertising keywords
- The words and phrases you bid on in a paid search platform like Google Ads so your ad shows when someone searches them.
- Google Ads
- Affiliate marketing
- Promoting a company's products and services through affiliate networks and receiving money when the business results in a sale.
- Ideas and examples
- Amazon advertising
- A pay-per-click and programmatic ad platform that lets brands and sellers promote products inside Amazon's results, product pages and partner sites.
- Google Ads
- Anchor text
- The visible, clickable words inside a hyperlink: the part a reader actually sees and clicks.
- SEO
- Audience targeting
- Identifying, segmenting and reaching the specific people most likely to act on your message, using signals like demographics, location, behaviour and intent.
- Ideas and examples
B
- Bandwagon advertising
- A persuasion technique that convinces people to buy a product or adopt an idea by showing that everyone else already has.
- Ideas and examples
- Brand awareness
- The degree to which your target audience recognises, recalls and associates your brand with a product category, problem or feeling.
- Marketing strategy
- Brand loyalty
- A customer's emotional and behavioural commitment to keep choosing one brand over its competitors, even when rivals offer lower prices.
- Ideas and examples
C
- Call to action (CTA)
- A word, phrase, button or link that tells your audience exactly what to do next.
- Ideas and examples
- Canonical URL
- The master version of a page, named in a canonical tag in the HTML so search engines know which URL to use.
- SEO
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- The percentage of people who click a link, ad or listing out of everyone who saw it.
- Google Ads
- Color psychology
- The study of how hues shape perception, emotion and buying behaviour, and how brands use them to build recognition and prompt action.
- Ideas and examples
- Comparative advertising
- A marketing strategy in which a brand directly or indirectly contrasts its product or service against a competitor's to prove it is better.
- Ideas and examples
- Competitive analysis
- Researching your competitors' products, pricing, positioning, marketing and customer experience to find their strengths and weaknesses relative to your own.
- Ideas and examples
- Conquesting
- A competitive advertising strategy where a brand targets its rivals' audiences, most often by bidding on competitors' branded keywords in paid search.
- Google Ads
- Content distribution
- Publishing, sharing and promoting your content across owned, earned and paid channels so it reaches the right audience.
- Marketing strategy
- Content marketing
- A marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.
- Marketing strategy
- Content strategy
- The documented plan for why, what, for whom and how your business creates, publishes and governs content to reach measurable goals.
- Marketing strategy
- Conversational tone
- A relaxed, natural writing style that reads like you are talking directly to one person, friend to friend.
- Marketing strategy
- Conversion
- Any action you've decided is worth counting, such as a purchase, a lead form, a sign-up or a phone call.
- Ideas and examples
- Conversion value
- The monetary worth you assign to each conversion so Google Ads and GA4 can optimise for revenue and profit, not just conversion counts.
- Google Ads
- CRM
- Customer relationship management: software that keeps every customer and enquiry in one place.
- AI and WhatsApp
- Customer journey map
- A visual representation of every interaction a customer has with your brand, from first becoming aware of a problem through purchase and beyond.
- Ideas and examples
- Customer pain points
- The specific, recurring problems, frustrations and unmet needs that prospects and customers experience before, during or after they buy from you.
- Ideas and examples
D
- Digital advertising
- Buying online placements on search engines, social media, websites, apps, video and connected TV to deliver promotional messages to a targeted audience.
- Marketing strategy
- Digital marketing keywords
- The words and phrases people type into search engines and AI assistants when they want marketing services, tools or advice.
- SEO
E
- E-A-T
- Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness: a concept introduced in Google's Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
- SEO
- EDM marketing
- Electronic direct mail marketing: sending emails to a targeted list of recipients to promote products, services or useful information.
- Email marketing
- Elevator pitch
- A 30-to-60-second spoken summary of who you are, what you do and the value you deliver.
- Ideas and examples
- Explainer video
- A short marketing video, usually 60 to 90 seconds, that uses simple visuals, a tight script and a voiceover to explain your product.
- Social media
F
- Facebook ad targeting
- Defining which Meta users see your ads by combining demographics, interests, behaviours and first-party data into audiences.
- Social media
- Facebook advertising
- The paid promotion of products, services and brands across Meta's family of apps using Meta Ads Manager.
- Social media
- Facebook Custom Audience
- An ad targeting option that lets you reach people who already know your business, such as existing customers and website visitors.
- Social media
- Facebook dynamic ads
- Ads that use automation and remarketing to reach prospects who have already shown interest in any of your products.
- Social media
- Facebook remarketing
- A paid-advertising tactic that shows targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram to people who have already interacted with your business.
- Social media
G
- Gateway page
- A thin, low-value page made mainly to rank for a specific search and funnel visitors elsewhere. Also called a doorway page.
- SEO
- GEO
- Generative engine optimization: getting your business cited or recommended inside the answers AI tools give, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
- SEO
- Gmail ads
- Native, expandable ads that appear inside the Gmail inbox, usually at the top of the Promotions and Social tabs.
- Google Ads
- Google Ads
- Google's pay-per-click advertising platform that lets businesses show paid ads across Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and partner sites.
- Google Ads
- Google algorithms
- Complex sets of rules and calculations that analyse various factors to determine the relevance and quality of a website's content.
- SEO
- Google AMP
- Accelerated Mobile Pages: an open-source HTML framework Google launched in 2015 for stripped-down pages that load almost instantly on mobile.
- SEO
- Google Display Network (GDN)
- Google's collection of over 2 million websites, apps and video properties where advertisers place visual ads.
- Google Ads
- Google Local Services Ads
- Pay-per-lead ads above Google Ads and organic results that let local service businesses receive calls, messages and bookings.
- Google Ads
- Google Merchant Center
- A free Google tool where ecommerce stores upload and manage product data so it can appear across Google's surfaces.
- Google Ads
- Google Trends
- A free Google tool that shows how often a search term is queried relative to total searches over a chosen time and location.
- SEO
I
- Instagram ad targeting
- Choosing exactly who sees your Instagram ads inside Meta Ads Manager, using a mix of location, demographics, interests and behaviours.
- Social media
- Instagram algorithm
- The set of AI ranking systems that decides which posts, Reels, Stories and Explore recommendations every user sees first.
- Social media
- Instagram highlight
- A saved collection of expired Stories that you pin permanently to your profile, shown as tappable circles beneath your bio.
- Ideas and examples
- Instagram Story template
- A reusable 1080x1920px layout with set fonts, colours and sticker placements that you fill with new content in seconds.
- Ideas and examples
K
- Keyword density
- The percentage of times a target keyword appears on a page relative to the total number of words on that page.
- SEO
- Keyword grouping
- Sorting a flat list of keywords into themed clusters by shared meaning, search intent or SERP overlap, so each group maps to one page.
- SEO
L
- Lead generation
- Drawing potential customers to your business and building their interest through nurturing, with the aim of turning them into customers.
- Marketing strategy
- LinkedIn advertising
- The paid promotion system inside LinkedIn, letting B2B brands reach decision-makers by job title, company and industry.
- Social media
- Local citation
- The presence of your business on the internet, such as on an online business directory, an industry website or another local site.
- SEO
- Long tail keywords
- Highly specific, lower-volume search queries, usually three or more words, that people use when they know exactly what they want.
- SEO
M
- Marketing collateral
- Any branded media asset, digital or printed, that a company creates to promote its products, services or brand.
- Marketing strategy
- Marketing funnel
- A marketing model, also known as the purchase funnel, that illustrates the consumer's journey towards making a purchase.
- Marketing strategy
- Marketing objectives
- The specific, measurable outcomes a marketing team commits to achieving within a set timeframe to support wider business goals.
- Marketing strategy
- Meta description
- A short snippet of text that appears below the title tag in search engine results pages.
- SEO
- Meta tags
- HTML elements in the head of a page that describe it to search engines and browsers, and to social apps when shared.
- SEO
- Metasearch engine
- A search tool that sends your query to several search engines at once, then combines and re-ranks the results on one page.
- SEO
- Microsoft Ads
- Microsoft's pay-per-click platform, formerly Bing Ads, serving search, shopping and display ads across the Microsoft Search Network.
- Google Ads
- Mission statement
- A short, present-tense declaration of an organisation's core purpose: what it does, who it does it for and the value it delivers.
- Ideas and examples
- Mobile-first indexing
- A process where search engines prioritise the mobile version of a website's content for indexing and ranking.
- SEO
N
- Niche keywords
- Highly specific search phrases, usually three to six words, that target a narrow audience inside your market.
- Ideas and examples
- Nofollow link
- A link with the rel="nofollow" attribute, which asks Google not to associate your site with, or pass ranking value to, the page.
- SEO
O
- Off-page SEO
- Optimisation techniques and strategies used outside your website to improve its search engine rankings.
- SEO
- On-page SEO
- Optimising the content and HTML elements on a web page, such as title tags, headings and internal links, so search engines understand it.
- SEO
- Organic keywords
- The search terms your website ranks for in the unpaid, algorithm-driven results of a search engine like Google.
- SEO
P
- Paid advertising
- A marketing strategy where businesses pay to display their promotional messages to a targeted audience across various platforms.
- Google Ads
- Performance Max
- A goal-based, AI-driven Google Ads campaign type that runs a single set of assets across every Google channel at once.
- Google Ads
- Persuasive ads
- Advertisements that don't just inform you about a product: they make you want it.
- Ideas and examples
- Positioning statement
- A short, internal sentence that defines who your brand serves, its market category, its core benefit and why customers should believe it.
- Ideas and examples
- PPC
- Pay-per-click: an online advertising model where advertisers pay a fee only when someone clicks their ad, not when it is shown.
- Google Ads
- Programmatic advertising
- The automated buying and selling of digital ad inventory using software and data.
- Google Ads
R
- Referring URL
- The full web address of the page a user was on immediately before they clicked a link to your site.
- SEO
S
- Sales funnel
- A diagram showing a prospect's progression from their initial contact with you through to their actual transaction.
- Marketing strategy
- Schema markup
- Code you add to your website to give search engines more information about your content. Also known as structured data.
- SEO
- Search engine spider
- An automated program, also called a web crawler, that browses the web and downloads content so a search engine can index and rank it.
- SEO
- Search term
- The exact word or phrase a person types or speaks into a search engine when looking for something.
- SEO
- SEM
- Search engine marketing: a strategic approach that uses paid advertising to raise a brand's presence on search engine results pages.
- Google Ads
- SEO
- Search engine optimization: improving a website so it earns more visibility in the unpaid, organic results of search engines like Google.
- SEO
- SEO audit
- A thorough examination of your website's performance, done to find improvements across on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO.
- SEO
- SEO consultant
- A specialist who audits your website, finds barriers to organic visibility and builds a data-driven strategy to improve rankings, traffic and revenue.
- SEO
- SEO content
- Any website content created and optimised to rank in search engines and earn organic traffic by matching what real people search for.
- SEO
- SEO copywriting
- Creating content that is engaging and informative but also optimised for search engines.
- SEO
- SEO keywords
- The words and phrases people type or speak into search engines, and that you target so your pages appear for those searches.
- SEO
- SERP
- Search engine results page: the page a search engine such as Google or Bing shows in response to a query.
- SEO
- Social media advertising
- How brands buy attention on the platforms where billions of people already spend their time.
- Social media
- SWOT analysis
- A strategic planning technique that identifies the internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats facing a business, project or person.
- Ideas and examples
T
- Technical SEO
- Optimising your website so search engines like Google can find, crawl, understand and index your content.
- SEO
- TikTok algorithm
- The recommendation engine that decides which videos land on each user's For You Page.
- Ideas and examples
- TikTok trends
- The audio clips, hashtag challenges, editing formats, effects and meme concepts that spread rapidly across TikTok's For You feed.
- Ideas and examples
U
- Unique selling proposition (USP)
- The single, clear reason a customer should choose your business over every other option.
- Ideas and examples
- User generated content (UGC)
- Any original content, such as reviews, photos or videos, created by customers, fans or employees rather than by the brand itself.
- Social media
- User intent
- The underlying motivation or purpose behind a user's search query: the reason someone is searching for a keyword or phrase.
- SEO
V
- Value proposition
- A clear, customer-facing statement of how your product solves a problem, what it delivers and why a buyer should choose you.
- Ideas and examples
- Voice search
- Using voice commands to search for information on the internet, rather than typing queries into a search engine.
- SEO
W
- WhatsApp broadcast list
- A saved list of up to 256 contacts you can message at once. Only people who've saved your number receive it.
- AI and WhatsApp
- WhatsApp Business API
- The connection that lets software send and receive WhatsApp messages on your business number. Meta calls the product the WhatsApp Business Platform.
- AI and WhatsApp
- White hat SEO
- Search optimisation techniques that fully comply with the rules and guidelines published by Google and other search engines.
- SEO
Y
- YouTube algorithm
- The set of machine-learning recommendation systems that decide which videos to surface to which viewers across Home, Suggested, Search and Shorts.
- Social media
- YouTube SEO
- Optimising your videos, metadata and channel to rank higher in YouTube search and recommendations and to surface in Google video results.
- SEO
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