Marketing terms and definitions: sixty words you need in plain language

Marketing has roughly sixty terms that come up in almost every meeting, and they fall into six groups: strategy and positioning, the funnel and lifecycle, channels, advertising mechanics, measurement and money, and content and search. This page defines each one in plain language, in those groups, so you can read a plan or a report without stopping. Where two terms are commonly confused, the definition says which is which, because most of the confusion in marketing conversations is two people using one word for different things.

Strategy and positioning

• Positioning. The place your product occupies in a buyer's mind relative to the alternatives. Written as one sentence: for whom, against what, and why you.
• Value proposition. The specific benefit a buyer gets, in their words, with the proof attached.
• Segmentation. Dividing a market into groups that behave differently enough to need different treatment.
• Targeting. Choosing which segments to serve.
• Ideal customer profile, or ICP. The firm level description of a company worth selling to: size, industry, situation. Used in business to business marketing.
• Persona. The person level description of a buyer: their role, their problem, what they fear getting wrong.
• Total addressable market, or TAM. Everyone who could buy. Serviceable addressable market narrows it to who you can reach, and serviceable obtainable market to who you can realistically win.
• Brand. What people expect of you before they deal with you. Identity is the visual and verbal system; brand is the expectation.
• Category. The thing buyers think they are shopping for. Winning a category is usually easier than inventing one.
• Four Ps. Product, price, place and promotion: the classic checklist for a marketing plan.

The funnel and the lifecycle

• Funnel. The stages between first awareness and purchase. Top of funnel is awareness, middle is consideration, bottom is decision.
• Demand generation. Creating commercial interest in a category and capturing it when the buyer is ready.
• Lead generation. Collecting contact details from interested people. A subset of demand generation.
• Lead. A contact who has shown interest. A marketing qualified lead meets agreed criteria for marketing to hand over; a sales qualified lead has been accepted by sales as worth working.
• Opportunity or pipeline. A deal sales is actively working, with a value and a stage.
• Account based marketing, or ABM. Treating a named list of target companies as the market and coordinating marketing and sales against each one.
• Lifecycle marketing. The programme of messages a customer receives across onboarding, adoption, renewal and expansion.
• Churn. The rate at which customers leave. Net revenue retention measures the revenue left after churn and expansion are both counted.

Channels

• Owned, earned and paid media. Owned is yours: your site, your list. Earned is coverage and word of mouth you did not pay for. Paid is advertising.
• Organic search, or SEO. Earning positions in unpaid search results.
• Paid search, or SEM and PPC. Buying placement against search queries, charged per click.
• Display. Banner and visual advertising on websites and apps.
• Programmatic. Buying advertising inventory through automated auctions rather than direct negotiation.
• Retargeting, or remarketing. Advertising to people who have already visited you.
• Affiliate marketing. Paying partners a commission for sales they refer.
• Influencer marketing. Paying or partnering with individuals who have an audience.
• Retail media. Advertising inside a retailer's own site or app, next to the products.
• Connected TV, or CTV. Advertising delivered through internet connected televisions and streaming services.
• Out of home, or OOH. Billboards, transit and street level advertising. Digital out of home is the screen based version.

Advertising mechanics

Term	What it means
Impression	One delivery of an ad to a screen
Reach and frequency	How many distinct people saw it, and how many times each
CPM	Cost per thousand impressions, the standard price for awareness buying
CPC	Cost per click
CPA	Cost per acquisition, meaning per completed action such as a sale or a sign up
CTR	Click through rate: clicks divided by impressions
Bid strategy	The rule the platform uses to decide what to pay per auction
Share of voice	Your share of the advertising or conversation in a category
Creative	The advertisement itself. A cutdown is a shorter version of the same asset
Frequency cap	A limit on how often one person sees an ad

Measurement and money

• Conversion. A visitor completing the action you wanted. Conversion rate is conversions divided by visitors.
• Customer acquisition cost, or CAC. Total sales and marketing cost divided by new customers won in the same period.
• Lifetime value, or LTV. Expected gross profit from a customer over the whole relationship. The ratio of LTV to CAC is the standard test of whether acquisition is affordable.
• Return on ad spend, or ROAS. Revenue divided by advertising cost. Return on investment is the same idea net of all costs.
• Payback period. How long it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a customer.
• Attribution. Assigning credit for a sale across the touchpoints that preceded it. First touch credits the first, last touch the last, multi touch spreads it. Every model is a choice, so state which one your report uses.
• Incrementality. Whether the sales would have happened without the marketing. The honest test is a holdout: withhold the activity from a comparable group and compare.
• Marketing mix modelling, or MMM. A statistical approach to estimating each channel's contribution from aggregate data rather than from tracking individuals.
• Self reported attribution. Asking on the form how someone heard about you. The cheapest way to see the demand analytics misses.
• Vanity metric. A number that rises without the business improving, such as impressions or follower count.

Content and search

• Keyword and search intent. The phrase typed, and the reason behind it: informational, commercial, transactional or navigational.
• SERP. The search engine results page, including its features such as map packs, shopping units and AI Overviews.
• Backlink and domain authority. A link from another site to yours, and a third party score estimating a site's overall strength.
• Technical SEO. Crawling, indexing, site speed, structure and markup: the work that makes content eligible to rank.
• Schema markup, or structured data. Code that states facts about a page in a form machines read directly.
• Content pillar and cluster. One comprehensive page on a broad topic, linked to specific supporting pages.
• Topical authority. Being the site that covers a subject most completely and credibly.
• Answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation. The work of being named and cited by AI assistants when they answer buyer questions.

This page covers the terms themselves. For how to build a plan around them, the sequence that works is positioning first, then the two or three channels your buyers actually use, then the measurement you will report on.

Where people get stuck on marketing terms and definitions

What is the difference between marketing and advertising?

Marketing is the whole job: deciding who you serve, what you offer, at what price, through which channels, and how you communicate it. Advertising is one part of the communication, specifically the paid part. A plan that is only advertising has skipped most of the work.

What is the difference between a KPI and a metric?

A metric is any number you can measure. A key performance indicator is the small set of metrics you have agreed to be judged on. Most reports confuse the two by including everything measurable, which buries the few numbers that decide anything.

What is the difference between branding and performance marketing?

Brand work builds the expectation that makes future buying easier and cheaper, and it is read over quarters. Performance marketing converts people who are ready now, and it is read over weeks. They fund each other: brand lowers the cost of performance, and performance pays for the patience brand needs.

Which of these terms matter most to a small business?

Six: positioning, conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, search intent and self reported attribution. Those let you decide what to say, whether the channel pays and where enquiries really came from, which is most of the decision making a small team needs.

Why do two agencies use the same word differently?

Because most of these terms have no standards body behind them. The fix is to write your own one page glossary with your definitions of lead, qualified, opportunity and conversion, and make every supplier report against those definitions. It removes more argument than any dashboard.

A term being added to plans this year

You will increasingly see AI visibility in marketing plans and agency proposals. It means whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews name your business when a buyer asks a category question, and which sources they cite when they do.

It is treated as its own measure because those five answer differently, name different companies and cite different sources, and they share no common ranking, so a search position tells you nothing about what they say. Most existing marketing reports have no line for it yet. AI Knows Us measures those answers and the sources behind them.