Marketing terms, as I use them.
54 words grouped by the situation they turn up in, from the boardroom down into the ad account. Each one ends with a question you can ask out loud in your next meeting.
54 terms, and counting
How marketing gets bought
The words that come up when you are deciding how marketing gets run, and by whom.
- Fractional CMOA senior marketing leader who runs a company’s marketing on a fixed share of the working week, with a full-time CMO’s authority over budget and team.
- Interim vs. fractionalAn interim CMO fills a vacant marketing seat full time, with an end date set by the permanent hire.
- Ownership vs. adviceThe difference between the person whose name sits next to the number at quarter end and the person who recommended how to reach it.
- Fixed scope vs. retainerTwo ways to buy external marketing work.
- HandoverThe planned transfer that lets an external role end while the work keeps running. Everything the role holds passes to a named person on a set date.
- In-housingMoving marketing work from an agency into salaried roles of your own.
- Agency briefThe document that tells an agency what the work must achieve, and the single biggest determinant of what comes back.
- The first marketing hireThe first salaried marketing role in the company.
- Marketing budget as a share of revenueMarketing spend expressed as a percentage of revenue, the form a board reaches for when it asks whether spend is reasonable.
The numbers leadership asks about
The numbers that decide whether marketing gets more budget or less.
- CACCustomer acquisition cost: everything a company spends to win new customers in a period, divided by the number of new customers it won in that period.
- LTVLifetime value: the gross profit a customer produces across the whole relationship, discounted because most of it arrives later.
- LTV:CACLifetime value divided by customer acquisition cost: how many kroner of gross profit a customer eventually returns for each krone spent winning them.
- CAC paybackThe number of months before a new customer’s gross profit has repaid the cost of acquiring them. Until that month, every new customer is a use of cash.
- Contribution margin per orderWhat one order leaves behind once the cost of goods, shipping, payment fees and returns are paid.
- MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)Total company revenue divided by total marketing spend over the same period, with everything counted on both sides.
- ROASThe revenue a platform attributes to its own ads, divided by the spend it recorded, over a window it chose. Every input is set by the party being graded.
- Pipeline coverageOpen pipeline for a period divided by the revenue target for the same period.
- Marketing-sourced vs. marketing-influenced revenueTwo rules for crediting marketing with closed revenue.
- NRR (net revenue retention)Revenue from the existing customer base this period against what the same customers produced a period earlier, with expansion, contraction and churn all…
- ChurnThe rate at which customers, or the revenue they carry, leave over a period.
- CPQL (cost per qualified lead)What it costs to produce a lead that sales agrees is worth working: cost per lead divided by the share of leads that qualify.
Demand
Where the revenue comes from before anyone clicks.
- ICP (ideal customer profile)The customer type that closes fastest and stays longest, described precisely enough to say no to the rest.
- MQL / SQLMQL and SQL are the two gates a lead passes on its way to revenue: marketing qualified, meaning marketing believes sales should see it, and sales…
- Demand creation vs. demand captureTwo jobs a marketing budget can do.
- Buying committeeThe group of people who all have to agree before a B2B purchase happens.
- Lead scoringPoints the CRM adds to a contact, partly for fit with your ICP and partly for behaviour on your site and in your emails.
- Lifecycle stageWhere a contact sits on the path from first touch to closed customer, as the CRM records it.
- Share of searchYour share of the branded search volume in your category: searches for your brand, divided by searches for every brand in a set you define.
- Category entry pointsThe situations that send someone looking for a product like yours.
Measurement and attribution
How you find out what worked, and the ways that answer gets distorted on the way.
- AttributionThe rule that decides which marketing touchpoint gets the credit for a sale when several came before it.
- Attribution windowHow long after a click or a view a purchase still counts as the ad’s.
- IncrementalityThe revenue that would disappear if the marketing stopped.
- Holdout testAn experiment that switches a channel’s spend off in matched regions and compares their sales with the regions left running.
- Server-side tracking (Conversions API)Conversion events sent to the ad platform from your own server, alongside or in place of the pixel in the visitor’s browser.
- MMM (marketing mix modelling)A statistical model that relates marketing spend, channel by channel, together with outside factors like season and price, to revenue over time.
- Consent ModeThe mechanism that governs what Google’s tags may measure when a visitor declines cookies, and that models the conversions lost as a result.
- Self-reported attributionThe answer buyers type into the “how did you hear about us?” field on your form.
- Single source of truthOne agreed number for each thing the company steers by, and one system appointed in advance to win when two reports disagree.
The engine
CRM, flows and handovers: the plumbing that decides whether any of the rest works.
- Pipeline architectureThe deal stages in your CRM, each with a meaning: what a deal in it has done, and what moves it out. Your forecast is read off this map.
- Lead routingThe rules that decide which person a new lead goes to, and how fast a human follows up.
- SLA between marketing and salesA written agreement between the two teams: the volume and quality of leads marketing commits to, and the response time and follow-up attempts sales…
- Win-back flowAutomation aimed at customers who have lapsed or been lost.
- Data hygieneThe state of the records underneath your reporting: duplicate contacts, dead email addresses, empty required fields and free text where a picklist belongs.
- DeliverabilityWhether your email reaches the inbox at all. The receiving provider decides before your subject line gets a vote.
Channels from the inside
The words from inside the ad account.
- Creative testingThe number of genuinely different ideas put in front of the market in a period, and the discipline of learning from what comes back.
- Hook rateThe share of viewers still watching a video ad after its first seconds, as the platform counts and reports it.
- Frequency and audience saturationFrequency is how many times, on average, the same person has seen your ad in a period: impressions divided by reach.
- Learning phaseThe period after a campaign launches, or after a significant edit, in which the platform’s delivery system is still working out who should see the ads.
- Black-box campaignsAutomated campaign types in which the platform chooses the audience, the placements, the bidding and the combination of your creatives, then reports the…
- Branded vs. generic searchA branded search contains your company or product name; a generic search describes the problem you solve.
When the buyer asks an AI
How buyers find you when the answer is written by an assistant.
- AI search (AEO / GEO)Being named or cited in the answer an AI assistant writes when someone asks it a question your company answers well.
- AI share of voiceHow often your company is named in AI assistants’ answers about your category, measured against how often your competitors are.
- Structured dataFacts about your business written into a page’s code in a standard vocabulary that machines parse without guessing: the company’s name and address, or a…
- llms.txtA plain text file at the root of a site, describing what the site contains, written so a language model can take in the site’s shape in one request.