Advertising – communications and activities to promote, influence and persuade people’s actions.

Affiliate marketing – performance based marketing where others get rewarded for taking actions such as recommending products or services, making sales and commanding commissions.

Ad copy – words, usually text, that appear in advertising.

AdWords – Google’s system for online advertising, where advertisers bid on keywords and are directed to web pages, sometimes special dedicated pages called landing pages.

Above The Fold – the concept that newspapers place the most interesting stories and content above the traditional “fold” in a newspaper.

Attribution – understanding what effort, action, campaign or keyword caused the customer to purchase, for example, on a website.

BANT – Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline.

B2B – Business to Business

B2C – Business to Consumer

Bandwidth – usually described as a rate of data transfer from point A to point B

Banner advertising – rectangular graphical image displayed on a web server or page, usually a paid sponsorship for a specified period of time.

Big Data – data sets so large that they require a computer to analyze them. Often associated with algorithms.

Brand – a name, mark, or feature that distinguishes one purveyor’s goods or services from another.

Brand Awareness – unaided recall of your company brand to the consumer.

Branding – the process of distinguishing one’s product or service from that of others

Brand Image – the customer’s impression of a brand.

Brand Essence – the core features of a brand.

Brand Identity – the physical appearance of a brand, for example its logo. What the company wants the brand to represent as contrasted with brand image.

Brand Manager – the person responsible for planning the brand identity and analyzing how it is received.

Call-to-action – a link, often at the end of an advertisement or page, leading to a place for the consumer to purchase your product or service.

Caption – text accompanying an image.

Campaign – in marketing, a specified effort to achieve a goal such as a marketing effort to sell more product in a geographic market.

Churn – when you lose a customer, it is often referred to as churn or churning out. Churn usually has a percentage rate.

Collateral – a word to describe marketing brochures, data sheets, sell sheets, any specific print and promotional material.

Contact – a person at a company or business.

Conversion – an action a person takes on a web page, usually a purchase or signing up to a subscription or newsletter.

Cost Per Lead – the precise cost for acquiring a lead at a trade show or using a pay per click (PPC) system.

Cost Per Inquiry – the total cost of a promotion divided by the total number of leads generated by that promotion.

Commodity – any material that can be readily bought or sold.

CASL – Canadian Anti Spam Legislation. A Canadian law designed to stop or slow unwanted SPAM and emailing by Canadian companies.

CPC – Cost Per Click advertising. A method to compensate an advertiser for web users to click on specific web advertising such as Google Ads cost per click model.

CPM – Cost per thousand: this is a variable over one thousand units.

CRM – Customer Relationship Management. Software which records information about your sales pipeline, customers, interactions, and sales. SalesForce is a good example of a leading CRM program.

CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization is a number to denote the percentage of visitors to a website that take a desired action: purchase, become a follower, subscribe to a newsletter.

CTA – Call To Action. The desired action of a visitor from an ask on a website page. Example: subscribe, purchase, learn more, watch video.

CTR – Click Through Rate – The rate at which prospects click on an advertisement.

Customer Testimonials – Text, audio or video recommendations of a person, company or service business, used in print or on webpages.

Comp – short for design comprehensive, it is usually referred to as an idea on paper or artwork, but it is not yet final art.

CMYK – technical term for colors: C-Cyan, M-Magenta, Y-Yellow, K-Black

Demographic – characteristics of a given subset of a population.

DM – Direct Marketing, such as a letter or a piece of mail, usually addressed and sent to the prospect by post.

DNS – Domain Name System is a system used by the internet to name servers and computers.

Elevator Pitch – a short, usually 30 second explanation about what your company does. The term developed from the idea that, delivered in an elevator, it should be no longer than the elevator ride.

Focus Group – a group of people gathered to get feedback on an idea, product, or service, usually employed by marketers or brand owners to quality a business idea or product from a small subset of the population. Participants are usually compensated for this effort.

Four P’s – the part in a classic marketing plan which covers the topics of Price, Place, Promotion, and Political environment.

FOMO – The Fear of Missing Out. Exclusionary marketing; fear on the part of a person to miss out on something good or desirable, a discount, promotion, etc.

FTP – File Transfer Protocol

Generic Brand – a no frills brand, often referred to as a no-name brand.

Google – popular search engine owned by the Alphabet company.

Google Analytics – service provided by Google to track page views, including how the viewer arrived at the page in question. For example, if someone clicks a hyperlink on a website to get to your website, Google Analytics will tell you where that hyperlink was found.

Google Ads – formerly Google Adwords, ads that appear at the top of or beside the search results on a google search page.

H1 tag – the primary page heading on a webpage, often used for the title. Used by search engines to rank pages.

Header tag – specifies a section head on a webpage.

Hits – the response to a request or search on a website eg. for an image file.

Host – to store information on a server so that it can be retrieved by other computers.

Hyperlink – text that allows navigation between web pages by clicking on links.

HTML – Hypertext Markup Language is symbols and codes used to create and edit web pages and display information on web browsers.

HTML5 – the fifth revision of HTML, designed to facilitate use of multimedia on websites.

HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol is the application level computer language of how web browsers talk to web servers.

Inbound Marketing – marketing to people who are already interested in your product. Includes making your company easily found online by people looking for the product or service you provide.

Industrial Advertising – business-to-business advertising.

Impression – the number of times that a page or ad is viewed once by one visitor.

JPG – photographic file format for computer, featuring lossy algorithm and compression method. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. www.jpeg.org.

Keyword – the terms used by a user in a search and broadly describe the content of a webpage.

Landing Page – special web pages that are hidden from view, not part of website navigation and used in conjunction with online advertising to measure advertising effectiveness. Often optimized for conversion (purchase/email sign up) by the person arriving at the page.

Landing Page Optimization – making changes to a landing page in order to get a larger percentage of leads from visitors.

Lead – a potential sales prospect.

Lead Magnet – an offer on a website in exchange for something such as an email address, a white paper PDF or similar electronic document, with the objective to obtain a lead.

Line Card – a list of products or services that a company, usually a distributor, sells, carries or represents.

MUSH – Municipalities, Universities, Schools and Hospitals. This can represent a segment of target accounts or markets.

Marketing – the business of communicating, positioning and persuading to sell goods or services.

Marketing Automation – a method of using forms, landing pages, emails and software to automatically bring prospects into your sales funnel.

Marketing Mix – the variables a company can control when influencing a customer to purchase their product. Often associated with the “4 P’s” – Product, Price, Promotion and Political environment.

Market Segmentation – the division of a larger market into smaller sections, each with its own unique need. A strategy is then implemented for each section.

Marketing Research – research into the process by which a consumer decides which good or service to purchase.

Mission – a statement defining what a company stands for and why it exists.

Media – a means of communication, such as television, radio, or newspaper.

Make Over – a repeat of a marketing or advertising project or ad, usually because of an error, and is repeated at no charge to the customer.

Marketing Strategy – a combination of long and short-term goals implemented by a company with the purpose of allocating resources to the most productive means of increasing sales

Marketing Plan – similar to marketing strategy, but situated within the overall business plan of the company.

Media Strategy – strategy concerned with a medium or channel consumers will receive marketing and messaging.

Meta Tag – an element in a website’s code that gives a description of the content of the page. Used by search engines to categorize web pages.

Metrics – data that is generated from marketing activities, usually on the web.

MPEG – a video standard for playing video content on a computer; designed by Movie Picture Engineering Group, hence MPEG.

MQL – Marketing Qualified Lead; a prospect that is likely to become a customer based on metrics. This qualification is coming from the marketing department.

Objectives – goals about what needs to be accomplished by a company.

Organic web listing – also called SERPs, short for Search Engine Ranking Pages.

Pantone – a proprietary system of colors.

Page view – a single instance of a user viewing a web page.

PPC – pay per click is the system of paying for advertising by users intention on computer over web, action is the click and advertiser pays by the click

PNG – a picture file format used on websites, very handy attribute is a clear background

PDF – portable document format, a format from Adobe that makes documents easy to distribute and print.

Per inquiry – usually a quantitative measure, i.e. how much did that marketing campaign cost, per inquiry?

Paid Listings – a paid-for listing on a web site. Part of SEM or Search Engine Marketing. Usually sold on a measured or monthly basis.

Page Rank – a term used to describe Google’s rank of your page, ie the relative importance of your page on the web. Each page can have a page rank, but it is usually the home page which is ranked highest.

Podcasting – creating audio files on a topic, typically fifteen minutes to an hour long. Often podcasts are on the same broad theme, such as marketing. Radio snippets on the internet.

PR – Public Relations

Premium – higher price or higher quality brand

Product Differentiation – features which make your product (or service) stand out from your competition.

Prospect – a person who you know, who may be a good possibility to become a customer.

Programmatic advertising – purchasing ad space from any inventory available on a commercial platform.

Psychographic – the study of personalities, lifestyles, values, attitudes and interests, as opposed to mere demographic information.

Promotional mix – advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing

Qualitative Research – examination of the “why” and the “how” of human behavior, as opposed to the “when”, “where”, and “what”.

Quantitative Research – looking into the “when”, “where”, and “what”, as opposed to the “why” and “how” of human behavior.

Referrer – Sometimes spelled “referer”, and HTTP Referrer is what tells a website which page the visitor came from. For example, if you click a hyperlink, the referrer tells the page you end up on which page the hyperlink was on. Useful for marketers to tell where people are visiting their site from.

Reputation Management – influencing a business’ reputation, both in terms of public relations and online.

ROI – Return On Investment

RFI – Requests For Information

RFP – Request For Proposal

RFQ – Request For Quotation

Segmentation – Sales/marketing strategy of grouping consumers together that have similar needs and that will respond in a similar fashion to a marketing strategy.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization which is organic (non-paid) rankings.

SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages. Pages of organic results from a search query.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing. Ranking or advertising that is paid to others, such as a web site owner for promotion of an offer or another site.

SQL – Sales Qualified Lead. Prospect that has shown signs for qualification by the sales group  for follow up.

Social Selling – The use of social media by salespeople to generate clients.

SPAM – Unwanted or unrequested email or electronic contact.

SWOT – Analysis including the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities or Threats in a marketing strategy, product, or idea.

Target Audience – A particular group at which a marketing campaign is aimed.

Tip In – Where an additional piece of paper, a brochure for example, is tipped into the magazine during final printing or assembly of a magazine.

TIFF – Tagged Image Format File. Created by Aldus and Microsoft, an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers.

Traffic – The data sent and received between a user and a website. Includes such things as visits, unique visits, files downloaded and page views.

Trade Show – An event of buyers and sellers focussed on a specific market, for a short, defined period of time.

USP – Unique Selling Proposition is the real or perceived benefit of marketing to the consumer.

URL – Uniform Resource Location; the URL for Google is www.google.com

Vanity Metrics – Website metrics such as page views, which seem to demonstrate high traffic or increased marketing results, but really do not show hard and fast results.

Viral Marketing – A marketing campaign that quickly spreads through social media channels such as Facebook and Reddit, generating a large number of views, often because they are humourous or emotionally-charged.

Vision Statement – A short inspirational statement about the future of a company, meant as a guiding philosophy for how the company wishes to appear and as a way of informing the company’s goals.

Visitor – A person who views a web page. While “visitor” might include the same person viewing a web page many times, “unique visitors” are the number of separate people who view a page.

Vector Artwork – Typically a logo or drawing created digitally. Can be enlarged to a very large size without loss of resolution.

Word of Mouth – A method of marketing using peer and customer recommendations by referral, usually spoken, hence “word of mouth”.

WWW – World Wide Web