Some of the Most Common Terms in Marketing Defined

Like any field, success in event management is all about how effectively you can market yourself. Unfortunately, that’s sometimes easier said than done. See, the issue is that there’s no shortage of buzzwords floating around – and that makes it more than a little difficult to get started.

Let’s see if we can’t help you sort through some of the jargon. Here’s a glossary of some of the most common marketing terms you’ll encounter while spreading the word about your event.

A/B Testing: A type of marketing field test where one compares two versions of a website, email, product, etc and measures which one performs better.  These two versions are functionally identical, save for a single variation. The goal is to determine how said variation influences visitor behavior.

AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. This acronym is used to represent the purchase funnel, which most marketing experts agree is now out of date – the sales process is much more complex and nuanced than this four-step model would have one believe.

AdSense: A service provided by Google to help webmasters manage, monitor, and control how advertising is targeted on their site. This includes choosing how revenue is generated (generally, advertisers either pay by the click or by the view).

B2B/B2C: Business to Business and Business to Consumer. These two acronyms essentially refer to marketing focused on generating commerce between business and marketing focused on the consumer, respectively.

Buying Process: An evolved version of AIDA, the buying process at its least distilled can be split into three stages: Awareness, where people are aware of a product or service, Evaluation, where they determine whether or not it will fit their needs, and Purchase, where they decide that it will. The process is much more complex than this, of course. There are a number of sub-stages based on one’s business model, but this definition will suffice for now.

Bounce Rate: An analytics term used to refer to the percentage of visitors who leave a site after viewing only a single page. This terminology can also be applied to email marketing campaigns, to refer to the number of emails that cannot be delivered.

Buzz: Literally means “word of mouth;” what people are saying about a product or brand.

Call To Action/CTA: Arguably the most important component of any marketing message, the Call to Action is essentially the final ‘pitch’ for your product or brand; the component of your marketing that convinces the audience to take a particular course of action.

CAC: Another metric, Customer Acquisition Cost measures the cost of advertising versus the number of new customers that advertising generated.

Churn Rate: Churn rate is essentially just a fancy way of saying ‘customer retention rate.’ This metric is particularly important if your business relies on repeat customers, but less so in the field of event management, where you aren’t always targeting the same people. 

Clickthrough: The average number of clicks per hundred impressions (basically, views).

Conversion Rate: The percentage of users/visitors who complete a desired action on a website (ie. signing up for an event).

CPM: The cost of an advertising campaign per thousand audience members. The formula is as follows: 1000 x cost / total audience.

CRM: A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management platform, allows companies keep track of their customer-facing activities. Most CRM platforms can also do things like record communications, monitor social media, and schedule appointments.

Duplicated Audience: The number of users in a particular advertising campaign reached through more than one medium.

Exposure: The number of customers who have seen a particular ad or piece of media.

Inbound Marketing: Refers to a marketing model that’s reliant on the initiative of its clients or customers – it’s marketing that’s meant to passively gain the attention of its audience, drawing users in without requiring that the marketers actively go out and promote.

Lead: A prospective customer.

Lifetime Value: A metric used to describe the value of a customer’s total relationship with a brand in terms of profitability. It measures the current profit gained by the relationship, then predicts the future gains that relationship might provide.

MRR: This metric describes the revenue generated by a subscription-based business each month. This includes new accounts (net new), upsells (net positive), downsells (net negative) and cancellations (net loss).

Pain Point: The most important thing for a marketer to identify about a customer – the customer’s core or central need, essentially.

Pipeline: The process through which sales representatives convert prospects into customers. What distinguishes a sales pipeline from a sales funnel is that the former is more concerned with the numbers going through it, while the latter is all about the sales process.

PPC: An advertising model which bases revenue entirely on clickthrough rate.

Push/Pull: Push promotion relies on a middleman to ‘push’ products to a customer, while pull promotion speaks to the customer directly.

Relationship Marketing: A key component of social media marketing, relationship marketing focuses on establishing a lasting connection with a customer rather than trying to directly sell products to them – something that will last beyond their initial purchase.

Rich Media: Audiovisual content such as YouTube videos, interactive applets, and animated images.

ROI: Return on Investment. The total effectiveness of a marketing campaign, measured by comparing profits and losses against the initial investment.

ROS: An advertising model which allows an ad to appear on any page on a site.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization. The process by which webmasters craft keywords, content, and user experience on their site to better appeal to Google’s search engine. The end goal is for a site to appear higher in Google’s rankings and bring in more traffic as a result.

Segmentation: Dividing a target market based on demographic or behavioral characteristics.

Value Proposition: A secondary benefit offered by a brand to make the main product more attractive.

USP: Unique Selling Point. The prime factor which differentiates you from your competitors – what makes your business unique?

Any terms you’d like to see included in the glossary? Give a shout in the comments below!