Common Marketing Terms You Should Know

Better questions create better lives.

You cannot ask a good question about something you do not have words for. I have sat across the table from a lot of business owners who nodded along while someone sold them a “marketing strategy” or a “funnel,” and then admitted afterwards that they had no idea what they had just agreed to. They were not stupid. They were simply working without a vocabulary, and the person on the other side of the table knew it.

So before we talk about how to get found and how to get leads, let me hand you the words. None of these are complicated. Every one of them has been dressed up to sound complicated by people who benefit from you feeling like an outsider. Read the list once, and the next time a salesperson uses one of these terms, you will be the one asking the questions.

The words about who you are

• Branding, internal: what your own people believe the business is and how they behave because of it. How the phone gets answered, how the truck is kept, how a complaint is handled. Customers feel this long before they can name it.
• Branding, external: what the outside world sees and remembers. The logo, the colors, the name, the look of the van, the tone of your posts. It only works when it matches the internal version; when it does not, people call it fake, and they are right.
• Marketing strategy: the big picture decision about who you are going after, what you are going to say to them, and where you are going to say it. A strategy can fit on one page. If someone hands you forty pages, most of it is filler.
• Marketing campaign: one specific, time-boxed effort inside that strategy. A spring tune-up push, a grand opening, a referral drive. It has a start, an end, a message and a result you can look at afterwards.

The words about who you are talking to

• Demographic profile: the measurable facts about a group of people. Age range, household income, homeowner or renter, zip code, family size. Useful, but it only tells you what people are, never why they buy.
• Target audience: the specific group you have decided to talk to with a given campaign. A plumber’s target audience for a water heater campaign is different from their audience for a bathroom remodel campaign, even though both are “homeowners.”
• Marketing avatar: one imaginary person who stands in for your whole target audience. A name, a situation, a worry, a way of searching. When you write to one person, your message gets sharper. When you write to “everyone,” it gets mush.
• Geo targeting: showing your marketing only to people in the places you actually serve. A landscaper twenty miles away does not want your ad, and you do not want to pay for them to see it.

The words about how you reach them

• Online marketing: anything that reaches people through a screen and a connection. Search, social, email, your website, your Google listing, paid ads on any of them. Three terms live inside that list. SEO, search engine optimization, is the work of showing up in Google’s regular results when someone searches for what you do. Pay per click means you pay each time someone clicks your ad. Your Google Business Profile is the free listing with your hours, reviews and map pin. And a lead source is simply where a lead came from, which is how you find out which of all this is worth paying for.
• Traditional marketing: everything that came before the screen and still works. Signs, flyers, direct mail, radio, print, networking, a wrapped truck. I know contractors who get more work from their truck than their website. Neither side is “old” or “new”; they are simply different doors.
• Marketing automation: a set of messages that go out on their own, in order, based on what a person does. Someone fills out a form, gets a thank you, gets a reminder two days later, gets a follow-up a week after that. You built it once; it runs while you are on a roof.
• CRM software: Customer Relationship Management. A system that remembers every lead and customer, what they asked for, what you promised, and when to follow up. A shoebox of business cards is a CRM too, just a very bad one.
• Data mining: going back through what you already know about your customers to find patterns. Which zip codes buy the most, which service leads to a second service, which month people start calling. Most owners have never gone back through their own job list. Do it once and see which zip codes and which services repeat.
• Sales funnel: the path a stranger takes to become a customer. Wide at the top, where many people notice you; narrow at the bottom, where a few pay you. Every step where people fall out is a step you can fix.

Notice how the terms belong together. You use a demographic profile to build an avatar, aim at that avatar with a strategy, run it as a campaign through online and traditional tools, track every lead in a CRM, follow up with automation, and watch the whole thing move through a funnel. It is one machine. The words just name the parts.

Pick the three terms on this page you were least sure about before you read it and write each one in your own words, in one sentence, as if you were explaining it to a new hire. If your sentence is longer than the definition above, shorten it until it sounds like you.

That is under an hour and costs nothing. The payoff comes the next time someone quotes you for “marketing services” and you can ask exactly which of these parts they are going to build.