Content Marketing Dictionary: 106 Terms You Need to Know
General Marketing Definitions Bottom of the Funnel
The final stages in the purchase decision process where prospects have identified their problem and selected the solution they want to use.
Deliverables
The expected goods or services a vendor will provide after a project is completed.
Demand Generation
The focus of targeted marketing programs to Brand Loyalty drive awareness of a company’s products or The result of consumer trust and affinity toward services. a brand, characterized by repeat purchases.
Brand Standards
Guidelines, rules, and details that generally refer to logos, organizational color wheels, or other aspects a brand wants to keep consistent. Larger companies usually inform new vendors of brand standards to ensure their branding efforts remain consistent.
Email Marketing
The process of mass emailing a message designed for a group of people or individuals to encourage them to take a profitable action.
Inbound Marketing
A form of marketing focused on creating materials and content that naturally draw a targeted audience back to a company’s Case Study website. Specific examples of inbound In-depth analysis of a past client that addresses marketing include SEO, SEM, or creating a the original goals, process, and services company blog. suggested, as well as the results achieved through the services. Lead Generation
Copy
Written content most often created for a landing page, an advertisement, or marketing purposes.
Delight
The main goal of marketing campaigns; to drive specific audience members’ interest in a company’s offering and get them in the sales funnel.
Lead Nurturing
The process of educating qualified sales leads A term often used in marketing or in the through relevant educational content that process of delivering a product or service. It helps build brand and product preferences describes the idea of going above and beyond before the purchase decision is made. expectations to deliver a client experience that creates brand advocates and loyalty.
Marketing Assets
Marketing content that a company already has that can be leveraged in its marketing initiatives to generate interest.
Marketing Campaign
A group of marketing initiatives focused on accomplishing one specific goal. Oftentimes, marketing campaigns focus on delivering a consistent message with multiple touchpoints to increase long-term brand recognition, topof-mind awareness, and desired behaviors.
Marketing Funnel
The process companies go through to attract visitors, convert them into leads, and nurture them before they finally reach the buying moment.
Marketing/Buyer Personas
A detailed representation of your ideal customer based on market research and data about your existing customers. This often includes demographic information, psychographic information, motivations, challenges, goals, and details on how they make buying decisions for your company’s product or services.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
A set of quantifiable measures that a company or vendor uses to gauge or compare performance in terms of meeting its strategic and operational goals.
Middle of the Funnel
The stage in the marketing funnel where prospects have officially identified a problem and a need to solve it.
Outbound Marketing
A form of marketing focused on spending time and money to push a message out in front of an intended audience. Specific examples of outbound marketing include paying for TV ads, attending conferences, and cold calling.
Public Relations (PR)
An arm of a marketing department responsible for positioning the company in a desirable light through messages from the company or an individual, which are delivered by thirdparty sources.
Return on Investment (ROI)
A common profitability ratio that measures the benefit you gain for the resources you put into a project or investment. This is often represented in terms of a number, such as multiplied quantities of the original investment or a percentage increase of the original investment.
Sales Funnel
The science of how individuals or companies discover a problem or need, identify potential solutions/vendors, conduct research, and make a final decision on selecting and buying a product that addresses that specific need.
Target Audience
A specific group of people that a marketing campaign is created for and targeted toward, which typically involves identifying buyer personas to better represent and visualize this group.
Top of the Funnel
The very beginning of the marketing funnel where prospects have not yet identified, or are just beginning to identify, a problem and learn about potential solutions.
Vendor
A company that other companies purchase products or services from.
Content Marketing Definitions Backlink
Content Engagement
Blog
Content Management System (CMS)
An incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website. An owned media asset that a company or an individual uses to distribute company updates, industry news, opinions, and educational content.
Brand Journalism
The comments, shares, and other actions that content incites from readers.
The software that a website or blog is built on to manage its content. The most common free services include WordPress, Squarespace, Expression Engine, and Joomla!
Brand journalism is a niche within content marketing in which a company creates journalistic and news-driven content to be used as a resource for its audience. This method isn’t used to advertise, but to tell a brand’s story and be a resource for unbiased, industry-related news.
Content Map
Buyer Journey
Content Marketing
The process buyers go through as they research product options and educate themselves before making a final purchase decision.
Columnist
A regular contributor at a publication.
Content Curation
The process of collecting and organizing information relevant to a specific topic in a meaningful way.
A visual diagram that outlines a specific piece of content’s role in each stage of the buyer journey and details how content should be organized and presented to the right person at the right time. Companies often create a content map for each buyer persona. The process of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience, with the objective of driving a profitable customer action.
Content Marketing Funnel
The different stages — from education to an ultimate sale — that specific content strategies take leads through.
Content Metrics
e-Books
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Editorial Calendar
The system of measurement that companies and individuals use to determine their content’s success. Common content metrics include: traffic, social shares, engagement, conversions, number of leads generated, revenue from blog visitors, time on site, page views, etc.
A system that manages a company’s interactions with current and potential customers. This typically involves using technology to organize, automate, and integrate sales calls, emails, etc.
Content Themes
The specific topic areas that a content strategy should address based on a company’s or an individual’s expertise, the target audience’s needs, and the particular industry.
Content Syndication
Pushing your blog, site, or video content out to third-party sites in the form of a full article, link, or something else to maximize your content’s reach.
Contributor
Someone who authors and publishes a piece of content or an article on an external publication or media outlet.
Earned Media
Free publicity gained through promotional efforts other than advertising. When a company pulls a PR stunt that attracts a newspaper or an online media outlet to write an article about it, the articles, stories, and press releases written about that event are earned media. The content that we help clients create and publish is also earned media.
This often refers to a gated piece of content, centered on one theme, that is typically 20 pages or more and broken up into chapters. The only design elements these usually include are supporting graphs to illustrate statistics and add depth and an analytic perspective to the topic. The schedule an organization uses to plan content creation and publication each month.
Gated Content
Content that can’t be accessed unless website visitors exchange their contact information. Companies often use these to identify leads and then market to and engage them in other ways.
Ghostwriter
Someone who strategizes, researches, and writes an article or a book entirely independently, but the text is published under another person’s byline.
Guest Post
An article or a blog post that a person contributes to an external media outlet. Influence & Co. helps individuals guest post on publications.
Influence
The credibility and authority someone exudes in a certain subject area that impacts the way another person thinks or behaves.
Influencer
An individual whose expertise sways others’ behaviors or thought processes within a particular industry.
Infographics
Visual images, such as charts or diagrams, that are used to present information or data.
Knowledge Bank
A wiki that houses and organizes an entire company’s knowledge over time to facilitate consistency and simple extraction of past content, ideas, and information to save time when developing new content.
Native Advertising
A form of paid online marketing in which the ad form is naturally embedded in the platform a user is engaging with and seamlessly aligns with the user experience on that site. Examples of native advertising are paid-for advertorials or pieces of content on a publication, “The LEGO Movie,” and product placement (such as CocaCola cups on “American Idol”).
Organic Distribution
Organic distribution refers to the way content is naturally circulated among an audience without any sort of paid distribution. Examples include appearing in search engine results, garnering social media shares, and earning referrals from other sites or articles.
Owned Media
Marketing assets a company has control over. Examples include websites, blogs, or email campaigns.
PageRank
A link analysis algorithm that Google uses to help determine the relative importance of a site to others. While no one but Google knows the exact algorithm used to determine PageRank, some large contributing factors include domain age, total number of backlinks from other sites, unique content, accurate keywords, and consistency of content.
Publication
A media outlet that produces and publishes content for public consumption.
Repurposing Content
Breaking down content so it can be combined and reused in other formats.
Thought Leadership
The status of a go-to resource for information on history, news, trends, and the future of your industry. Thought leadership helps build your influence with potential customers, partners, investors, reporters, peers, and others.
Trade or Niche Publication
A publication specifically focused on one industry or area. Content Marketing Institute and HR.com are two examples of trade publications; they are focused on content marketing and human resources, respectively.
Top-Tier Publications
Paying for content circulation efforts. Examples include paying for promoted content on social networks, using Outbrain, or paying a newsletter to include your article in it.
Publications most people look to and perceive as the leaders in their specific industry. These publications carry a large amount of prestige for the companies or individuals who publish on their sites. Examples of top-tier publications include Forbes, Inc., and ClickZ.
Paid Media
Unique Visitors per Month (UVM)
Paid Distribution
Any media outlet a company specifically pays to The number of new people who visit a website be placed in. Almost all traditional advertising in one month. falls under paid media. Examples include online banner ads, a TV commercial, or a sponsorship spot.
Viral Content
Content that is circulated rapidly and widely on the Internet, often through excessive shares. Viral content is most valuable when it spreads within a targeted audience and educates on a specific topic.
Webinars
An online seminar hosted around a particular topic, which is intended to educate and provide valuable information to a specific target audience. Speakers commonly accompany these with a PowerPoint presentation to help walk viewers through a particular topic. Typically, a webinar requires registration similar to a gated piece of content so the host knows who attends.
Website Domain
The entire address for a web page, such as http://www.influenceandco.com/.
Website Subdomain
The address for one specific section of a larger website, such as http://blog.influenceandco. com/.
Website Traffic
The number of visits a website gets, which can then be segmented for further analysis.
Whitepaper
Content, which is usually gated, that educates an audience on a particular subject around a company’s expertise. Typically, this content involves more in-depth research and analysis than an article or a blog post or gives specific how-to advice on a topic. Whitepapers often have design elements integrated into them, along with written content, to make them easily digestible.
Digital Marketing Definitions A/B Testing
The process of testing two variations of a specific element, while holding everything else constant, to determine which version creates a better long-term result. A/B testing is heavily emphasized in conversion optimization.
Acquisition
The process of driving traffic to a website.
Benchmarking
Establishing a point used to evaluate something against. If the industry average for click-through rates is 25 percent, and we’re at 30 percent, we know we’re above the benchmark. Benchmarking is important for providing context for current metrics and evaluating success or failure for certain tests and initiatives.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of visitors who navigate away from a site after viewing only one page.
Call to Action (CTA)
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The percentage of people who view a particular link and ultimately click on it. For example, if John receives 1,000 views for an article he publishes on LinkedIn that includes one link to the home page, and we get 30 visitors from that article, we know we have a total CTR of 3 percent.
Conversion Optimization/Website Optimization
The process of maximizing the percentage of visitors who perform a desired action or become customers. This typically refers to adjusting the entire website, landing page, or blog and can also refer to using content and its structure to increase the likelihood of a particular action.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of users who take a desired action. For example, one of our goals for the Influence & Co. website is to have an individual download a piece of content he or she finds valuable. If 15 out of 100 visitors download something, we have a conversion rate of 15 percent.
An instruction located on a web page or an article that’s designed to provoke a specific reader action. Buttons and banner ads are common CTAs; however, CTAs can also be Cost per Acquisition included in the content itself. By instructing The amount of advertising dollars it takes to users to share an article or leave a comment, get a user to perform a desired action. you’re asking them to take a specific action that ideally aligns with your long-term goal.
Cost per Lead (CPL)
A way to calculate the cost of each lead based on the total cost of a campaign, divided by the number of leads generated from that campaign. If an advertiser spends $5,000 and generates 100 leads, the CPL is $50.
Cost per Mille (CPM)
The price it takes to get 1000 people to see your online ad.
Keywords
A specific word or phrase that a user types into a search engine to find the information he or she is looking for.
Landing Page
The section of a website a specific visitor lands on, which is generally the website’s home page. Landing pages are critical to conversion optimization because they present the first opportunity for a visitor to take a desired action and lead to a conversion. Oftentimes, a landing page is heavily tested and optimized because it serves as the page where a visitor could potentially turn into a lead.
Lead
A potential client or customer for a company. An example of a lead for Influence & Co. is someone who downloaded our whitepaper.
Lead Scoring
A function of marketing automation that allows marketers to automatically rate the quality of leads based on certain actions or information they see as positive or negative indicators.
Marketing Automation
Software platforms and technologies designed for marketers to more effectively manage online marketing and automate repetitive tasks.
Marketing Qualified Leads
A lead who is more likely to become a customer compared to other leads based on his or her activity before converting. MQLs are often determined through marketing automation.
Pay-per-Click (PPC) or Cost-perClick Advertising (CPC)
Internet advertising in which marketers pay a publisher or search engine each time a user clicks an ad.
Responsive Design
The practice of creating a website to optimize the viewing experience across a wide range of devices. Responsive design has and will continue to become increasingly important with the rise of mobile phones, tablets, and other devices people use to access the Internet. Although it usually refers to the website itself, images, CTAs, forms, comments, and social sharing are all elements within the website that must be optimized for mobile.
Retention
Getting readers or viewers to do a desired action repeatedly.
Sales Qualified Leads
A potential customer who is viewed as a business opportunity by a salesperson, with a specific dollar value and timeframe established after interacting with that person.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
A form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages through optimization and advertising.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The practice of influencing a website’s visibility in a search engine’s “organic” or unpaid search results through generating backlinks, incorporating relevant keywords, publishing content, and using other techniques.
Search Engine Result Page (SERP)
A page that displays the results a search engine returns in response to a keyword query.
Week Over Week, Month Over Month, Year Over Year
Timeframes used for comparing metrics to benchmark performance on an ongoing basis. Typically, the goal is to see a percentage gain as you evaluate increments of time against each other to reveal trends in growth, decline, or stagnation.
Companies/Products You Should Know About Contently
Company that connects brands with freelance writers and journalists to create compelling brand content and engage their audiences.
Google Analytics
Statistical tool that helps companies track how visitors flow through a site, how many people convert, and how the website performs overall. It’s essentially designed to tell you what is happening on your site and is installed on nearly every website as the default free analytics option for companies.
HubSpot
Inbound marketing software that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and make sales. It provides tools for marketing automation, social media management, analytics, and website creation, design, and management.
Kapost
Content marketing software designed to help companies manage content ideation, production, distribution, analytics, and campaigns.
KISSmetrics
Web analytics solution that provides an indepth look at specific user behaviors on your website to inform business decisions.
Marketo
Marketing automation provider that facilitates
email, social, analytics, lead management, and more.
Moz
SaaS tool that provides inbound marketing and marketing analytics software subscriptions to help marketers succeed at SEO, social media, and content marketing.
NewsCred
Content marketing software that helps you plan, source, discover, publish, share, and measure all of your content.
Pardot
Leading B2B marketing automation software provider that helps companies shorten the sales cycle, increase website leads, increase email subscribers, and more.
Percolate
Platform that helps brands scale and sustain their digital content strategies.
Scripted
Content writing marketplace that matches businesses with freelance writers to create content for blog posts, articles, whitepapers, and more.
WordPress
World’s most popular CMS. More than 25 percent of active websites are built on this free platform.
Are all of these terms making your head spin? I would love to learn about your business objectives and determine exactly how Influence & Co. can help you leverage content marketing and thought leadership for you and your company. We’d love to help out! - Cherish Grimm, Assistant Vice President, Influence & Co.
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