Below you can find an explanation to common marketing terms, mainly used within marketing plans and strategy. There are a lot of terms just to confuse you and will not help you to understand what to do, when and how. So we will try to make things simple and easy to digest.

While writing a marketing strategy is vital, some ‘help’ websites will just muddle everything up and you end up with several drafts and none of use. Marketing jargon buster is a first of the series on Marketing 101 series to help you understand the basics.

• Affiliates– affiliates marketing is performance-based marketing when all the risks of media advertising are moved from the brand owner to the affiliate. The company only pays the affiliate when a customer is acquired, either on CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) or revenue share basis or a mix of the both. CPA is traditionally flat, one-off fee, paid when a customer purchases a product or service. Revenue share is when a brand is paying a percentage of the revenue generated by the customer during the agreed period (typically 1 year).
• Brand concept– an extended brand identity analysis, concentrating on brand identity traps: brand image, brand position, external perspective and product-attribute.
• Brand identity– a unique set of brand associations that are created and maintained. These associations represent what the brand stands for and imply a promise to customers from the organisation. There are four perspectives of brand identity – brand as a product, brand as an organisation, brand as a person and brand as a symbol
• Brand values– these are the main attributes the brand wants to communicate to the customer to not only gain confidence in the product and services but also feel that someone cares for them. For example to make a ‘friend’ with the customer will imply that the brand delivers key attributes that customer wants: honesty, caring, dependability and respect.
• CRM– is Customer Relationship Management, but also sometimes called Customer Retention Management. Both imply management of the relationship with customers, contact strategy, interactions and sometimes conversion strategy. Often using software to organise and automate communication. Also used to synchronise marketing, sales, customer service and technical support.
• Customer insight– this is where a company would define what a customer likes, feel, what is their motivations to buy and how it interacts with the brand.
• Display marketing– all online banners and rich media displayed on different websites across the internet. It is a digital equivalent of a newspaper advertisement.
• Email marketing– it is an email with a marketing message included. In practice, every email sent by a company can be considered an email marketing message. An email could be sent to existing customers or could be sent to an acquired database. This database would be made off people that agreed to receive marketing messages from third party companies.
• KPI –Key Performance Indicators are metrics that the company consider is vital for success. These could be a number of new customers, visits to the website, conversion rate, sales, retention etc.
• Marketing mix– marketing mix consists of 4 P’s – Product, Price, Place and Promotion, and provide the strategy and tactics to promote the product.
• Objectives– a particular goal that a company wants to achieve in a specified time frame with available resources. Objectives should be SMART (see SMART)
• PPC– Pay Per Click – a form of display marketing when a company pays a website, which displays their banners (links or rich media), for each click on that banner.
• RACE– Reach, Act, Convert, Engage, is a strategy modelling tool to help plan, manage and optimise multichannel marketing. Could be used in conjunction with SOSTAC to create a truly comprehensive marketing planning framework
• Sales promotion– helps your company to acquire customers by enticing them to purchase your products. It could be a discount, first purchase offer, free delivery, Buy One Get One Free etc.
• SEO– Search Engine Optimisation is everything that makes up to make your website show highest on unpaid result page on the search engine for a specific search term.
• SMART objectives– specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-bound.
• Social media marketing– characterise using social media, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, to improve your brand awareness and acquire more customers.
• SOSTAC– Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, Control, is a strategy modelling tool, developed by PR Smith to help companies to write a marketing plan.
• SWOT– Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats – is an analysis tool to help to evaluate product, business, project or a person
• Unique selling point– this is what differentiate you from your competition. Could be a price or a feature.
• User persona– a company would create a fictional user persona to represent the company’s potential customers.
• Value proposition– is a statement of a functional (utility – e.g. fast, convenient, quality), emotional (gives customer positive feeling, e.g. excited, energetic, important, strong) and self-expressive (communicates one’s image, e.g. sophisticated, adventurous, powerful, frugal, successful) attributes delivered by the brand that provides value to the customer. This should drive purchase decisions by creating a brand-customer relationship.