Where every click is a journey and every impression counts.
Limiting how many times the same person sees your ad, based on the radical notion that showing someone the same message 47 times in one day might be counterproductive. It's the marketing equivalent of knowing when to stop talking.
A performance-based model where third parties earn commissions for driving sales, creating an army of motivated salespeople who work for free until they succeed. It's outsourcing your sales force to anyone with a website and no shame.
Google's report card for your ads, rating relevance, landing page quality, and expected click-through rate to determine how much you pay and where you appear. It's the algorithm's way of rewarding good behavior and punishing lazy advertising.
Social media personalities with 1,000-100,000 followers who command higher engagement rates than celebrities and charge less than your quarterly coffee budget. They're the proof that smaller, engaged audiences beat massive, apathetic ones.
The strategic art of defining how a product, brand, or service occupies space in the consumer's mind relative to competitors—essentially, it's competitive mind-gaming. In marketing, it's about carving out your unique spot in an overcrowded marketplace by convincing people your mediocre product is somehow different. Good positioning makes people willing to pay $8 for coffee that costs 30 cents to make.
When influencers grant brands permission to run ads from the influencer's social media account, combining organic authenticity with paid promotion's targeting and scale. It's puppet mastery with consent.
The function responsible for marketing technology, analytics, data management, and process optimization. Often abbreviated MarOps, it's the team that actually makes marketing work while creative people take credit.
A delightfully meaningless marketing buzzword invented by the snowmobile industry to make their products sound cutting-edge and innovative. It's what happens when corporate types need to describe how well a snowmobile snowmobiles but can't just say "it works good." The vehicular equivalent of saying a phone has great "phonability."
Automated auction-based ad buying where impressions are sold individually in milliseconds as pages load. High-frequency trading energy applied to banner ads, because markets apparently need to operate at inhuman speeds everywhere.
Full-screen advertisements appearing between content transitions, named for occupying interstitial space while testing user patience. The pop-up ad's more aggressive cousin that actually demands attention before allowing progression.
The practice of encouraging customers to purchase a more expensive or upgraded version of what they're already buying. It's the art of making people feel inadequate about their original choice.
A methodology for ranking prospects based on their perceived value and likelihood to convert, assigning points for behaviors and demographics. It's hot-or-not for potential customers, but with spreadsheets.
The corporate equivalent of getting a makeover and pretending you're a completely different person—changing a company's name, logo, or image to distance from past failures or chase new markets. It's what happens when focus groups decide your perfectly good brand needs $2 million worth of "refreshing." Sometimes transformative, often just expensive window dressing on the same old product.
The percentage of visitors who complete your desired action, whether that's buying, signing up, or downloading, serving as the ultimate verdict on your marketing effectiveness. It's the number that determines whether you're persuasive or just loud.
The final stage where prospects are ready to convert, having survived the grueling journey through awareness and consideration. Where marketing hands the baton to sales and hopes they don't fumble.
A concentrated marketing blitz over a short period, flooding channels with messaging like a promotional tsunami. The opposite of always-on, favored by those with seasonal products or limited budgets.
Republishing your content on third-party platforms to reach wider audiences, like licensing reruns of your hit show to other networks. Efficiency gains meet brand dilution concerns.
An aggressive marketing strategy targeting your competitor's customers, like a medieval siege but with Facebook ads instead of catapults. It's poaching dressed up in professional terminology.
When your email gets temporarily rejected—maybe their inbox is full, their server is having a bad day, or Mercury is in retrograde. Unlike hard bounces, there's still hope for future delivery.
In content marketing and analytics, the act of retelling events, data, or customer experiences in a way that supports your narrative or campaign thesis. Done well, it's storytelling; done poorly, it's obviously cherry-picked propaganda that savvy audiences immediately distrust.
An untapped market space with little to no competition, as opposed to 'red ocean' markets soaked in competitor blood. The mythical promised land every marketer claims they've discovered.
A junior marketer whose primary job is creating endless PowerPoint presentations for meetings that may never happen. The modern equivalent of a Victorian-era scribe.
In email marketing, when your carefully crafted message gets rejected and returns to sender like an unwanted boomerang—the digital equivalent of your mail being marked "return to sender." Bounces come in hard (permanent failures like invalid addresses) and soft (temporary issues like full inboxes) varieties. High bounce rates are the email marketer's nightmare and ISPs' favorite excuse to label you as spam.
Software that automates repetitive marketing tasks like email campaigns, social posting, and lead nurturing, freeing marketers to focus on strategy—or more realistically, to set up even more automated campaigns. The robot uprising, but for email.