Necessary marketing vocabulary for SMEs
Developing your marketing strategy requires familiarity with specific terminology as well as an understanding of certain concepts, tools, and metrics. With this marketing glossary designed for SME executives, we’ll help you better understand this terminology.
We also list the acronyms and abbreviations most commonly used in the course of our work. This glossary will be expanded over time.
Direct access to the glossaries, listed alphabetically
- Marketing Glossary from A to B
- Marketing Glossary from C to D
- Marketing Glossary from E to N
- Marketing Glossary from O to R
- Marketing Glossary from S to Z
Marketing Glossary from A to B
Ad blocker: A software tool that blocks online ads while browsing the Internet, providing users with an experience free of intrusive ads. It therefore affects the results of your online advertising campaigns.
Algorithm: The set of rules established by each social media platform, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. Understanding these rules and using them to your advantage helps increase the visibility of your posts.
Advertiser: The company that pays for the launch of an advertising campaign. This term is generally used to refer to the client of a communications, advertising, or marketing agency.
Audience: This is the number of people reached by a message as a result of a communication campaign. This may include television viewers, readers, listeners, or website visitors.
A/B testing: Widely used in online marketing campaigns, A/B testing involves testing two variations of a project on a sample group of people. The results help identify the option with the highest conversion rate so that the most effective approach can be rolled out on a large scale.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM):Account-Based Marketing is a B2B strategy in which marketing efforts are tailored and focused on a limited number of key accounts (corporate clients or strategic prospects), with strong alignment between marketing and sales.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) : the practice of optimizing content so that it is understood and used directly as an answer by search engines and AI assistants (Google, ChatGPT, Bing, Copilot, in particular in the form of optimized extracts or conversational answers, rather than simply positioned in a list of results.
Tag: In SEO, a tag is HTML code that structures the content of a web page to indicate to search engines the page’s topic and context. It contributes to the page’s ranking in search results. It is essential to optimize tags by including relevant keywords.
Benchmark:A comparative analysis method used to evaluate the performance of a company, product, or service by comparing it to market benchmarks. This approach helps identify best practices and areas for improvement by drawing inspiration from industry leaders.
Brainstorming:A group technique for generating ideas that aims to produce as many proposals as possible on a given topic, without passing judgment. The goal is to encourage creativity by giving free rein to the imagination and the association of ideas.
Branding: A branding strategy encompasses actions aimed at creating a consistent and memorable image for a company, including the creation of distinctive visual elements such as the logo, colors, and typography, as well as the establishment of a unique voice and personality to build trust, stand out from the competition, and forge a lasting connection with customers.
Buyer Persona (or persona): A marketing technique that involves creating a typical profile of a company's customers in order to carry out marketing activities tailored to their needs and interests.
Marketing Glossary from C to D
Communication channel: The medium through which a company sends a message to its audience. There are several communication channels, which fall into the categories of media and non-media.
Brand Guidelines: A document that formalizes all the graphic design rules governing a company’s internal and external communications, including elements such as the logo, typography, colors, etc.
CMS: A tool that allows you to create, manage and update a website, such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.
Cold emailing: This marketing technique involves sending promotional emails to people who have not yet had any prior contact with your company. It is a form of direct email prospecting.
Social Selling: The use of social media platforms to promote and sell products or services directly through these channels. This includes features such as integrated stores, shopping links in posts, and recommendations. Social selling aims to leverage the engagement and reach of social media to drive sales while strengthening customer relationships.
Omnichannel communication: Using various offline and online communication channels in a coordinated and seamless manner to create an optimal customer experience.
Multichannel communication: Using multiple communication channels independently to communicate with one's audience.
Content marketing: It involves creating and distributing relevant, high-quality content to engage with prospects and customers—both digitally (website, social media) and through other channels (brochures, print media). It helps increase visibility and demonstrate expertise in one’s industry. It generally follows an editorial calendar.
Cookies: These are small files stored on our computers by the websites and apps we visit. They are used to collect information in order to personalize our browsing experience.
Copywriting: This involves writing persuasive and effective copy that serves a specific purpose and leads the target audience to take a specific action.
CPA (Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action for a marketing campaign): The cost charged to the advertiser for the targeted audience to perform a specific action, such as downloading a form or clicking on a link.
CPC (Cost Per Click): When setting up an advertising campaign, billing begins only when the audience clicks on the link. As long as the action (and therefore the click) does not occur, there is no charge for the service. Payment is therefore based on the click.
CPL (Cost Per Lead): Through their marketing campaigns, advertisers seek to generate leads. They are billed based on the number of sales leads generated.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management): CRM is a tool used to manage the entire customer relationship. It begins with the initial contact and extends through after-sales service, including complaint management.
Cross-selling: A sales technique that involves offering a customer a product or service that complements the one they have already purchased.
CTA (Call to Action): These are buttons that, when strategically placed on a website or in a newsletter, encourage the audience to take action. A call-to-action button should ideally specify a specific action, such as “Sign Up,” “Download,” “Subscribe,” etc.
CTR (Click-Through Rate): This is a metric used to measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. It represents the number of clicks on an ad relative to the number of times it was displayed.
Deliverability: The ability of an email marketing message to reach recipients’ inboxes. It depends on several factors, such as the sender’s reputation, the quality of the email’s content, and recipient engagement. Good deliverability is essential to the success of email marketing campaigns because it directly influences the visibility and effectiveness of the messages sent.
First-party data: This is information collected directly by a company from its own customers or users through sources such as its website, app, or surveys. It is accurate, reliable, and essential for personalized, privacy-conscious marketing strategies.
Display: Advertising displayed online as part of a marketing campaign.
Marketing Glossary from E to N
Earned media: These are the communication channels through which a company generates buzz without having to pay anything. They do not belong to the company. In a way, they represent the reputation a company enjoys in the outside world.
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness): A concept introduced by Google to evaluate the quality of content. Recently, Google added the first “E” for Experience, emphasizing the importance of content written by authors with real-world experience in the subject matter.
Enrichment: Improving the customer database by adding additional information collected from various sources. Enrichment helps create comprehensive and accurate customer profiles, facilitating targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
Conversion funnel: The process a user goes through that leads to the achievement of the goal set by the company.
Event: In GA4, this refers to a specific action performed by a user on a website or mobile app—such as clicking a button or watching a video—that is used to analyze user behavior and optimize marketing strategies.
Freemium: A business model in which some services or products are offered for free, while advanced features require payment.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) : Optimizing your content so that AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini understand, reference, and cite your brand in their generated responses. It complements SEO without replacing it: while SEO aims for a high ranking in a search results list, GEO aims to be recognized as a reliable source within the response itself. To learn more
Agentic AI : Artificial intelligence capable of anticipating needs, acting autonomously on behalf of a user, and adjusting its actions based on new information, without waiting for human instruction at each step. Unlike generative AI, which produces content on demand, agentic AI executes a task from start to finish (monitoring, lead qualification, distribution planning).
Inbound marketing: This marketing technique involves attracting customers to a company by creating relevant content.
Web Page Indexing: Search engine crawlers scan the pages of a website based on a crawl budget (the maximum number of pages visited) allocated to it. The crawled pages are analyzed and compared to the existing content. A ranking is established. The indexed pages are displayed in search results pages.
Influencer: A person who, through the image they have cultivated, is able to influence the behavior of the audience they have built across various social media platforms.
Generative artificial intelligence: Technology based on machine learning algorithms that enables the creation of original content (text, images, videos, music) using models pre-trained on large datasets. It is used to generate personalized responses, visuals, or creative concepts tailored to the specific needs of businesses.
Marketing insights: Observations and analyses that provide a better understanding of consumers’ expectations, behaviors, and motivations. This information, derived from quantitative data (statistics, sales figures) and qualitative data (customer surveys, feedback), is used to refine marketing strategies.
KPI (Key Performance Indicator): Key performance indicators are used to measure the effectiveness of marketing initiatives and to draw lessons from them in order to manage them more effectively.
Landing Page: Typically, after clicking on a call-to-action button, this page is designed to guide a website visitor to perform a specific action, such as filling out a form or requesting a quote. To avoid distracting the visitor, it will display only the intended action. For example, it will not include a navigation bar.
Lead: This is a contact who has expressed interest in the company. The more actions they take, the more they demonstrate their interest in the services and/or products offered, which moves them from lead status to prospect status.
Lead generation: A technique that involves attracting prospects in order to collect their contact information. It expands the database of potential customers to improve conversion rates.
White paper: This is expert content designed to inform its audience on a specific issue, usually downloadable online in exchange for the reader's contact details.
llms.txt : A text file placed in the root directory of a website that presents the most important site content to AI models (LLMs) in a format they can easily read. It plays a role similar to that of the robots.txt file or the sitemap, but designed specifically for AI. This is a suggested convention, and its actual impact on visibility varies depending on the search engine: it's a quick, inexpensive technical win, to be treated as a supplement, not a guarantee. To learn more
Lookalike: Creating an audience similar to an existing group of customers or prospects based on shared characteristics. This allows you to target new people in marketing campaigns who share similarities with your current audience.
Marketing Automation: By using various tools, this technique enables the automation and personalization of communications with customers through the implementation of predefined workflows and the activation of triggers.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM): A B2B marketing strategy that focuses its efforts and resources on key groups of strategic accounts.
Conversational Marketing: A strategy focused on real-time interaction between a brand and its customers through tools such as chatbots, instant messaging, and virtual assistants. The goal is to create a personalized experience, engage the customer, and respond quickly to their questions to drive conversions or enhance satisfaction.
Influencer marketing: The practice of collaborating with influencers—that is, individuals with a strong social media presence and credibility—to promote a product or service to their audience.
Viral marketing: Viral marketing involves creating compelling and engaging content that spreads quickly and widely across the Internet, thereby increasing the visibility and brand awareness of a brand or product.
Meta description : A sentence of approximately 160 characters that appears below search engine results pages after a user performs a search. It describes the content of the page the link leads to. This sentence helps convince the user to click on your link rather than another, thus contributing to the click-through rate.
Micro-influencer: A person who has a smaller but highly engaged audience on social media and who can have a significant impact on their followers’ purchasing decisions.
Keyword: This is a word or group of words that internet users regularly use to perform a search on a search engine like Google. It is essential to identify and use them when writing for the web in order to attract qualified traffic.
Mood board: A visual inspiration board that brings together images, colors, typefaces, and graphic elements that define a project’s aesthetic. It helps stakeholders align on a shared vision before launching a graphic design or creative project.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): A metric that measures the likelihood that a customer will recommend your company. It assesses customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Newsletter: A company can choose to communicate with its prospects and customers through an electronic newsletter (email). This marketing tool is used to inform and strengthen the relationship a company has with its audience. It is sent on a regular basis and contains content that is relevant to the recipient.
Marketing Glossary from O to R
Opt-in: This refers to the prior consent given by a user authorizing a company to add them to a mailing list, collect data, and send them marketing communications.
Outbound marketing: This marketing technique is similar to cold calling. The company reaches out to the customer even when the customer has not requested anything.
Owned media: These communication channels are owned by the company. The company therefore has full control over them, such as its website, social media accounts, newsletter, etc.
Paid media: This type of media refers to the advertising space that a company must purchase in order to promote itself and increase its visibility.
Customer Journey: The complete experience a customer has with a company. It encompasses all the interactions that may take place between them. As such, the customer journey begins before and continues after the purchase phase.
Ping (or latency): The term “ping” refers to a method used to measure the speed at which information is transmitted from one computer to another over a network. Latency, often expressed in milliseconds, refers to the time it takes for this data to be transmitted. In the context of digital marketing, low latency is crucial for ensuring a fast and efficient user experience.
Tracking pixel: A piece of code installed on a website that tracks visitor activity.
Podcast: On-demand audio content, often presented in episodes. Incorporating podcasts into a marketing strategy boosts customer engagement, establishes authority in specific fields, and creates a more personal connection with the target audience.
Prompt: Text or instructions given to a language model such as ChatGPT to generate a response or content based on that input.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP): This is a concise and compelling promise that explains what makes a company’s product or service unique and provides specific value. An effective USP captures attention, addresses customer needs, and sets the company apart from the competition.
Prospect: Before becoming a customer, a prospect goes through various stages of maturity. Generally, they start out as a contact, then become a lead, and finally a prospect. This status indicates that the interest shown in the company and its products or services is significant enough for their contact information to be forwarded to a sales representative. The prospect can then be contacted directly.
Direct Mail: A form of direct marketing in which information or promotional products are sent directly to potential customers by mail. This technique allows for the specific targeting of market segments with personalized messages, thereby increasing the chances of conversion.
Quick win: A simple action to implement that requires few resources but has a significant marketing impact.
Reach: In the context of a social media campaign, reach refers to the number of users your post will reach. You can compare this to the number of impressions. Impressions refer to the number of times your post was shown to users, keeping in mind that it may have been displayed multiple times to the same user.
Natural or organic search engine optimization: This is the French term for SEO. It refers to a website’s ability to rank as high as possible in the list of results provided by search engines through the use of various techniques.
Remarketing: Target people who have already interacted with your website or your products/services by showing them specific ads when they browse other websites.
Responsive Design: The technique that allows a website to adapt to the size of the various screens on which it is viewed.
GDPR: The General Data Protection Regulation, which is enforced in the European Union and governs the processing of personal data.
ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend): A metric that measures how much revenue is generated for every euro invested in online advertising. A high ROAS indicates a positive financial return on the advertising investment.
Marketing Glossary from S to Z
Search intent: Analysis of the actual intent behind a Google search query: informational, commercial, navigational, or transactional.
Marketing workflows: Sequences of targeted, relevant messages sent at the right time that boost engagement and conversion. They are essential for building personalized and effective relationships with an audience throughout the customer journey. They are automated and respond to the behavior of the target audience.
Scoring: A method for evaluating the quality of a lead based on their behavior and level of engagement with the company. It allows marketing efforts to be prioritized according to specific objectives.
SEA (Search Engine Advertising): This acronym refers to all paid advertising on search engines. In Belgium, this primarily involves Google through its Google Ads platform (formerly AdWords).
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): This involves optimizing a website’s visibility using various techniques. These techniques can be implemented directly on the website (on-site SEO) or outside of it (off-site SEO). The goal is to meet search engine requirements so that your website ranks ideally on the first page of search results.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page): After performing a search on a search engine, results are displayed on a web page. This page is called a SERP.
SMO (Social Media Optimization): This involves making the best possible use of social media to promote content for free, generate sales, increase visibility, and drive traffic to a website or mobile app.
Storytelling: The art of communicating through storytelling to convey a message more effectively. By evoking emotions, storytelling helps humanize the relationship and build a closer connection with the audience.
Conversion rate: This is the number of people who took the desired action compared to the number of people reached by the marketing campaign.
Engagement Rate: Used on social media, this metric measures the extent to which posts generate a response from your audience.
Open Rate: When you send an email, this rate measures the number of times your email was opened relative to the number of emails sent.
Bounce rate: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who viewed only one page on your site before leaving it.
Touchpoint: This refers to any point of contact a customer or prospect may have with a company throughout their customer journey (email, phone call, website visit, social media message, in-person meeting at a trade show, etc.).
Upselling: A sales technique that involves offering a customer a product or service that is more expensive or more sophisticated than originally planned, with the aim of providing them with additional value.
UX (or user experience): The ease and enjoyment users feel when navigating a website. Its goal is to make the site intuitive, engaging, and effective, thereby increasing user satisfaction and optimizing conversions.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Customer Lifetime Value represents the total amount of profit a customer is expected to generate for a company over the entire duration of their relationship with it. It is a strategic metric for optimizing marketing investments (e.g., acquisition budget), as it provides insight into a customer’s long-term value rather than short-term results.
AI Visibility : The degree of presence, frequency of mention, and accuracy of a brand in responses generated by AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity). AI prioritizes information that is easy to analyze, verify, and attribute, and it also relies on consensus observed on the web (reviews, forums, third-party sites). For an SME, this is a new brand awareness indicator to monitor alongside Google ranking.
Window decal: A sticker applied to a glass surface to inform the public about a one-time promotional event.
Wording: Use vocabulary tailored to your target audience to evoke emotion and drive engagement. The choice of words is crucial to the effectiveness of a marketing message.
Workshop: A collaborative session in which participants exchange ideas on a specific issue. Ideally led by a facilitator, a workshop is designed to be interactive and often includes practical exercises to foster creativity and decision-making.
Zero-click search : A search that ends without a click to a website, because the user gets their answer directly from the results (optimized snippets, AI previews, chatbots). Zero-click visibility is the strategic response to this phenomenon: influencing the prospect's decision before they even arrive on your site. For an SME, this means no longer judging its SEO solely on traffic and click-through rate.