Big-A List of B2B Marketing Buzzwords

B2B marketing is rife with buzzwords that are easily misunderstood and misapplied.

A metaphor: If the b2b marketing industry is a planet, then a b2b marketer can either be a field or a volcano. Sadly the planet is covered in huge, spewing volcanoes that boil up out of the deepest recesses of the planet and then spray their molten hot buzzword jargon lava all over the place. Needless to say, life on this planet is not for the faint of heart. If an alien, unfamiliar with the b2b landscape dares to venture too close to a volcano, they are in danger of being scalded by the lava and retreating to find a safer place to land.

The moral of the story: Don’t be a volcano; be a safe field for aliens to land in.

For the greater good of the b2b planet, I have decided to provide some clarity for any who need it. I have made a list of b2b marketing and sales terms for beginners to learn and (hopefully) veterans to reference. Here we go…

* designates a term that was added after the original blog was posted. This post is updated often so make sure to check back!

*Account Based Marketing (ABM) – The opposite of mass marketing that blasts out messages to as many people as possible, account based marketing focuses on individuals as markets of one. Want to learn more? Check out this article.

*Advocate Marketing – the combination of customer service and marketing to delight customers or clients. Once customers are delighted, they are rewarded for any advocacy they undertake for the company. The phrase was coined by SaaS company Influitive. Influitive’s gamafication software allows companies to set up tasks for customers to perform in order to earn rewards.

*Affiliate Marketing – A kind of marketing where a company rewards an affiliate for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Common forms of affiliate marketing include PPC and organic search. Check out this Forbes article on affiliate marketing.

Always Be Closing (ABC) – an acronym that is used to remind salespeople that everything they do is to close deals. If they don’t close the deal then everything they did was wasted. The acronym “Always be connecting” has a similar connotation with a little less all or nothing feel.

*Backlinks – Links from other sites to a website. Backlinks from authoritative websites can increase the search ranking of a website, while backlinks from un-authoritative websites can hurt a website’s search ranking. If backlinks are part of a linking scheme, then it can get your website penalized by search engines. For backlinks to help with SEO, they have to be natural and authoritative.

B2B Marketing – marketing that takes place between businesses. In other words it is where a business markets their products and services to other businesses as apposed to a consumer (see b2c marketing). An example of a b2b industry is the backhoe industry. Most backhoe buyers are not individual consumers but buy backhoes on behalf of a company.

B2B marketers must understand how b2b buyers are different than b2c buyers. B2B buyers are much more careful and do much more research before buying sense their decision to buy will affect a whole company.

B2C Marketing – marketing that takes place between a business and a consumer. It is where a business markets their products and services to a consumer. B2C products and services (music, movies, airlines, you name it) are usually simpler and flashier to sell than b2b products.

BANT – (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) A tool used by sales reps to determine whether a contact has the budget, authority, need, and timeline to purchase their products and services. HubSpot has replaced BANT with: GPCTBA/C&I.

*Black Hat SEO – SEO that is focused on outsmarting the search engines instead of working with them. Black hat SEO makes a website appear more authoritative than it really is. Sooner or later, search engines will notice black hat SEO and penalize the guilty website. Black hat SEO includes but is not limited to link schemes, link farms and  keyword stuffing. Also see White hat SEO.

Blog – if you are active on the big thing known as the interwebs, you probably know what a blog is. Business blogging is one of many components of inbound marketing. Having a relatable and informative blog on a business’s website can help a business increase traffic, conversions, improve SEO, and do a number of positive things for a website.

1. It can help your business to have authority in the industry. Helpful and informative blogs can be shared on social media, linked to
2. It will add more unique pages to your website helping it to rank higher in search engines

Blogs fit into the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey and the attract stage of the inbound methodology.

*Big Data – Huge amounts of structured and unstructured data that is now available with the ability to track people’s digital behavior.

Bounce Rate – represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather then continuing on to view other pages within the same site. If the bounce rate is extremely high for a landing page, then it is probably because the copy and design of the landing page and the call-to-action are not consistent.

Branding – Branding is an integral part of any kind of marketing. Most people think of branding as having to do with the way a company or organization presents themselves visually, but there are a lot of other things that a company does to create a brand: how the company interacts with customers, company values, personality, products, culture. A company’s brand encompasses all the things that effect the way the company is perceived. Good branding makes a company or organization easy to recognize and helps the company be positively perceived by its audience.

Buyer Personas – a semi fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. Everything that a b2b marketer does should be to solve the problems of their company’s buyer personas.

Buyer’s Journey – (synonymous with adoption process) this is the journey that buyers go on throughout the buying process. Check out the diagram below:

***The buyer’s journey is sometimes confused with the inbound methodology. The buyer’s journey is the journey that the buyer goes on whether or not they ever hear about your business (they will realize a need, consider options, and make a decision with or without your help). The inbound methodology is the journey that you as the marketer hope you can guide the buyer through using inbound marketing.

Call-To-Action (CTA) – the first step in turning a website visitor into a lead. A call-to-action is an advertisement for a piece of content; this could be a webinar, an ebook, a white paper, or another high value piece of content. This piece of content is hidden behind a landing page. When a visitor sees a call-to-action and clicks on it, they are taken to the landing page where they are asked to complete a form in order to access the desired content. The visitor’s information is then stored on a Marketing Automation platform and the visitor becomes a lead. Call-to-actions fit into the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey and the convert stage of the inbound methodology.

Campaign – a way of organizing marketing efforts. Often b2b marketers will use some combination of marketing tools (webinars, ebooks, white papers, press releases, events, keywords, blogs, keywords, social media messages, and buyer personas) for one unified purpose. All the tools that are used for the one purpose are categorized as a campaign. For example, if a backhoe manufacturer wanted to promote a new model of backhoes they could create a campaign by writing an ebook about the new model, releasing a webinar showing people how to use the backhoe, write blogs that highlight sections of the ebook that are particularly relevant to certain buyer personas, and then promote the blogs, webinar, and ebook through social media.

*Channel Partner – A company or person that partners with a manufacturer or producer to market the manufacturer’s products, services, or technologies. A value added reseller (VAR) is an example of a channel partner.

*Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) – The head of everything marketing at a company. They usually report to the CEO.

*Click Through Rate (CTR) – the percentage of people that view an add that click on it. A useful metric for measuring the effectiveness of a call-to-action or a pay-per-click add.

Cold Calling – a form of outbound marketing where a person calls random people that may or may not be interested in hopes to sell them a product or service. As you probably know from experience, people don’t like receiving cold calls.

Content – comes in many forms. It could be writing (website text, ebook, blog, whitepaper, press release, social media posts), it could be video, static image, or recorded audio like a podcast. Content is at the center of the marketing process.

*Content Audit – Will be different depending on who is conducting the audit, but generally should consist of mapping out the stages of the buyer’s journey for a given company, then maps out the company’s existing content to each stage.

*Content Curating (Curation) – The practice of sharing content that was produced by another company. Content curating usually takes place on social media. Brands that only talk about and promote themselves on social media will soon realize that no one is listening. Best practice is to share 80% of unoriginal content and 20% content about your brand. Content curation is an excellent way for a brand to develop relationships with thought leaders, and show their own thought leadership by association. In some niches, there is already tons great content out there (see content shock). In these cases, content curation is a great way to cut through the noise by allying with industry leaders.

*Content is king – A phrase that has truly earned buzzword status. It’s pretty self explanatory as it just communicates the power of content marketing.

*Content Management System (CMS) – An application that is used to publish, edit, modify, organize, and delete web content in one centralized interface. Common content management systems include WordPress, SquareSpace, and HubSpot. There are also content management systems that are specialized for social media like HooteSuite.

Content Marketing – using content to market products and services. Check out this article from Content Marketing Institute. Content marketing is usually considered to be a subset of inbound marketing. Content marketing often functions by educating the buyer about how to solve their problems. Marketer’s create content that their buyer personas find helpful and thus create trust and authority. Content should be created for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Blog content should be geared toward the awareness stage, ebooks toward the consideration stage, and content like case studies, whitepapers, and consultations towards the decision stage. Check out The 18 Best B2B Content Marketing Posts Ever Written.

*Content Shock – A term coined in 2014 by Mark Schaefer in a blog post. Mark articulates that the amount of online marketing content is increasing exponentially faster than people’s ability to consume it. The supply is growing way faster than the demand, and thus making successful content marketing more and more expensive. He predicts that it will only get harder for a marketer to cut through the noise and gain an audience through content marketing. Check out Mark’s blog, and this blog on how historical optimization can protect you from getting content shocked.

Conversion Path – the path that website visitors follow to become a lead.

Conversion Rate – the percentage of website visitors that convert into leads.

Copy – is writing used for marketing and advertising purposes.

*Copywriter – someone who writes marketing and advertising content. (Copywriting: the process, or the product).

*Cornerstone Content – extremely deep content focused on a high value keyword that is then linked to naturally by other related pieces throughout the site. This is a technique used to rank for competitive keywords. To learn more, check out this article: The 5-Minute Trick for Better Traffic, SEO, and Subscribers.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – CRM is a system for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. There are many CRM software systems, two well known ones are Salesforce and HubSpot.

*Deliverables – A term used in project management to describe a tangible or intangible product that is the result of a project.

*Demand Generation – A function of marketing that drives interest in a company and creates a demand in the company and it’s products or services.

*Direct Mail – A kind of traditional marketing where marketers would send marketing content by snail mail. This used to be common practice, but in the digital age the practice has become less frequent and is often looked down on by marketers. Check out this article on how direct mail can be used to add some flare to lead nurturing: “Lead Nurturing Drip Campaigns Need Splash“.

*Disavow Tool – In 2012, Google released the disavow tool which allowed website owners to “disavow” spammy backlinks that were pointed to their site. Thus Google made website owners responsible for their link profile. If there are a lot of spammy links pointed to your website, it can hurt your search ranking, and in some cases be a reason for Google to place a penalty on your domain. You can access you disavow tool by google “disavow tool” while logged into your google account.

Ebook – A piece of content that can be used to educate your buyers and thus help them to move along the buyer’s journey. Ebooks fit into the awareness and consideration stage of the buyer’s journey and the attract and convert stage of the inbound methodology. An ebook should be “gated” or put behind a form on a landing page for visitors to fill out and download.

Email Marketing – One facet of content marketing. It can be done using inbound methods or outbound methods. Outbound methods of email marketing are invasive and include buying email lists and spamming random uninterested people about your products or offers. Inbound methods of using email marketing focus connecting with and helping people who have already expressed interest in your company. Email marketing fits into the consideration and decision stage of the buyer’s journey and the close stage of the inbound methodology. Even though email marketing has been around for awhile, it’s still as useful as ever. Check out this post: Email marketing: The B2B Marketer’s Loyal Hound.

*External Links – While internal links link somewhere else on the same website, external links link to another website. If a website has external links that link to authoritative websites, it will help it rank higher in search engines. If a website has external links to un-authoritative or spammy websites, it will make it rank lower in search engines. External links are links that you put on your website.

*Form – A form should be on every landing page. A form is what turns a website visitor into a lead. A form consists of form fields that the viewer fills out in order to download the offer. At the very least, a form should have a form field to capture the viewer’s email. The email is the primary identifier of any lead. The longer the form or the more fields in a form, the less likely someone is to fill it out. If an offer is extremely valuable (like a free in-depth consultation with the company’s president) you can have tons of form fields. Not only will someone interested in that offer probably be alright with giving you that information, it will help the consultation be more valuable. If the offer is a purely awareness stage ebook, then you will want to have less form fields. When creating a form, think what information you need in order to help the viewer down the buyer’s journey and down your sales funnel.

*Gamification – The use of game design techniques to enhance non-game contexts. Gamification is not just about badges; it’’s a technique that employs our natural desire to play games. Check out this post on Gamafication.

*Gated Content – Content that is higher in value and usually for buyers in the consideration or decision stage of the buyer’s journey.This content is placed behind a “gate” or a form on a landing page. Lots of different kinds of content can be placed behind a form (ebooks, case studies, consultation, whitepaper, webinar, etc.), the marketer must determine whether visitors will perceive the content as valuable enough to give some personal information on a form to obtain it. This gated content is ultimately the key to lead generation.

*Growth Hacking – A phrase coined by Sean Ellis in 2010 in a blog post. He describes it as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth” (wikipedia). It’s a trendy term that is used to describe a way of integrating marketing and technological savvy to create unprecedented growth. Like the phrase “epic fail”, growth hacking has some negative associations. Check out this article from Wired on the origins of the word. Let’s see if it sticks around. Check out this post comparing Growth Hacking and Inbound Marketing.

Guerrilla Marketing – like guerrilla warfare, guerrilla marketing ambushes your victim where they least expect it. Check out this post on guerrilla marketing.

*Historical Optimization – The practice of optimizing past content (usually blogs, but also ebooks and other content) to increase its visibility and lead generation. The term was coined just this month (June 2015) by HubSpot’s Pamela Vaghan in a blog post. Learn how historical optimization can help fight content shock in this blog post.

Inbound Links – When another website links to a page on your website. Websites link to other websites when they feature remarkable content. Inbound links give a website more authority and help to drive more relevant traffic to the website.

Inbound Marketing – a term coined by HubSpot founder Brian Halligan in 2006 used to describe new marketing methods that use new technology to get found by the buyer instead of pushing in front of the buyer’s senses. Where outbound is often easy for marketers to execute but unpleasant for the potential buyer, inbound marketing aims to create a positive experience for the potential buyer. It is about empowering potential customers. Inbound uses techniques like website, social media, email, and blogging to attract customers. Check out this year’s State Of Inbound Report. Also, check out this post comparing inbound marketing and growth hacking.

Inbound Methodology – This term is a hybrid between the buyer’s journey and the sales funnel. It is the process that inbound marketers use to attract strangers to their business and eventually turn those strangers into happy customers that advocate their business to other strangers. This process contains stages. Inbound marketers use different tools for contacts at each stage of the process to encourage them towards becoming happy promoters. Check out the diagram below:

The inbound methodology was created to help marketers interact with buyers that come in contact with their company. While the buyer’s journey is buyer centric in that it is focused solely on the buyer’s goals, the sales funnel is company centric and often times doesn’t focus on the needs of the buyer. The inbound methodology takes into account both the goals of the buyer and the company and is a map for aligning those goals. The inbound methodology completes this by helping marketers know which kinds of content are right for buyers in each stage of the sales funnel.

The inbound methodology is the journey that you as the marketer hope you can guide the buyer using inbound marketing.

*Influencer – An influencer is a person that influences a great number of people in an industry. Examples of marketing thought leaders are Seth Godin, Joe Pulluzi, Guy Kawaski, Brian Halligan, and Dharmesh Shah. This term is synonymous with thought leader.

Integrated Marketing – A term used to describe when both inbound and outbound (traditional) techniques are used in marketing efforts.

*Internal Links – While external links to another website, internal links go somewhere else on the same website. Internal links help with navigation, user experience and help Google crawl your pages more quickly. These are links that you create for your own website.

Keywords – the words that someone types into a search bar to find you online. One part of driving traffic to your website is finding out what your buyer personas type into search engines to solve their problems. Once you find out, you can then create content around those keywords. If you create valuable, relevant, and authoritative content around a given keyword, then you will rank higher in search engines for that key word. The higher you rank, the easier it is for you to be found when one of your buyer personas types that keyword into a search engine. For more see long tail keywords.

Keywords aren’t as big of a ranking factor as they used to be.

*Keyword Stuffing – a form of black hat SEO that used to be effective where web masters would take a keyword they wanted to rank for and put it all over the page. Now keyword stuffing can hurt your search ranking.

Landing Page – when a person clicks on an advertisement or call-to-action, they are taken to a landing page that features the advertised offer. Landing pages usually feature a form that the viewer fills out to obtain the offer.

For example if you created a call-to-action to download a free ebook, you would also need to link the call-to-action to a landing page on your website where they fill out a form and then are given the free ebook. Landing pages fit into the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey and the convert stage of the inbound methodology.

Lead – a person who has given your company their email address and any other information about themselves and expressed interest in your company. Usually this happens when a person visits a website and fills out a form to download a piece of gated content.

*Lead Scoring – The process of assigning a score to each contact in your database. Lead scoring is usually done by marketing automation software. Lead scoring entails adding or subtracting points based on how likely a contact is to close as a customer. You can score on a number of criteria including a contact’s engagement, their persona, their demographic and more. Check out this article on lead scoring and how different marketing automation software solutions handle it: “HubSpot User Group Atlanta and Lead Scoring For B2B Marketing.”

*Lead Generation – The task of turning website visitors into leads. There are seemingly infinite ways to generate leads. Everything including your website, social media pages, and content should be generating leads.

*Lead Nurturing – the task of moving your leads further down the funnel until they turn into customers. If your leads never become customers then they are worthless. Email marketing is the most common form of lead nurturing.

*Link Schemes – A link scheme is an unethical way of making your website look more authoritative than it really is to search engines so that it will rank higher in SERPS. Check out this article by Moz on different kinds of link schemes: “What is an Unnatural Link? An in-depth Look at the Google Quality Guidelines.”

*Link Farms – A link farm is a kind of link scheme where pages are created with the sole purpose of linking to a target website to try and improve that target website’s search ranking.

Long Tail Keywords – A long tail keyword is a keyword phrase made up of multiple words. Long tail keywords are more specific therefore they are less competitive and attract more of the right kind of traffic to your site.

You aren’t the only person out there trying to attract people to your website. There are tons of websites out there, all competing for the same keywords. For this reason, if you try and create your website’s content around a keyword like “backhoes”, chances are you aren’t going to rank very high, and even if you did, you aren’t going to get very many people who are actually looking to buy your backhoes. Some people who search for the term are looking for pictures of backhoes, or backhoe toys. In order to rank highly, and to attract the right traffic, you will want to use long tail keywords in your content.

Marketing Automation (MA) – Software that allows marketers to handle all their marketing channels (website, blog, social media, email, contacts) in one place. There are lots of marketing automation platforms: HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Sharp Spring, and others.

*Marketing Director – At small companies, the title of marketing director and manager are synonymous and are simply the person in charge of marketing. At a small company this could only be one person. At larger companies with multiple marketing departments for different products, the marketing manager is over one brand or product line, while the marketing director oversees all marketing across all products and brands and reports to a CMO.

*Marketing Manager – See above 🙂

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – A lead that has shown interest in your business, but you don’t know if they are qualified to buy your services or products. MQL’s must be researched or interacted with more in order to determine whether they can be determined a sales qualified lead and given a call by your sales team.

*Newsjacking – the practice of putting a spin on a breaking news story in order to gain media attention, gain leads and create revenue.

*Omni-Channel Marketing – Omni channel marketing is refers to marketing that takes place of of multiple channels (also called multi channel marketing). For example, most companies today must have marketing content for mobile devices, computers, ipads and more. The more seamless the experience is across different devices, the better. Check out this article that goes into more depth: The Definition of Omni-Channel Marketing – Plus 7 Tips.

Organic Search – A free channel for attracting traffic to your website by optimizing it for search engines and using the correct keywords. Organic search will last as long as your website has relevant and authoritative content that uses the right keywords.

Outbound Links – Links from your website to other websites. This can establish your websites authority.

Outbound Marketing – a term used to describe old school marketing techniques like cold calling, email blasts, or television ads. These methods are more about broadcasting yourself to the buyer whether or not they just want to watch their TV show in peace. This term is synonymous with “traditional marketing.” Usually outbound marketing is less tech savvy than inbound marketing. (See inbound marketing)

Pay Per Click (PPC) – Paid online advertising. This way of attracting traffic to your site can get pricey and must be done correctly in order to drive the right kind of traffic to your website. PPC fits into the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey and the attract stage of the inbound methodology.

*Pipeline Marketing – A term that has been around sense 2007, and that Bizible claims to have coined. This term supposedly addresses the disconnect between lead generation and actually acquiring customers. According to Forrester, 99% of leads never become paying customers. Pipeline marketing takes this into consideration and focuses efforts on acquiring customers, not just on generating leads. According to Bizible “Pipeline marketing is what you’re doing while content marketing, inbound marketing, lead nurturing, and growth hacking are how you do it.” It is yet to be seen if Bizible’s pipeline marketing is a substantive shift in marketing or just a rebrand of old concepts.

Positioning – similar to branding, this term describes how a company positions themselves in their market. Positioning requires finding a niche market that is large enough to support your company and small enough that you can beat out the competition. Check out this post on Positioning.

*POV – short for “point of view”, a POV is a report that a marketing agency gives to a client to help the client asses different marketing channels. For example, a POV would show whether a company’s target audience spent more time on Pinterest, Twitter of Facebook and therefore which social media platform was a better option.

Press Release – A short news story written by a company to get media attention. It is supposed to be written like a news story (in third person and a journalistic style.) A press release fits into the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey and the attract stage of the inbound methodology.

Prospect – A person who may be interested in your company’s products or services.

Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI) – This is the revenue that is generated because of marketing efforts. This is the most important statistic in marketing. Check out this post on ROMI.

*Retargeting – A form of digital advertising that tracks visitors to a site and then shows them adds for that site on other sites. For example if you visited this website, retargeting would allow ads for MLT Creative to appear on other sites that you visit. In order to do this Javascript is placed in the footer of a webpage. When a person visits that webpage, the code places retargeting “cookies” in the browser that show a company’s ads on other websites. Learn more here.

*Request for Proposal (RFP) – traditionally it has been used as an opportunity to find a marketing agency or consultant with whom you can build an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship (chron.com). Most RFPs sent to marketing agencies are pretty standard, asking for facts, figures, management bios, client list, recent wins and losses, capabilities, strategic approach, case histories and examples of work (Forbes.com). Many people (Forbes included) see RFP’s as obsolete.

*Sales Funnel – A visual representation of the journey that buyers take from strangers to customers and evangelists of your company that the Smarketing team uses to categorize contacts. It usually looks like your regular funnel. The top of the funnel represents people who are farther away from buying (strangers, visitors, subscribers) and the bottom of the funnel represents people who are closer to buying (SQL‘s, Opportunities, Customers, Evangelists). Here is HubSpot’s sales funnel:

The sales funnel is often confused with the buyer’s journey and the inbound methodology. These words all describe a similar process: the process the buyer goes through. Buyer’s journey is from the perspective of the buyer, the sales funnel is from the perspective of the company, and the inbound methodology takes both perspectives into account.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – A lead that has been determined to have the ability to purchase your company’s products or services. A sales qualified lead is then passed from the marketing team to the sales team to hopefully be closed into a customer.

*Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – internet marketing that promotes website by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages. This term is often times used synonymously with SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The process of optimizing a website to be found in search engines. This process includes a range of things including creating authoritative content based on the correct keywords for your buyer personas, acquiring inbound links, creating outbound links, gaining social proof, and more. Search engines are constantly getting better at determining what searchers want to find thus the process of SEO is always evolving.

*Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) – results pages in a search engine like Google or Bing.

*Small and Medium Sized Business (SMB) – Refers to businesses that have between 1 and 999 employees. General consensus is that small businesses have less than 100 employees, while medium businesses have between 100 and 999.

*Smart Content – Website content that changes depending on who is viewing it. Smart content can be set up to show viewers different content based on their location, their device, their lifecycle stage, their buyer persona, or actions they have completed on the website (content they’ve downloaded, or pages they’ve viewed).

SMART Goals – SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. SMART goals meet all of these criteria

Smarketing – the alignment of the marketing team and the sales team. Typically the sales team and the marketing team have had trouble working together for a common goal. Smarketing is where a company aligns the sales and marketing teams under common goals and definitions as to what exactly a SQL and a MQL are.

Social Media Marketing – The use of social media for marketing purposes. Social media marketing has become extremely popular over the years. With well over 1 billion people on social networks today, social media provides a huge opportunity for marketers to gain new leads and prospects. Marketers can use social media to share their marketing content, to stay informed on industry trends and news, to create business connections, to engage with their audience, and to find new customers. Social media marketing fits into the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey and the attract stage of the inbound methodology. Check out this post on Social Media Marketing.

Social Monitoring – The act of monitoring specific social users. Social monitoring is especially useful for Twitter. Marketers can create Twitter streams using tools like TweetDeck, or HubSpot’s Social Inbox that only show tweets from specific users, or that include a certain word. This can be helpful in identifying needs or opportunities to share helpful information. Social monitoring is often used synonymously with “social listening.”

Social Proof – Marketers have the option of having social liking and sharing buttons on their website content. This allows people to share and like your website content, but it also allows people to see how many other people shared and liked your content. If a piece of content like a blog has a lot of shares and likes it will appear more authoritative to readers, and it will help the blog post rank higher in search engines.

*Software as a Service (SaaS) – A kind of software that is subscription based and centrally hosted, usually on the internet. The most popular kinds of SaaS software are CMS and MA.

*Style Guide – a set of design parameters that a web designer uses on every page to make sure your website stays consistent.

*Submission Rate – On a landing page, the percentage of views that resulted in a form submission. A useful metric for measuring the effectiveness of a landing page and its form.

*Syndicated Content – Whey you publish content to your website and someone else likes it so much that they ask if they can duplicate it on their website. This can help deliver your website content like a blog to a wider audience if done correctly. If done incorrectly it could hurt the rank of your website and the website with the duplicate content. Read this article from Search Engine Land about how to correctly do syndicated content.

Synergy – When multiple marketing channels work together to communicate the same message. Synergy is an integral part of any marketing campaign. Many times the most successful marketing takes place by creatively using different marketing channels in complementary ways.

Thank-You-Page – When a prospect clicks on a call-to-action and is taken to landing page and fills out a form to download gated content and thus becomes a lead, they should then be taken to a thank-you-page. A thank-you-page is a great way to move the viewer farther down the buyer’s journey. The thank-you-page thanks the viewer for their interest in the offer and then can show them related offers, or direct them to look at some other aspect of the site. This fits into the decision stage of the buyer’s journey close and delight stages of the inbound marketing methodology.

*Thought Leader – A term that is pretty synonymous with influencer. It describes a person that leads an industry with their thoughts and practices.

*Transparency – Companies often tout this quality in an attempt to gain trust.

*T Shaped Marketer – A concept used to describe a marketer that has a breadth of knowledge about a lot of subjects, but also has a depth of knowledge in one or two areas. The concept has been around for a long time, but was first introduced to the spotlight in 2010 by Tim Brown in his article: “T Shaped Stars: The Backbone of IDEO’s Collaborative Culture.”

*User Experience – With the rise of online marketing, the website has become the marketing hub for b2b companies. User experience refers to the experience that someone has on a website. The whole purpose of the website is to give the user a positive experience while helping them align their goals with the goals of the company. User experience includes everything about the look and feel of a website including: design, navigation, and even content.

*Value Added Reseller (VAR) – A company or person that resells a product, usually software.

Webinar – a piece of high value content, a webinar is a great way for a company to educate their buyer personas about a problem and establish themselves as thought leaders. A webinar fits into the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey and the attract and convert stages of the inbound methodology. Webinars should be “gated“, or put behind a form on a landing page.

White paper – A white paper is a sales or marketing document used to persuade a potential customers to learn about a particular product or service in order to get them to make a purchase. White papers fit into the decision stage of the buyer’s journey and the convert and close stages of the inbound methodology. A white paper should be “gated“, or put behind a form on a landing page.

*White Hat SEO – SEO that is ethical and aimed at working with search engines instead of trying to outsmart them. It’s the opposite of black hat SEO. White hat SEO includes a lot of different things.

*Workflow – a system of nourishing leads down the buyer’s journey email marketing. Workflows are a series of emails that a marketer can set up in their marketing automation to send out to leads who perform certain actions on a website. For example, a marketer could set up a workflow for everyone that downloads a certain ebook. The workflow would then send out a series of emails designed to keep the lead interested in the company and prepare them to purchase the company’s product or service.

Either you just read a ton of material, or scrolled to the bottom of this page mindlessly. Either way, congrats! Make sure to check back as we add definitions to this blog post!