Growth marketing conversations are often full of acronyms and jargons that most people can find difficult to understand.
Some acronyms in the growth marketing dictionary are too long and complex to follow, but have very simple meanings. For example OMTM can overwhelm you if you didn’t know it meant ‘one metric that matters’, pretty self explanatory, right?
If you might have felt out of the place and found it difficult to follow the discussions. Or you might find yourself nodding to the words you don’t even understand. That’s why we created the Ultimate A-Z growth marketing dictionary. To make things easier for you and help you understand exactly what each word in a growth marketing jargon means.
This Growth Marketing Dictionary can come in handy the next time you read or get into conversations about growth marketing. You can download the pretty eBook version or add this article to your bookmarks so that you can quickly refer to it before you get confused.
After you read this growth marketing dictionary, you can join the 2000+ marketers and sign up for our FREE growth marketing essentials course (valued at €145).
AAARRR stands for Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue. This holistic funnel is used to understand the different phases of your marketing efforts
See our what is growth marketing article to learn more about the pirate funnel.
A/B testing involves creating two versions of a campaign, showing both at random across a small percent of your target audience, and allowing the numbers to determine which ad is more effective.
This strategy lets the marketer know which design, copy or a change in code works better for the campaign by analysing the response rate of the different test campaigns. As a result, you will know what works better and can adjust your campaigns according to A/B testing results.
For more information, check out our free eBook on CRO that covers A/B testing in more detail.
This is the second stage of the Pirate Funnel. The acquisition is the phase where you collect your prospects’ personal details. You can collect the prospect’s details through different channels.
The main purpose of acquisition is to offer some item or incentive to your potential customers in return for their contact information. We often offer eBooks through LinkedIn in exchange for a comment with their email address.
Link to eBook on How we generated 700+ leads on LinkedIn with zero budget.
This is the third stage of the Pirate Funnel. Also known as the WOW moment. Prospects engaged with your product and you need to act and make them use the product right away when they’re still interested!
A platform that enables any advertiser to purchase individualized and affordable keyword advertising that appears instantly on the google.com search results page.
Google’s AdWords program is designed to offer a simple advertising solution for every business. Google has differentiated its AdWords program with several key features, including the ability to fine-tune ads in real-time, post new ads instantly, monitor ad statistics, and track inventory and cost-per-day impression estimates — so advertisers can pace their actual spending limits.
For more information, you can visit Google AdWords
Website analytics refers to the data generated by website visitors. Any website that has installed an analytics package can examine several aspects of visitors’ browsing and purchasing behavior on the website.
These data can and should be used to make informed decisions about web design to improve the portion of customers engaging in the desired behavior as well as to track the volume of visitors the website is receiving and from what sources.
This is the first stage of the Pirate Funnel. In this stage, you put your brand in front of your audience by providing different types of valuable content.. In one sentence, the mantra of this stage is: make sure people know that you exist.
B
Backlink for a particular website is a link coming from another website usually on a similar topic.
Backlinks are used by search engines to rank websites. When one website adds the link to your website, this helps increase the credibility of your website. This is a sign for the search engines that your website is a trustable source and has valuable content.
Bofu is the abbreviation of ‘bottom of the funnel’. This refers to the marketing strategies created for the stages at the bottom of the pirate funnel. Bofu is the closing stage when a marketer finalises a sale.
When a lead is at the bottom of the funnel, they know about your brand, they have done their research and know what they want. Approaching leads that are at this stage with a solid product or service is highly likely to lead to a sale.
Some examples of content examples for this stage of the funnel are:
- Trials
- Consultations
- Case studies
- Demo
- Competitive advantage
Buyer persona is a profile that best describes your target customer. Defining a buyer persona can help a business focus on their audience so that they can better target them. When making a buyer persona, it is important to list the characteristics of and the challenges faced by the target customer. This helps to identify the value that can be provided to them.
It is common for a business to have multiple buyer personas. We recommend 3 buyer personas to be optimal. More than 3 would make the target audience very general. Less than 3 would make the target audience very specific.
C
- Call to action (CTA)
- Churn rate
- Content marketing
- Click through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Cost per action (CPA)
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
A CTA is a button or text that encourages your audience to take the desired action. It is usually a command that tells the visitors what exactly they do next. Please shamelessly decorate your pages with CTAs, don’t hesitate to use more than once. A page without CTA is like a samurai without a sword.
Some great examples of CTAs are linking your article, adding a download link to your eBook or asking them to schedule a call with you with your contact details highlighted.
Want to know more about Growth marketing? Check out our Growth Marketing Essentials Free Course. See what we did here?
Churn rate for a business refers to the annual percentage of people that are no longer interested in the product or service of the business. Unsubscribe rate and the percentage of customers stop using a product are metrics of churn rate.
For example, if you send a monthly newsletter to the 100 people in your mailing list. If 50 people decide to unsubscribe from the mailing list over the year, then your churn rate is 50%. This is a rather high percentage. It should tell you that there is something wrong with your emails, and hopefully you can fix it to reduce your future churn rate.
Content marketing is a marketing strategy in which relevant content is created, published and distributed for an online target audience.
Content marketing does not directly advertise a product or service, but instead generates interest in it. The purpose of content marketing is to attract, nurture and educate the audience until to the point they’re comfortable to take an action.
Following are the different forms of content:
- Blogs and articles
- Videos
- Social media posts
- Emails
- Lead magnets such as: eBooks, whitepapers etc
Click through rate is the percentage of people who click on a specific link when they visit a website, email or an ad campaign. This is considered as a measure of effectiveness of an online ad campaign or the success of an email campaign.
Click through rate is higher for campaigns which do a good job at persuading their audience to click on a specific link. The goal is always to have a higher CTR.
Conversion rate optimisation is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action. In other words, the aim of CRO is to design web pages that do a good job of persuading the visitors to perform certain actions. But this design doesn’t have aesthetic concerns, it is based on your customer needs and opinions.
For more information, Check out our free eBook on CRO
Various companies advertise themselves on search engines and pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement spots on other websites. The cost per click is the actual price that the company pays to get each click on the PPC ads
Cost per click depends on the type of product or service your business is selling. High value products or recurring subscription models usually have higher CPCs when compared to low value products or one off sales.
Customer acquisition cost is the cost to convince a potential customer to make a purchase with them. CAC comprises all the sales and marketing costs associated with the customer making that purchase. This includes the cost of tools, spend to make the customer visit your website and the salaries.
CAC is calculated by summing up all the expenses and dividing it by the total number of customers acquired during the period of the incurred expenses.
Cost per action is usually applicable for affiliate marketing. This is the commission a business pays to an affiliate when a specific action is completed through them. This action could be watching a video, clicking on a link, making a purchase or filling a form.
A business’ customer relationship management is the process of analysing and managing their businesses relationships with their customers typically using CRM systems.
The idea of CRM is to use past data of customer interactions to manage and improve the future customer relationships. Customer relations are key to achieving a business’ long term goals. And CRM is the relationship memory of your business.
D
Data-driven marketing aims to acquire the required information, interpret it, and use the insights to predict your customers’ needs and future behaviors. Or prepare a personalized offer for your customers with the insights you’ve collected.
Deep-dive refers to detailed analysis or research about certain aspects of a business. A deep-dive analysis can be done for the customer base, the competitor strategies, etc. The aim of deep dive analysis is to get as much information on a specific topic as possible.
Demographics are parameters that define an individual. Typical demographics include age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, culture, and geographic location. Defining customer demographics plays an important role in understanding them and helps in better targeting them.
Engagement rate is the measure of how well your audience is engaged with your content. In a company’s website, this rate can be the number of times the viewer clicked on specific links or the number of times they interacted with different elements on the website.
The more a user engages with your website, the more likely they are to become customers. A smart business would be willing to pay higher to retarget an engaged visitor.
Evergreen content is a timeless piece of content that generates attention and traffic to your website for longer periods of time. Unlike trends or popular topics, evergreen content provides fundamental value that will survive time and changes for many years.
Exit-intent popups are popups that the visitors of a website see when they are attempting to leave a particular web page. The purpose of an exit-intent popup is to catch the attention of a website visitor when they are about to close their tab. Exit-intent popups usually include attractive bonus, discount codes or some other interesting information that keeps the visitor on the page for longer.
It is always smart to place an exit-intent with a valuable offer, because you have a last chance to convert a lost visitor.
F
In marketing, the term factor analysis is used to describe the process of analysing numerous marketing campaigns to derive the key factors that are significant and common for all campaigns.
The important factors identified from the factor analysis can be used by a business to create a successful marketing campaign.
G
Growth loops are also known as acquisition loops. Growth loops are cycles which start with new users performing some action, which then leads to some outcome. This outcome is used to generate new customers and the cycle continues.
Developing growth loops can help companies grow their customer base exponentially. Once the growth loop is initiated, the cost per acquisition tends to become smaller and smaller after each additional customer.
Growth marketing (aka growth hacking) is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business. Growth hacking refers to a set of both conventional and unconventional marketing experiments that lead to growth of a business.
Growth hackers often focus on low-cost alternatives to traditional marketing, e.g. using social media, viral marketing or targeted advertising instead of buying advertising through more traditional media such as radio, newspaper, and television. The similarities between growth marketing and data driven marketing are that they both rely on data and the performance of the campaigns rather than ‘gut feelings’. Due to this reason, these approaches are most likely to succeed, if the data is interpreted correctly.
Link to related articles:
What is Growth Marketing and Why Is It So Effective?
Growth Hacking Vs. Traditional Marketing – 8 Major Differences
Guerilla marketing is an advertising strategy where businesses use unconventional ways to interact with their target audience to persuade them to buy a product or service. Guerilla Marketing often uses elements of surprise to get attention.
The goal of Guerilla marketing is to give the audience a new way to experience the advertisements in a way that makes them share it with their friends and family. This unconventional advertising is often designed to make it viral on various social media platforms to gain attention of the target audience.
H
Heat maps are visual maps that allow the business to know which elements/ sections of their webpages the visitors interact most with. Analysing heatmaps lets the business understand which parts of their website are interesting for users and which ones are not.
Hotjar is a tool that we often recommend to our customers for checking the heatmaps of their website.
An ideal customer profile for a business is an hypothetical customer that benefits the most from their business offerings and in turn provides significant value to the business.
An ideal customer profile typically includes the average size of the company, the revenue they generate, the industry they operate in and the location they are based in.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that attracts customers to a business’ products or services by their valuable content offered on search engines and social media.
Inbound marketing aims to create awareness about a product or service through creation of content that is beneficial to the target audience. This awareness is often generated through blogs and articles on the company’s own website. Unlike one-time campaigns, inbound marketing could continue to bring value for years.
J
Jack of all trades refers to a person who has knowledge in multiple fields. But this knowledge is limited to fundamentals and basics. Specialist on the other hand is a person who has mastered knowledge in one specific field, but has little to no knowledge of the fields other than his/her specialization.
Javascript is a programming language that is used to create interactive elements on a business’ website. Javascript codes are often used by inbound marketers to track the user’s activity on the website.
The source codes for user activity trackers on websites are often coded in Javascript.
K
Key performance indicators are actionable and measurable indicators that keep your strategy on track and allow you to manage, control and achieve desired business goals.
When defining a marketing strategy, it is common for businesses to get lost by the different metrics. KPIs are important to decide which metrics are important and help them visualize their long term business goals. KPIs that don’t align with the business goals, will often be more distracting than beneficial.
Keywords are the words used by search engine users to find what they are looking for. Keyword research process involves finding what keywords and phrases do people search for when they are looking for specific information. It is the step to be taken before one starts writing content for a blog or article on a website.
This process also involves analysing how different keywords perform on the search engine and how the other websites writing on the same topic use their keywords to rank higher on search engines.
L
Landing page is the webpage that is specifically created to share information on a specific product, service or topic. This is the first page that the lead visits when they click on the link through search engines, social media posts, online advertisements or backlinks.
These pages must be informative and must help the visitor get the information they are looking for. It is important to have CTAs on landing pages to make sure that the visitor can further engage with the business’ website.
Lead generation is a process of generating initial interest in the products or services of a business. The aim of lead generation is to collect information of the leads so that they can be contacted with more information about the products or services of the business.
There are numerous ways to generate leads, our favourite platform is LinkedIn. For lead generation, it is important to understand the preferred platforms of your target audiences.
We generated 8000+ leads in the last year on LinkedIn, you can learn about the exact strategies from this 105 pages eBook: LinkedIn social selling, marketing automation and Lead Generation
Lead magnet is referred to a free item or service offered to potential customers with the aim of collecting their contact information. Commonly used lead magnets are free trials for subscriptions, eBooks, newsletters and brochures.
The great part about lead magnets is that it attracts people who are already interested in the products or services of a business. This means that the lead generated from it will be qualified.
A lead is a person who is interested in your company’s product or service in some way. The goal of businesses is usually to generate as many leads as possible. More leads would mean more opportunity to convert them to a paying customer.
Lifetime value (aka customer lifetime value) of a customer is the total estimated profit the business generates from that customer over a lifetime. In other words, it is the monetary value of a relationship customer as a present value of future cash flows.
Customer lifetime value is important to understand how much a business would be willing to spend to acquire this customer.
A marketing qualified lead is a lead that has shown interest in a business’ offerings based on the marketing campaigns. This kind of a lead is more likely to become a customer when compared to other leads. This qualification is based on the lead’s engagement with the content of offerings of the business.
Minimum viable product is an early product with the features that are just enough to persuade a customer to buy it and gain feedback of possible improvements for the future products.
The aim of an MVP is to gain understanding of customer’s needs with minimal effort. MVPs help the business learn what the customers do with the products and how they use it to gain insights of the customer needs and wants. This helps them design the future of the current or the new products.
Mofu is short for ‘middle of the funnel’. This refers to the marketing strategies created for the stages at the middle of the pirate funnel. Leads in this stage of the funnel are not quite ready for sales. They are aware of a particular problem and are willing to find solutions, but they are not aware of the different competitors.
Webinars, videos, articles and eBooks and comparison contents are great to provide the leads with a solution to their problem and also by familiarizing them with your brand and activities.
N
Native advertising is the form of advertising that matches the form and content of the platform it is being advertised on. The word native in native advertising refers to the coherence of the content of the advertisement with the overall content shared in the platform.
This form of advertising often disguises as the regular content shared on the specific platform, making it difficult to identify it as an advertisement. Advertising natively on a platform is great because the other users of the platform are more likely to interact with it.
Net promoter score is the percentage of customers who are likely to promote a particular business’s products or services to their friends, families or colleagues. If your business has customer ratings on a scale of 1-10, the ones that rate 8 or higher would be considered as your net promoters.
Every business must have a goal to maximise their net promoter score. The lower the score, the more it will demotivate your potential customers from using your business’ products or services.
Netiquette combines the words network and etiquette. It describes the acceptable or the moral way of interacting with others online. Just like etiquette is to culture, netiquette is to online interactions.
It is an overarching term that recognizes the internet as an extension of our society. It encompasses the use of online resources, promotion/spread of information and the practices used by businesses to market themselves.
A niche market can be defined as a small segment of a larger market with very specific preferences, needs and characteristics.
Businesses targeting niche markets usually have narrow audiences since they target only those with the specific needs, but they also often have low competition.
O
OMTM is the metric that your business cares the most about in the current stage of your business. This is the metric that all your employees and business goals focused on. Defining OMTM helps the business understand their core goal and focus on its progress over time.
Opt in is the process to describe a positive action for the business. It is when a potential customer leaves in their information and allows you to send them something. In most cases this is marketing and promotional emails. This could be signing up for a newsletter, downloading eBook or something else. High opt in rate suggests that more people are interested in your business
Opt out is the exact opposite of opt in. This refers to the process when someone takes away the permission to contact them. This suggests that they no longer want to receive any promotional offers from you. It is an indicator suggesting that your content is not valuable for them. It is similar to unsubscribing action from a newsletter.
P
Product-market fit is the degree to which a product fits the demand of the market. If there is a good product-market fit, it means that the demand is good enough to sell the product. This means the cost of advertising and CPA of the product would be lower.
In digital marketing, a query is the term, question or a phrase that an individual searches for on search engines. There are three types of search query: informational, navigational, commercial investigation and transactional .
Quality score is the estimate of quantity of keywords, landing pages and advertisements on your website. The quality score of a website affects the ranking on search engines. The higher it is, the higher will your page be on search results.
A higher quality score tells the search engines that the content on your website is credible and the keywords used are relevant.
R
This is the sixth and last stage of the Pirate Funnel. The main goal in this stage is to get your customers to refer your business to their friends/ connections. The best way to make your customers recommend your business to their connections is to offer them incentives to do so.
Retargeting is a way of online advertising where an individual is shown information or introduction of a brand more than once as they visit other websites. Studies show that <5% of viewers convert to becoming customers when they first see a new brand.
Retargeting reminds the viewer about a particular brand over multiple web pages. Seeing something multiple times helps build trust and thereby help in converting them to a paying customer. Retargeting is done by tracking users on different websites using cookies based on javascript code.
This is the fourth stage of the Pirate Funnel. The main goal here is to make customers come back to you. The best way to do this is to keep your customers delighted. To improve retention, growth marketers might look at how to offer personalized support for customers or how to improve the value users gain from a product.
Return on investment is the total revenues generated by a marketing campaign minus the cost of campaign divided by the firm’s investment It is an indicator of how well a marketing campaign performed in terms of cost effectiveness. A lower ROI indicates that the marketing campaign is either too expensive or it is not generating enough revenue.
Businesses must choose marketing campaigns with higher ROI. A negative ROI means that the campaign generated less revenues than the amount that was invested in it.
This is the fifth stage of the Pirate Funnel. The main goal is getting more money from current customers. Here the ultimate goal is to upsell, cross-sell, sign a new contract or higher subscription plan. Or you can prevent attrition and churns.
S
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
- Scraping
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search engine results page (SERP)
- Storytelling
A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a lead that has been screened and assessed by both the marketing and sales team. This is the lead that is ready for the next step in sales.
The process of a lead turning into SQL is as following:
- Your business identifies a lead that has high engagement with your business
- Your marketing team informs sales team about this lead
- Sales team accesses this lead
- This lead is ready for the next step before a sale
Scraping is the process of importing information from websites to a spreadsheet. Data scraping is used for collecting a large amount of information from the internet. This data can then be used for promotional purposes or educational purposes.
Scraping information about all businesses in your target industry can allow you to market your business in a much more efficient way than individually visiting their websites. There are numerous tools available for data scraping.
Search engine marketing is a way to increase a website’s visibility on search engines through paid advertising. SEM is often misunderstood for SEO, the main difference between the two is that SEM is based on a pay per click model, whereas SEO is free and done through content of a website.
Search engine optimization is the process of adapting web pages, content and the distribution of the content to optimize it for ranking higher on search engines. Aka increase the visibility of your website. SEO helps a website get more traffic from organic (unpaid) search engine results.
There are numerous factors that affect a website’s SEO score, such as keywords used, backlinks, quality of content and images used on the webpages.
Search engine results page is the list of web pages served to users when they search on search engines. Analysing SERP is important for content marketing to learn about what other webpages do that make them rank higher. This helps a business in understanding how their website is performing on the search engines and also how their competitors are performing.
Storytelling is a way to share communicative messages by means of telling a story. Sharing your messages in the form of stories is greatly beneficial because people remember stories better.
In this type of content marketing, you try to connect with a person before you advertise your business. Once the connection is built, it is easier to promote your business’ goods or services.
Link to the related article:
Brand storytelling: How to sell more with the proven 7-step framework
How To Write A Blog Post Fast (And Good) – 15 actionable tips
T
The meaning of talent acquisition is to use Human Resources tools to identify skilled individuals and recruit them to fulfill a specific long term needs of your organization.
Talent acquisition is identifying talented people who have the skills and attitude to accept challenges and who would fit well with your company culture.
For more information about TA, check out our free eBook on How to hire people who are smarter than you.
A tech stack is a set of marketing and automation tools that works together to make marketing efforts easier. It is used to generate leads, close sales and automate daily tasks. A typical marketing tech stack involves an email platform, content management system, CRM and some analytics tools.
Full stack marketer is someone who understands the tools in a marketing tech stack and has the knowledge of operating them.
For more information about the tech stack we use on this link.
Tofu is short for ‘top of the funnel’. This refers to the marketing strategies created for the stages at the top of the pirate funnel. At this stage, people are looking for information about the product or service. They’re not ready to buy anything yet, in fact, they’re far from taking action.
Just like it is not wise to ask someone to marry them on the first date, it is not smart to push your offers at this stage. A good practice is to introduce your leads with some valuable content from your business to educate about the given subject. Blog posts and eBooks can be shared to create awareness about a specific topic and also about your business.
A T-shaped marketer is someone who is knowledgeable in more than one marketing facets, but specializes in one of them. This type of marketer has a broader knowledge base than a marketer specializing in one of the facets only.
UTM codes are used to track the source and medium of traffic on a website. UTM tags added to a webpage link before sharing it on your different marketing campaigns can allow you to track from which campaign does the traffic flow to your webpage.
It helps in understanding the engagement of campaigns with the viewers and also to understand which campaigns are working well and which ones need improvements.
V
A great value proposition is a short and compelling summary of the primary benefit that you offer to your prospects. It’s the unique identifier that solves a problem your competitor can’t.
Without this unique competitive advantage, the target customer doesn’t have a reason to work with you. That’s why it’s also called, unique customer value proposition.
There are 3 deadly sins to writing a good value proposition. We cover these sins along with the best practices of writing a value proposition in these two articles:
W
A wow moment is when you exceed your customer expectations or when you deliver something extraordinary that your competitors do not deliver. Wow moments are great to show your customers why you are better than the other competitors. It also helps in persuading your customers to choose your product or service.
X
An XML sitemap lists all the important web pages on a website. This allows the search engines to understand the structure of the entire website and also enables it to better navigate through different web pages.
Y
Youtube marketing is the practice of marketing a business’ product or service by uploading a video on their channel. Youtube also has paid advertising where a company’s short video advertisement is played before a video from another channel.
Z
Zapier is a web service that allows users to automate their workflows on various platforms. The users can link different web apps so that they can share data with each other. This integration can be used to automate processes to get more work done.
We hope that you feel more confident after checking out this A-Z growth marketing dictionary.
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