B2B Inbound Marketing Glossary: The Terms and Jargon Your Business Needs to Know

Posted by David Terry on July 29, 2020

Are you looking to work with an outsourced B2B inbound marketing partner, but don’t know your MQLs from your CRMs? Digital marketing is crammed full of acronyms and buzzwords that can make even the most experienced of marketers confused.

To create successful inbound marketing campaigns that target relevant buyer personas and convert high-quality leads, it’s crucial that your company understands some of those key terms.

To help you navigate the ever-evolving inbound marketing world, The Brit Agency has compiled a list of the most important acronyms and terms you will come across on your marketing journey and what they mean.

- A -

A/B testing: The process of comparing two versions of a web page, email, or other marketing asset and measuring the difference in performance. Knowing the marketing assets that perform better will help inform future marketing decisions. 

Algorithm: Generally speaking, an algorithm is a sequence of steps or rules designed to produce a specific outcome in a problem-solving process. In digital marketing, this is used to describe how search engines dictate which search results are ranked highest.

Analytics: Marketing analytics is the practice of managing and evaluating data to determine the return on investment (ROI) of marketing efforts. This helps make better informed marketing decisions. 

- B -

Blogging: Blogging is a crucial component of inbound marketing and can lead to website traffic growth, thought leadership and lead generation. It is an essential part of any inbound marketing program’s SEO efforts.

Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors that leave your page without navigating to other links on your website (single page visit with no click interactions). 

Buyer’s journey: The journey a buyer goes through when considering what product or service to purchase. HubSpot defines three stages of the buyer’s journey - awareness, consideration and the decision stage.

Buyer persona: A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your company’s ideal customer. This helps your business define its target audience and ensures you create targeted content that attracts visitors and leads to conversions. 

- C -

Call-to-action (CTA): A text link, button, image or other type of web link that is intended to encourage a website visitor to visit a landing page and become a lead. Examples of a CTA include “Subscribe Now” or Download the ebook Today”.

Churn rate: The percentage of clients who stop doing business with your company within a given timeframe. This will help you to understand how many customers you retain and at what value. 

Clickthrough rate (CTR): The percentage of visitors who advance from one part of your website to the next stop of your marketing campaign. This could mean they have clicked through to another page, a CTA, an email or something similar. 

Content marketing: An essential element of any successful inbound marketing strategy. Your content marketing involves everything from blogs, whitepapers, ebooks and much more. 

Content management system (CMS): The platform you use to create, edit and manage the content on your website. 

Conversion rate: The percentage of people on your website who complete a desired action on a web page, such as filling out a form or clicking on a CTA. 

Conversion rate optimization (CRO): The process of improving your website’s ability to convert new leads by developing user experience. This could involve optimizing layout, text content and many other elements of your website.

Cost-per-lead (CPL): The amount it costs your marketing organization to acquire a lead.

- D -

Dynamic content: The personalization and tailoring of pages on your website to create a unique experience for the visitor. For example, smart CTAs can be tailored to those already on your website’s database and who are further down the marketing funnel. 

- E - 

Ebook: A type of gated content used to generate leads. These in-depth and long-form pieces of content go into more detail on a subject than a blog and offer your visitors and contacts greater value.

Email: A core component of marketing as it creates direct communication with a contact. You can send targeted content directly to contacts in a bid to convert them into customers, but you must use it wisely!

Engagement rate: A social media metric used to measure the amount of interaction, whether like, shares or comments, a piece of content receives.

- F -

Facebook: Facebook has strong paid ad offers and organiz promotion possibilities that can become great tools for marketers. 

Form: An area on your website where visitors will supply contact information in exchange for your offer, such as an ebook, whitepaper or product demo. 

Friction: Any aspect of your website that is confusing, distracting or unclear for your target audience. This friction will lead to them leaving your page and possibly even purchasing from a competitor. 

- G -

Google Search Console: A web service by Google that helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot tour site’s presence in Google Search results. It will help you improve SEO goals and find new keywords. 

- H - 

Hashtag: Hashtags are used across social media channels to market and promote your brand’s content. You can get involved in conversations and trends by using hashtagged keywords on your social media posts. 

HTML: This is the standard language for web pages, which allows marketers and web designers to format features on a page such as images and text.

HubSpot: HubSpot is the leading voice and the developer of the Inbound Marketing philosophy. The company offers various marketing software solutions for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service.

- I -

Inbound marketing: The marketing philosophy that draws visitors in, rather than outbound marketing methods. Inbound Marketing is about earning the attention and trust of potential customers, through high-quality websites and great content marketing strategies. 

Inbound link: An inbound link is a link to your website that comes from a different website. Websites that receive a large amount of inbound links will be seen as an authoritative source on a topic and will rank higher in search engines. 

Instagram: A social media channel that brands are having success with through the use of influencers and word-of-mouth marketing. 

- J -

Javascript: A programming language used alongside HTML and CSS, which is commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers to track visitor action.  

- K -

Key performance indicator (KPI): A performance metric that tells your company about the performance of your marketing initiatives in the context of your brand’s goals. 

Keyword: Keywords are important for your SEO efforts. Keywords will optimize your webpages for the topics that your customers are searching for, and they are how your web pages will get indexed for in search results. 

- L -

Landing page: A web page (without navigation) containing a form that is used for lead generation. A landing page captures visitor information in exchange for a valuable offer, such as a whitepaper or product demo. 

Lead: A person or company who has shown an interest in a product or service that you are offering. This is anyone who has taken a desired action on your website or email etc.

Lead nurturing: The process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Through a series of communications, you can gradually push leads down the sales funnel. 

LinkedIn: A business-focused social networking site, with its main focus on facilitating professional networking. A great place for publishing thought leadership content in your brand’s industry. 

- M -

Marketing automation: Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies that are designed for marketing departments to more effectively market on multiple channels online and automate repetitive tasks. 

Meta description: A short description of a blog or webpage that shows up on search engine result pages and improves your SEO. 

- N -

Native advertising: A type of advertising that aims to make ads feel less like ads. It’s generally a piece of sponsored content published on a different publication.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): A customer satisfaction metric that measures, on a scale of 1-10, whether people would recommend your company to others. The simple survey measures how loyal customers are to your business. 

- O -

On-page optimization: The practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to improve SEO efforts and rank higher on search engines. This helps your business attract more relevant traffic and create leads.

- P -

Page view: A visit to a page on your website. This will help you analyze whether changes on your webpage result in more or fewer page views.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC): A model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC.

- Q -

Qualified lead: A contact that has opted in to receive communication from your brand based on your marketing efforts. A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is someone that has intentionally engaged with your brand by performing a desired action.

- R -

Return on investment (ROI): A performance metric to measure how well an investment is performing. It measures how much you gain from an investment compared with how much the initial investment cost you. 

- S -

Search engine optimization (SEO): The process of growing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website by increasing the visibility of your website on search engine results. There are a range of optimizing your SEO efforts, from keywords, title tags, inbound links and much more.

Service Level Agreement (SLA): An agreement between your company’s sales and marketing teams that defines how each department is expected to deal with leads.

- T -

Top of the funnel: The first stage of the buying process, in which consumers are identifying a problem that they have and looking for more information that helps them takes some steps towards a solution.

Twitter: A social media platform known for its maximum post length of 280 characters.

- U -

Unique Visitor: The number of distinct individuals who visit a page on your website during a given period, regardless of how often they visit. 

URL: The address of an online destination on your website, such as a page, image or document. URLs are important for on-page SEO as search engines scour the text for keywords. 

User experience: The overall experience a customer has with your business, all the way across the buyer’s journey. 

- V -

Viral content: Online content that is circulated rapidly and widely from one web user to another. Most viral content gains attention through shares and comments on social media sites. 

- W -

Worth-of-mouth: The passing of information from person to person. Word-of-mouth is still one of the most valuable tools in marketing today.

Workflow: A marketing workflow is an organization tool that helps develop a simple series of steps that you follow in order to develop a marketing campaign or project. It’s often synonymous with your lead nurturing campaigns. 

- X -

XML site map: This is a floor plan of your company’s entire website. It’s a file where you provide information about the pages, videos and other files on your website, and the relationship between them.

- Y -

Youtube: The world’s most popular video sharing platform, where your business can use paid YouTube ads to promote your brand. 

- Z -

Zero-cost marketing: A marketing activity, designed to promote a business, product or service, that is undertaken without any cost.


Want to learn more about Inbound Marketing or any of the terms we have listed here? Contact the Brit Agency today. Our team of marketing experts would love to answer any questions that your business may have.

Topics: Inbound Marketing