Marketing Glossary for Startup Founders

ARR is the annualized value of your recurring subscription revenue — the north star metric for SaaS businesses.

BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline — a classic sales qualification framework.

A BDR is similar to an SDR but often focuses on larger, more strategic accounts or outbound into new markets rather than a defined territory.

A champion is your internal advocate inside a prospect account — the person who wants your product to win and actively sells it internally when you're not in the room.

Churn is the rate at which customers cancel their subscriptions.

Cold email is sending an unsolicited email to a prospect who has no prior relationship with you.

The economic buyer is the person who controls the budget and has final say on the purchase.

Expansion revenue is new revenue from existing customers — upgrades, seat additions, plan upsells, or cross-sells to adjacent products.

Your ICP is the precise description of the company most likely to buy, stay, and expand.

An MQL is a lead that marketing has flagged as sales-ready based on behavior or firmographic fit.

MEDDIC is an enterprise sales qualification methodology: Metrics (the quantified business impact), Economic Buyer (who controls the budget), Decision Criteria (how they evaluate), Decision Process (the steps to close), Identify Pain (the core problem), and Champion (your internal advocate).

MRR is the monthly version of ARR — total predictable recurring revenue in a given month.

NDR is often used interchangeably with NRR, but in some frameworks refers specifically to dollar-based retention (vs.

NRR measures how much revenue you retain from your existing customer base over a period, including expansions and upgrades.

A cadence is the planned sequence of touchpoints — emails, calls, LinkedIn messages — used to reach a prospect.

An SDR is the outbound hunter on your sales team — their job is to generate qualified meetings, not close deals.

Your pipeline is the collection of active sales opportunities across all stages of your sales process — from first meeting to proposal to contract review to closed-won.

An SQL is a lead that has been vetted by sales and meets the criteria to enter the active pipeline.

A sequence is the automated (or semi-automated) version of a cadence, typically built in a tool like Outreach, Salesloft, or Apollo.

Sales velocity measures how fast money moves through your pipeline.

SAM is the portion of TAM you can actually reach with your current GTM motion.

SOM is the slice of SAM you can realistically capture in the next 12–24 months given your resources, competition, and execution capacity.

TAM is the total revenue opportunity if you captured 100% of your target market.

A warm intro is a referral from a mutual connection to a prospect — dramatically more effective than cold outreach.

ABM flips traditional demand gen: instead of casting wide and filtering, you identify a list of specific target accounts and run personalized marketing just at them.

Bottom of funnel is where active buyers evaluate your product specifically.

CTR is the percentage of people who see your ad (or email) and click it.

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors or leads that take a desired action — filling a form, booking a demo, starting a trial.

CPC is what you pay each time someone clicks your ad.

CPL is total ad spend divided by the number of leads generated.

CPM is the cost per 1,000 impressions — the standard metric for awareness-stage advertising.

CAC is the total cost to acquire a new customer, including all sales and marketing spend.

LTV is the total revenue you expect from a customer over their entire relationship with you.

Dark social refers to the sharing and discovery that happens in private channels — Slack communities, DMs, WhatsApp groups, private Discord servers, word-of-mouth — that attribution tools can't track.

Demand capture is marketing that intercepts buyers who are already actively looking for a solution — search ads, review site optimization, and comparison content.

Demand creation is marketing that generates interest in your category among people who weren't actively looking — thought leadership, community building, events, and content that educates the market about a problem they may not have fully articulated.

Demand gen is the full-funnel marketing strategy designed to create awareness, generate interest, and drive pipeline for your product.

Intent data tells you which companies are actively researching topics related to your product — reading articles, comparing vendors, downloading relevant content — even before they fill out a form on your site.

A landing page is a standalone page designed for a single conversion goal — typically a demo request, free trial signup, or content download.

Lead gen is the tactical activity of capturing contact information from potential buyers — gated content, webinar registrations, demo requests, contact forms.

The marketing funnel is the staged journey from awareness to purchase.

Middle of funnel is where you convert awareness into active consideration.

Programmatic advertising is automated, data-driven ad buying across the web — using DSPs (Demand-Side Platforms) to target audiences based on data signals rather than buying specific ad placements manually.

Retargeting (or remarketing) is showing ads to people who have already visited your website or engaged with your content.

ROAS measures the revenue generated per dollar of advertising spend.

Top of funnel is the awareness stage — reaching people who have the problem your product solves but may not know you exist or even be actively looking for a solution.

AI search refers to search engines that use large language models to generate answers rather than just return links — Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, SearchGPT, and similar.

AEO is the practice of optimizing content to be selected as the source for direct answers in search engines and AI tools.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours — one of the strongest ranking signals in Google's algorithm.

A content cluster is a group of interlinked articles covering a topic from multiple angles — a pillar page at the center and cluster pages covering subtopics that link back to it.

Domain Authority is Moz's proprietary metric (0–100) estimating how likely your domain is to rank in search results, based primarily on the quality and quantity of backlinks.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — Google's framework for evaluating content quality.

A featured snippet is the highlighted answer box at the top of Google search results — the 'position zero' result that appears above organic listings.

GEO is the emerging practice of optimizing content to appear in generative AI responses from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Claude.

Internal linking is connecting your own pages to each other through hyperlinks in your content.

Keyword difficulty is a score (0–100) estimating how hard it is to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword, based primarily on the strength of competing pages.

Long-tail keywords are specific, multi-word search queries with lower search volume but much higher intent and conversion rates.

Organic traffic is visitors who arrive at your site from unpaid search results, social posts, and direct/dark social channels — not from ads.

A pillar page is the central, comprehensive resource on a broad topic that anchors a content cluster.

SEM typically refers to paid search advertising — Google Ads and Bing Ads — where you bid on keywords to appear in search results immediately, without waiting for organic rankings.

SEO is the practice of improving your website's visibility in organic (unpaid) search results.

The SERP is the page Google shows you after a search.

Search intent is the underlying goal behind a search query — informational (I want to learn), navigational (I want to find a specific site), commercial (I'm comparing options), or transactional (I want to buy).

Topical authority is Google's assessment of how comprehensively your site covers a topic.

A zero-click search is a Google search where the user gets their answer directly in the SERP without clicking any result — from featured snippets, AI Overviews, knowledge panels, or People Also Ask.

A beachhead market is the initial narrow market a startup targets to establish a foothold before expanding.

Brand awareness is the degree to which your target market recognizes and recalls your brand.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile of your ideal buyer — their job title, responsibilities, goals, pain points, objections, and how they prefer to buy.

Community-led growth is a GTM strategy where an owned community — Slack group, forum, event series, online association — becomes the primary acquisition and retention channel.

A competitive moat is the durable advantage that makes it hard for competitors to displace you.

GTM is the complete plan for how you bring a product to market: who you're selling to (ICP), what problem you solve (positioning), how you reach them (channels), what you charge (pricing), and how sales and marketing work together.

Jobs-to-be-done is a framework for understanding why customers buy: they 'hire' a product to accomplish a specific job — a functional, social, or emotional outcome.

Land and expand is a sales and marketing strategy where you close a smaller initial deal to get into an account, then expand over time by adding users, seats, or products.

Messaging is how your positioning translates into specific words: headlines, taglines, elevator pitches, email copy, and ad creative.

NPS measures customer loyalty by asking: 'How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?' on a 0–10 scale.

Positioning is how you define your product in relation to alternatives in the mind of your target customer.

PLG is a GTM strategy where the product itself is the primary engine of acquisition, retention, and expansion.

Product-market fit is when your product satisfies a real market need strongly enough that customers come back, expand, and refer others without heavy marketing.

SLG is the traditional enterprise GTM model where sales is the primary growth engine — marketing generates leads and builds brand, but deals close through human sales cycles.

Your value proposition is the clear statement of why a customer should choose you over alternatives.

The viral coefficient (K) measures how many new users each existing user brings in.

Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can plan, take actions, use tools, and complete multi-step tasks autonomously — going beyond generating text to actually doing work.

An AI agent is an LLM-powered system that can autonomously use tools, access data, and complete tasks — as opposed to a simple chatbot that only responds to single prompts.

AI enrichment is using AI models to add intelligence to contact and account data — summarizing a company's recent news, inferring job responsibilities from a title, identifying buying signals from LinkedIn activity, or generating personalization angles from public information.

An AI SDR is an automated system (or AI-powered software) that handles outbound prospecting tasks traditionally done by human SDRs — researching prospects, personalizing outreach, sending emails, and managing follow-up sequences.

An autonomous workflow is a multi-step automated process that runs without human intervention — trigger, conditions, actions, branches, and loops all executing on schedule or in response to events.

Clay is a B2B data and automation platform that lets you build 'tableaus' combining 100+ data sources, web scraping, and AI to research prospects and automate outbound at scale.

CRM automation is using triggers, rules, and workflows within or connected to your CRM to automate data management, routing, and communication tasks — automatically assigning leads, updating deal stages, sending follow-up sequences, creating tasks, and syncing data between tools.

Human-in-the-loop describes AI automation workflows that include a human review or approval step before consequential actions are taken — particularly sending outreach, making calls, or publishing content.

An LLM is the AI model underlying most modern AI tools — GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Llama.

Lead scoring is assigning numerical scores to leads based on firmographic fit and behavioral signals to prioritize follow-up.

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n8n is an open-source workflow automation platform — the self-hosted, developer-friendly alternative to Zapier and Make.

Prompt engineering is the practice of designing inputs to AI models to get better, more consistent outputs.

A propensity model is a machine learning model that predicts the likelihood of a specific behavior — purchasing, churning, upgrading — based on historical data patterns.

RAG is an AI architecture that combines retrieval (pulling relevant information from a knowledge base) with generation (using an LLM to produce output).

Waterfall enrichment is a data strategy where you cascade through multiple data providers in sequence to fill contact information — try provider A for an email, if not found try provider B, then C — maximizing coverage without paying for all providers on every record.

Zapier is the most widely used workflow automation tool — a no-code platform connecting 6,000+ apps with simple 'if this, then that' logic (called Zaps).

An agency of record is the primary agency relationship for a company — handling the majority of marketing strategy, execution, and media buying.

An embedded agency model means the agency team functions as an extension of your internal marketing team — not a vendor, but a partner with deep context, shared Slack channels, and attendance in team standups.

First-touch attribution gives 100% of conversion credit to the very first touchpoint — the channel that originally introduced the buyer to your brand.

A fractional CMO is a senior marketing executive who works with multiple companies on a part-time or contract basis — providing strategic leadership without the cost of a full-time hire.

Growth hacking is the practice of running rapid, low-cost experiments across acquisition, activation, and retention channels to find scalable growth levers — popularized by Sean Ellis and the early growth teams at Dropbox, Airbnb, and Facebook.

Growth marketing is data-driven marketing focused on the full customer lifecycle — acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.

KPIs are the specific metrics used to measure performance against business goals.

Last-click attribution gives 100% of conversion credit to the final touchpoint before a conversion — typically the ad or page that drove the demo request or sign-up.

Attribution is the process of assigning credit to marketing touchpoints that contributed to a conversion or sale.

Marketing ops is the function that manages marketing technology, data, processes, and reporting — the infrastructure layer that makes marketing execution scalable and measurable.

Multi-touch attribution distributes credit for a conversion across all touchpoints in the buyer's journey.

OKRs is a goal-setting framework: each Objective is an ambitious qualitative goal, supported by 2–5 Key Results that are specific, measurable, and time-bound.

Performance marketing is any advertising model where payment is tied to measurable results — cost per lead, cost per acquisition, revenue share — rather than flat media fees.

A retainer is a monthly fee paid to an agency or consultant for ongoing services — buying a defined scope of work or number of hours each month.

RevOps is the alignment of marketing, sales, and customer success operations under a unified function — shared data, shared tooling, and shared accountability for revenue.

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based partnership where affiliates (publishers, influencers, review sites) earn commissions for referring customers.

A brand ambassador is a long-term partner who consistently represents and advocates for your brand — versus a one-off influencer campaign.

The creator economy refers to the ecosystem of independent content creators who monetize their audiences through brand deals, affiliate revenue, subscriptions, and merchandise — operating as media businesses.

A dark post is a paid ad that runs through a social account but doesn't appear on that account's public profile or feed — it's only visible to targeted audiences seeing it as a sponsored post.

Earned media value estimates the monetary equivalent of organic coverage — press mentions, social shares, influencer posts — using a cost-per-equivalent-impression benchmark against paid media rates.

Engagement rate is the percentage of your audience that actively interacts with content — likes, comments, shares, saves, clicks.

Impressions count the total number of times content was displayed — including multiple views by the same person.

Influencer marketing is partnering with content creators who have an engaged audience in your target market to reach that audience through authentic content — as opposed to traditional ads.

A macro-influencer has a large following — typically 100,000–1M+ — and broad reach across a general or semi-niche audience.

A micro-influencer is a creator with a smaller but highly engaged audience — typically 1,000–100,000 followers.

Reach is the total number of unique accounts that saw a piece of content — distinct from impressions, which count multiple views by the same person.

UGC is content created by customers, users, or fans of a product — reviews, social posts, testimonials, case study videos — rather than the brand itself.

Whitelisting is running paid ads through an influencer's social account rather than your brand account — using their identity, handle, and credibility to distribute your message.