Marketing terms, in plain language.

Marketing audit

A marketing audit is a structured review of what a business currently has (brand assets, site, search visibility, channels, tracking and the numbers behind them), producing a ranked list of what is broken, what is missing and what is working better than anyone realized.

The value of an audit is in the ranking, not the finding. Any competent reviewer can produce forty observations; the useful output names the three that would change the most if fixed first, and says plainly what evidence that ordering rests on. An audit that hands over a list without an order has moved the work of deciding back to the client and called it a deliverable.

Related: Marketing agency Evidence loop

Service: Free marketing audit

Brand and communication

Brand system

A brand system is the set of rules, assets and decisions that let a team produce consistent work without asking a designer every time. It is larger than a logo and smaller than a strategy: color and type, yes, but also the decision rules, the format kits and a named owner with a process for changing them.

A brand book that only describes appearance stops being useful the first time somebody needs a format it does not cover. A system answers the next question too: who decides, what happens when a rule does not fit, and how a change gets recorded. Consistency is not a design outcome; it is an operating one.

Related: Brand book Content system

Service: Visual Identity & Design

Brand book

A brand book is the document that records a brand's visual and verbal rules: logo use, color, typography, imagery, tone of voice and the wrong ways to use each. It is a reference, not a system: it describes what the brand looks like, without saying who decides when a new case appears.

Most brand books are read once and then consulted only in disputes. That is fine, provided something else carries the operating half: templates people actually open, and a named person who owns changes. A brand book with no owner ages into a PDF everyone quotes and nobody follows.

Related: Brand system

Service: Visual Identity & Design

Positioning

Positioning is the decision about which place a brand intends to occupy in a specific audience's mind, against a specific set of alternatives. It is a choice about who the brand is not for, and what it is willing to be worse at, expressed clearly enough that the rest of the marketing can follow it.

A positioning statement that no competitor would refuse to sign is not a position, it is a description. The test is subtraction: name the customers you are turning down and the attribute you are conceding. If nothing is being given up, nothing is being chosen, and every later decision (tone, format, price, channel) will be argued from scratch.

Related: Brand system Value proposition

Service: Brand Strategy & Positioning

Value proposition

A value proposition is the specific promise a business makes to a specific customer: what changes for them, at what cost, and why this provider rather than another. It is narrower than a mission and more concrete than a slogan, close enough to the sale that a prospect can accept or reject it.

Most weak propositions fail in the same place: they name a category rather than a change. 'Digital marketing services' is a category. 'Your inquiries answered in one inbox, with a named person accountable for every reply' is a change. The second can be disagreed with, which is the only reason it can also be believed.

Related: Positioning Conversion

Service: Brand Strategy & Positioning

Tone of voice

Tone of voice is the set of rules that make a brand's writing recognizable across people and formats: vocabulary, sentence rhythm, how much is claimed, how directly the reader is addressed. It is a written standard, not a personality adjective, useful only when a second writer can apply it without asking.

Three adjectives on a slide ('confident, friendly, human') produce inconsistent copy, because they can be satisfied in incompatible ways. What works is a page of paired examples: this sentence yes, this near-identical sentence no, and one line on why. A tone guide that is never used to reject a draft has never been tested.

Related: Brand book Content system

Visual identity

Visual identity is the visible part of a brand system: logo and its variants, color, typography, layout grids, image treatment, icons and motion. Its job is recognition at a glance and consistency at scale, which means it is judged in the smallest and worst-case placements, not on the presentation slide.

Identities are usually approved as a large image on a clean background and then spend their lives at 24 pixels in a browser tab, on a phone in daylight, or printed one color on a box. Reviewing a mark in those conditions before signing it costs an hour and prevents the redesign that otherwise arrives in the second year.

Related: Brand book Brand system

Service: Visual Identity & Design

Rebranding

Rebranding is changing what a company signals (name, identity, positioning or all three) and then replacing every place the old signal lives. The visible design is the small half; the expensive half is the inventory of surfaces, from signage and packaging to email footers, ad accounts and the search index.

The common failure is treating launch day as the finish. A rebrand that stops at the new logo leaves the old one on a third of the surfaces, which reads as decline rather than change. Before approving one, ask for the surface list and who owns each line. If nobody has written that list, the project is a design project wearing a business project's name.

Related: Visual identity Brand system

Service: Brand Strategy & Positioning

Brand awareness

Brand awareness is the share of a defined audience that can recall or recognize a brand in the moment a need appears. It is a memory outcome, not a reach number: impressions describe how many times something was displayed, awareness describes how many people it stayed with.

Awareness is the metric most often claimed and least often measured, because impressions are free to report and recall is not. If a campaign is sold on awareness, agree in advance how it will be checked: a short prompted-recall survey before and after is cheap and settles the argument. Without that, awareness is the word used when nothing else moved.

Related: Positioning KPI

Service: PR & Communications

Content and production

SMM (social media marketing)

SMM is the planning, production and distribution of content on social platforms, together with the community and paid promotion around it. It covers what gets posted, when, in what format, and what happens in the replies, which is the half most plans leave out.

SMM is usually sold as a number of posts per month, which measures production rather than results. The more useful contract states what the account is for (reach, inquiries, service load) and which two or three numbers will be watched. Posting volume is an input; nobody buys inputs on purpose.

Related: Content system Conversion

Service: Social Media Management

Content system

A content system is the repeatable process behind publishing: where ideas come from, who approves them, which formats exist, how assets are produced and how performance feeds the next round. It is what turns content from a series of one-off requests into something a team can run without heroics.

The test for a content system is whether the second month is easier than the first. If every piece still starts from a blank brief and ends in an ad-hoc approval chain, there is no system; there is a person working hard.

Content plan

A content plan is the schedule that says what will be published, in which format, on which channel and by when, with an owner against each line. It is the operational half of a content strategy: strategy decides what the content is for, the plan decides what happens on Tuesday.

A plan built only from dates fills the calendar and starves the strategy. A useful one carries three columns most calendars leave out: the question the piece answers, the asset it needs, and the one number that will say whether it worked. Everything else is scheduling software.

Related: Content system Creative brief

UGC (user-generated content)

UGC is content made by customers or creators rather than by the brand's own production: reviews, unboxings, phone video, photos in real settings. Its value is evidential: it shows the product in conditions the brand does not control, which is exactly why it reads as more credible than studio work.

The category is now split in practice. Genuine UGC is unpaid and unbriefed. Paid 'UGC-style' content is production that borrows the format, and in most markets must be labeled as advertising. Both are legitimate; presenting the second as the first is not, and in a small market it is usually recognized.

Service: Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is paying or partnering with people who already hold an audience's attention, so that a brand borrows their credibility for a defined message. What is bought is not reach alone but the transfer of trust, which is also why a mismatched partner costs more than it appears to.

Follower count alone does not show whether a creator fits a campaign. We also assess engagement quality, audience location and interests, comment substance and past results. A smaller, relevant audience may be more useful than a larger audience that does not match the intended customer.

Service: Influencer Marketing

Search and AI visibility

SEO (search engine optimization)

SEO improves a site's technical setup and content so search engines can discover and understand it and people can find useful information. Results take time, and positions can change, so the work needs regular review and updates.

An SEO review checks whether a page answers a real need, whether search engines can discover and index it, and whether relevant pages link to it. Problems may involve content, technical setup or both.

GEO (generative engine optimization)

GEO describes work intended to improve how a site's content is discovered and represented in AI-generated answers. It overlaps with established SEO: accessible pages, clear information and useful, reliable content. Inclusion and citation are not guaranteed, and Google does not require special AI markup.

The practical difference from SEO is what gets returned. A search engine returns your page and the reader decides; an answer engine returns a sentence and names a source. That changes what is worth writing: passages that answer completely on their own, and facts a model can check somewhere other than your own site.

Structured data

Structured data is machine-readable markup added to a page, often as JSON-LD using schema.org vocabulary. It describes entities such as an organization, service or article and should match the visible content. It helps systems interpret the page, but does not verify claims or guarantee a search appearance.

Structured data cannot make a claim true, and search engines increasingly ignore markup that a page does not visibly support. Treat it as a way to remove ambiguity from something already on the page, never as a way to assert something that is not.

Keyword

A keyword is the phrase a person actually types or says when they search. It matters less as a word to repeat than as evidence of a question: the useful unit is the question behind the phrase, because one page can answer a whole family of phrasings while a page built around a single string answers none of them well.

People may search for the same subject in Georgian script, Latin transliteration or English. Research these variations using actual search results and Search Console data, and use keyword-tool estimates with care. A page should answer the underlying need naturally; it does not need to repeat every spelling variant.

Search intent

Search intent is what a person is trying to accomplish with a query, not what the words literally say. The standard split is informational, navigational, commercial and transactional, and it decides page type: the same phrase can call for a definition, a comparison or a checkout, and only one of them will rank.

The fastest way to read intent is to look at what is already ranking, because that is Google's own answer to the question. If page one is nine guides and one shop, the query is informational and a product page will not win it however well optimized. Intent is not something to argue with; it is something to match.

Backlink

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines read it as a third party vouching for the page, which is why it remains one of the strongest ranking signals, and why it is the one signal a site owner cannot simply write into their own markup.

Two things follow. First, no link that lives on your own domain is a backlink; internal links help crawling and distribute authority, but they cannot vouch for you. Second, links that can be created at will (comment fields, open directories, bought placements) are discounted or penalized, so the only durable route is to publish something worth citing and to be listed where a real business is listed.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the work that lets a search engine reach, render and understand a site at all: status codes, crawlability, sitemaps, canonicals, hreflang, speed and stability. It does not make a page worth ranking; it removes the reasons a page that deserves to rank cannot.

Its value is asymmetric, which is why it is easy to misjudge. A perfect technical setup adds little to a page nobody wants; a single technical fault can remove a good page from the index entirely. Treat it as a floor to hold rather than a lever to pull, and check it after every deploy, because the faults that cost the most are the ones introduced by a release nobody thought was risky.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the work of appearing when a search carries a place: explicitly, as in 'marketing agency' plus a city name, or implicitly from the searcher's location. It runs on a different set of signals from ordinary search: a verified business profile, consistent name-address-phone details across directories, reviews, and proximity.

Local search can show both website pages and business profiles. For an eligible business, maintaining an accurate Google Business Profile supports its presence on Search and Maps. The owner or an authorized representative can manage the profile; neither a profile nor a website guarantees placement.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a site that summarizes what the site is and links to its most useful pages, written for language models rather than browsers. It is a proposed convention, not a standard: no engine is obliged to read it, and none treats it as a ranking signal.

Its value is not in being fetched, it is in the discipline of writing it. Compressing a site into a page of unambiguous, self-contained statements (who the company is, what it does, which page answers which question) exposes every claim that was only ever legible from context. Sites that do it well usually improve because of the edit, not because of the file.

Advertising and media

Performance marketing

Performance marketing is paid promotion bought against a measurable outcome (a lead, a purchase, an install) rather than against exposure. The defining feature is not the platform but the accounting: every campaign has a target cost per outcome, and spend follows the result.

Performance marketing works exactly as well as the measurement underneath it. Buying against a conversion the site cannot reliably record produces confident optimization toward noise, which is more expensive than not optimizing at all. Build the measurement before the media runs.

Service: Advertising

Cost per lead (CPL)

Cost per lead is the media spend divided by the number of leads it produced. It is useful only against a definition of 'lead' and a known close rate: a cheap lead that never becomes a client is more expensive than an expensive one that does.

CPL is the number most often quoted between agencies and clients, and the one most easily improved by lowering the standard for a lead. Ask for it alongside the qualification definition and the eventual close rate, or it measures nothing.

Service: Advertising

PPC (pay per click)

PPC is advertising bought on a per-click basis, most often on search and shopping platforms: the placement costs nothing until someone clicks it. The auction sets price against competing bids and ad quality, so the amount paid is not chosen by the advertiser alone.

PPC is a pricing model, not a single channel. Search ads can reach people expressing an existing need, while other click-priced campaigns may reach people before they search. Evaluate click cost alongside audience, intent and the actions visitors take after the click.

Service: Advertising

Cost per click (CPC)

CPC is the average amount paid for one click on an ad: spend divided by clicks. It is a price, not a result: it says what traffic costs, and nothing about whether that traffic did anything once it arrived.

CPC is worth watching for one reason: it is the first place a change in competition or ad quality shows up, usually weeks before it reaches revenue. It is worth optimizing for almost never. A campaign that halves its CPC by buying cheaper attention has usually made every number after the click worse.

Service: Advertising

Cost per mille (CPM)

CPM is the cost of one thousand ad impressions. It is the buying unit for reach-based media, where the goal is that a defined audience sees something at all, and it prices display rather than response: what was shown, not what happened next.

CPM is the honest unit for awareness work and a misleading one everywhere else. Comparing two campaigns on CPM alone rewards whichever bought the cheaper audience, which is usually the one least likely to buy. If a campaign is bought on CPM, the number that judges it has to be agreed separately (recall, search volume, direct traffic) before the campaign runs.

Service: Advertising

Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR is clicks divided by impressions, usually expressed as a percentage. It describes how often a displayed ad or search result receives a click. It counts clicks and impressions, not necessarily unique people, and should be read alongside conversion and other outcome measures.

A high CTR is evidence about the promise, not about the product. It is the single cheapest early signal of whether a message is landing, which makes it excellent for testing creative and dangerous as a goal: the surest way to raise it is to promise more than the page delivers, and every number after the click will record that.

Related: Conversion Landing page

Service: Advertising

Return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS is revenue attributed to advertising divided by the amount spent on it. It answers one narrow question (what did the media buy return) and deliberately ignores the cost of everything else, which is why it is not the same as profitability.

Two cautions. ROAS inherits every weakness of the attribution model underneath it, so a change in tracking can move it without anything real changing. And a ROAS of 4 is only good if the margin, delivery cost and refunds leave something behind: in a low-margin business a 4 can lose money, and in a high-margin one a 2 can be excellent. Agree the target against gross margin, not against a number someone read in an article.

Service: Advertising

Remarketing

Remarketing is advertising shown to people who already interacted with a business: visited a page, watched a video, abandoned a cart, or appear on a customer list. It is the cheapest audience to convert and the easiest to overuse, because it converts demand that in part already existed.

Two rules keep it honest. Cap frequency and set an exit: an audience that keeps seeing the same ad for six weeks is being annoyed, not persuaded. And read its results skeptically: remarketing takes credit for purchases that would have happened anyway, which is exactly the case where a holdout group, a slice of the audience deliberately left unadvertised to, is worth the lost reach.

Related: Attribution Funnel

Service: Advertising

Measurement and analytics

Conversion

A conversion is a visitor action a business has decided to count: an inquiry, a call, a booking, a purchase, a signup. Conversion rate is that count divided by the visitors who could have taken it. Both numbers are only as meaningful as the decision about which action counts.

The common mistake is counting whatever is easy to record. A newsletter signup and a request for a quote are both conversions, and treating them as one number hides which of the two the campaign actually produced.

Qualified lead

A qualified lead is an inquiry that meets a stated definition of a real potential client: the right kind of business, a real need, a workable budget and someone who can decide. Without that definition written down, 'leads' counts form submissions, which is a measure of traffic rather than of demand.

Agreeing on the definition before a campaign starts is the single cheapest improvement available to most marketing. It changes what the media optimizes toward, what the report means, and whether the sales team trusts the number at all.

Related: Cost per lead (CPL) Conversion

Service: Marketing Automation & Integrations

Attribution

Attribution is the set of rules that decide which marketing touchpoints get credit for a result. Last-click gives everything to the final step, first-click to the first, and data-driven models spread it, so the same campaign can look like a success or a failure depending only on the rule chosen.

No attribution model is correct; they are different simplifications of something unobservable. The practical approach is to fix one model, state it in every report, and use holdouts or controlled tests when a decision is large enough to deserve real evidence.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

CRO is the practice of increasing the share of visitors who take the action a page exists for, by changing the page rather than buying more traffic. It covers offer clarity, page structure, form friction, page speed and proof, tested rather than assumed.

CRO is usually the cheapest growth available, because the traffic is already paid for. It is also the easiest to fake: a test that ran for a week on a few hundred visitors can show anything at all. If a result cannot survive being stated with its sample size, it is not a result.

Related: Conversion Qualified lead

Service: Website Development

Evidence loop

An evidence loop is the working cycle in which measurement changes a decision, the decision changes the next piece of work, and that work produces new measurement. It is the difference between reporting (which describes what happened) and learning, which changes what happens next.

The test is whether any number in the last report changed a decision. If not, the report is a record rather than a loop, and the metrics in it were chosen for availability rather than for consequence.

Related: Attribution Content system

KPI

A KPI is a number chosen in advance to tell whether a specific goal is being met, with a target and a review date attached. The word key does the work: a dashboard of forty numbers has no KPIs, it has reporting, because nothing on it can be failed.

The test of a real KPI is that missing it changes what happens next. If a number can drop for two quarters and no decision follows, it is a metric being watched, not a KPI being held. Three per engagement is usually the ceiling: enough to cover reach, response and result, few enough that a person can hold them in mind while making a smaller decision.

Related: Evidence loop Attribution

Funnel

A funnel is the sequence of steps between first contact and a completed action, counted at each step: seen, visited, engaged, inquired, bought. Its purpose is not the diagram but the arithmetic: the step where the biggest proportion is lost is the one worth working on.

Real behavior is not a funnel; people arrive sideways, leave, return months later and buy after a conversation nobody logged. The model still earns its place because it forces a count at each stage, and a counted stage can be improved. Treat it as a measuring instrument, not as a description of how anyone actually decides.

GA4 (Google Analytics 4)

GA4 is Google's analytics platform, built on events rather than pageviews and sessions: every interaction worth counting is sent as a named event with parameters. It reports behavior on a site and app, and it is one input to attribution rather than a source of truth about revenue.

A useful GA4 setup needs events that reflect business actions, verified data collection and appropriate consent settings. Depending on eligibility and configuration, reports may include modeled data as well as observed data. Document these limits before using the reports to make decisions.

Related: UTM parameters Attribution

UTM parameters

UTM parameters are labels added to a URL to describe a campaign, such as its source, medium and name. Analytics tools can use them to group incoming traffic. Consistent naming helps reporting; the parameters do not capture every part of a customer's journey.

Their weakness is also human: they are typed, so they drift. Facebook, facebook and FB become three sources, and a quarter's reporting quietly splits in three. Write the convention down once (lower case, fixed vocabulary, one owner) and keep the link builder somewhere the team will actually open. A UTM scheme that lives in one person's head is a reporting outage waiting for their vacation.

A/B testing

An A/B test splits traffic between two versions of the same thing and compares one agreed outcome. Its purpose is to replace an opinion with an observation, which means the variants must differ in one deliberate way, and the winner must be decided by a rule set before the test started.

Most tests fail on volume rather than on design. At a few hundred visitors a week, a realistic difference will not separate from noise for months, and stopping early at a flattering moment is how a test becomes a story. If the traffic is not there, say so and decide by judgment: an honest opinion beats a test that cannot conclude.