We’ve put together this in-depth Content Marketing Glossary to help the community better understand the terms used within the industry. In this content marketing glossary, you’ll find definitions for the most commonly used terms.
The Content Marketing Glossary is organized in alphabetical order and new terms are added to it regularly. We’d like this glossary to grow organically so we’ve provided a form at the bottom of this page that you can fill out if you’d like us to add a new term to it.
Click a letter below to jump to the relevant section or scroll down the page to learn the most commonly used terms.
Table of Contents
Content Marketing Glossary
A B C D E F G H I
J K L M N O P Q R
S T U V W X Y Z
A
A/B Testing (or Split-Testing)
A/B testing or split testing is a way to test variations, or customizing your website and seeing what works best. For instance, you can create two different versions of the same page and test out both versions to see which design works the best or converts more traffic.
Side-by-side testing can increase conversions on your website and lets you try out various design elements before fully committing to one.
Above the Fold
Above the fold is the part of the screen a user sees on their web browser without scrolling down or up. It’s the total content they can see in their device’s viewport without having to scroll down your webpage.
Adaptive Content
Adaptive content is content created exclusively for the customer. This means it’s the content you offer to customers based on their behavior, interests, and preferences.
The main purpose of adaptive content is to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing tactic online advertisers and publishers use and usually is in the form of registrations, clicks, views, or sales.
Agile
Agile is a software development term that basically means to develop something interactively. For instance, you can start with a project and ask a few selected users for feedback. This helps you understand what should be improved and what’s worth keeping the same.
Agile differs from the traditional manufacturing processes as it does not involve presenting customers with the ideal product from the get-go. Feedback from users helps you improve your product.
Analytics
Analytics is the data you collect and then study to gauge the performance of your campaigns. You can use popular analytics tools such as Google Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Facebook Insights. Lots of SaaS applications have built-in analytics systems, as well.
Autoresponder
Autoresponder lets you send email-marketing messages to all your email lists or subscribers in exactly the order you set.
B
B2B
B2B refers to businesses that sell their products or servers to other businesses only.
B2C
Businesses that sell products and services to consumers are B2C businesses. Common examples include Dominos Pizza, Gap, and Apple.
Backlinks
Backlinks are the links in other web pages that link back to your posts. They are commonly used in blog posts and articles.
Blogging
Blogging is the act of publishing content on the web, specifically on a blog website. Not to be confused with BloggInc which provides data-driven content for B2B and B2C companies.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors that leave your website rather than staying and taking action such as viewing your content, clicking a link, filling out forms, or purchasing products.
The bounce rate is different from the exit rate of your website.
Buyer Persona
You can create buyer personas for your customers. This detailed report typically includes the customer’s likings, hopes, fears, hobbies, or the common problems they face when using your product or service.
Buying Cycle
When a customer visits your web page, they go through multiple stages before making a purchase. There are five stages in the buying cycle including awareness, consideration, intent, purchase, and repurchase.
C
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The click-through rate is known as the number of times a link is clicked by site visitors. For instance, if 1000 people see your link and only 100 click on it, the click-through rate would be 10 percent.
The average is around 1.91% for search and 0.35% for display
Content Management System (CMS)
Content management systems or CMS are designed to manage all content on your website. Common examples of content management systems include WordPress, Joomla, and Magento.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is known as the process of creating and sharing quality content to attract the attention of prospective customers. You want to create and publish content closely related to your product or service as a way to encourage customers to trust your business.
Content Shock
Content shock is known as the time period when there is an abundance of content and not enough people to consume it. It’s a common theory used in content marketing that doubts there won’t be enough audience to consume the quality free content you’re creating.
Copywriting
Copywriting involves creating content for the purpose of advertising and promoting services. The main purpose of copywriting is to increase brand awareness and encourage users to take some sort of action.
Cornerstone Content
Cornerstone content is the core of your website as it offers all the important information a user might need when learning about your product or service. It helps display all the basic information and highlights your most important content. As a result, this can help you attract more site visitors and get more subscribers.
Cost Per Action (CPA)
The cost per action metric measures how much your business spends to convert a prospective customer into a subscriber.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Cost per click is an advertising model for companies that payout for each link clicked rather than paying by the number of impressions.
Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM)
Another common measurement used to calculate the cost of showing an ad to a set amount of people. For instance, if you show an ad to 100 people and only 20 click on it, the cost per impression or the CPM is 20 percent.
Cost Per Sale (CPS)
This is the total amount an advertiser pays for each sale generated directly from the ad.
Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons licenses let content creators protect their reserved rights for the content they create. For instance, if you run a blog and create unique content every day, you can let other blog sites share your blog posts on their website for their readers while crediting your work.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is when you ask your audience or supporters for ideas, capital, content, or volunteer services. For instance, you can crowdsource the capital for launching your next product and give a huge discount to supporters.
Curation
Curation is when creators collect, organize, and share content via a blog post, on social media sites, or through email newsletters.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer relationship management is a series of involved processes that use robust tools to organize, automate, and sync all customer interactions with a business. This way, all team members and different departments are on the same page and have a better idea of where the customer is in the sales cycle.
D
Digital Commerce
Digital commerce is known as the exchange of a product or service with money. The seller can be an individual or a company and the digital product can include software, e-books, media, photographs, apps, membership plans, and much more.
In simpler words, it’s the sale and purchase of digital products or products that only exist in digital form.
Digital Sharecropping
Digital sharecropping is when you build an online presence at a platform that isn’t directly owned by you. For instance, if your entire business operates on a social media platform such as Meta or Instagram.
Direct Marketing
Direct marketing is the act of directly targeting a group of people when promoting your products or services. Direct marketing includes direct selling of products, targeted emails, or exclusive product catalogs as a way to get a response from customers.
Direct Response
Direct response refers to the promotions that let users directly respond to the advertiser. For instance, when a customer can directly respond to the promotion via email, phone, or other means of direct communication.
E
Ebook
A downloadable and purchase-able digital book that’s designed to be easily read on a device like an e-reader, tablet, laptop, as well as a smartphone. Ebooks can contain text-based content as well as images and links.
Echo Chamber
An echo chamber is when a community amplifies ideas and information based on communication through a closed, private channel.
Editorial Calendar
The editorial calendar is a term used for publishing content at a pre-defined schedule. This is a great way for publishers to plan ahead for what content needs to be published and when it should be published. This can include planning for content such as blog posts, podcasts, email newsletters, and social media posts or updates.
eLearning
eLearning means using technology to deliver enhanced learning and training programs to online learners. eLearning is better than traditional learning as it lets your students learn from anywhere and offers a more personalized learning experience.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the process of asking site visitors for permission to send updates and news about your content or products directly to their inbox. This works better than sending out a message on social media as most people check their email inboxes.
Email marketing offers a great way to get your message across to all your subscribers and helps build customer trust for your business.
Engagement
Engagement is known as the ability to keep the attention of site visitors or your audience towards your content and encourage them to take part in some type of activity. For instance, you can engage your audience with your content by letting them reshare your content on social media sites or encourage them to comment on a blog post.
Exit Rate
Exit rate refers to the rate at which site visitors exit your site when they visit a web page, after browsing other web pages. This indicates that the user has already visited other parts of your site but only decided to leave after visiting a specific page. This could also help you understand underlying problems in your content that causes site visitors to exit your website. As a result, you can enhance the web page and the content to reduce the exit rate as well as the bounce rate on your website.
F
One of the most popular social media platforms, Facebook just recently rebranded itself as Meta and was first launched back in 2004. Facebook is the largest social media network that allows its users to create their own profiles, upload images, and videos and update their status.
Facebook also offers private and public groups and dedicated organization and business pages.
Forum
Forums are also referred to as message board websites that let users interact with each other and discuss a specific topic. However, forums are different from traditional chat rooms as the discussions are published onto threads and are usually first approved by a moderator.
G
Gamification
Gamification is the process of applying game mechanics to real-life tasks. For instance, you can give your students a score and let them compete for points by completing quizzes and exercises. As a result, this can help enhance normal tasks and make them more interesting to perform.
Google+
Google+ is also a social media site designed by the team at Google. It doesn’t have many active users.
H
Hashtag
A hashtag or “#” is a label created for social media sites such as Twitter or Instagram that lets users search specific content on the site. For instance, you can search #onlineshopping on Instagram to find pictures of local products being sold online.
HTML
HTML or HyperText Markup Language is the backbone of any web page online. It is the universal standard language for building websites as it gives web pages a proper structure.
You can use HTML to add heading, media, or paragraphs to your website’s pages.
HTML5
HTML5 is the latest updated version of the classic HTML that was formally upgraded back in October 2014.
HTML5 changed the online media experience by offering rich content such as video streams, audio, and canvas to be used in creating web pages.
I
Impression
Impression refers to the count of how many times an online advertisement is generated and seen by a user. This doesn’t mean that the ad has to be clicked by the user, impressions are counted once the user sees the ad.
Infographic
Infographics are essentially digital posters created to portray information in a way that’s more visually pleasing to see than ordinary information boxes. For instance, you can create an infographic by using text-based and image-based content to tell your audience an important fact or help them learn something new.
One of the most popular social media platforms for image and video-based content, Instagram allows you to post photos and short videos. You can also like other users’ photos and comment on their posts. In addition to this, Instagram also lets you post “Stories” or updates for 24 hours only. This is a great way to interact with your followers in real-time.
With Instagram, you can also share your photos and videos to other platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.
Interactive Learning Environment (ILE)
Interactive learning environment or ILE refers to an online environment where students can learn at their own comfort and pace. A popular example of a successful ILE is Khan Academy as it offers a learning community that helps students get better at all sorts of subjects including algebra and math.
K
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
Key performance indicators or KPIs are used by organizations to gauge how successfully or smoothly operations are running on a daily basis. KPIs can differ from one business to another. For instance, an online WooCommerce store will have KPIs to measure sales while a membership site will have KPIs for new registered members or re-subscription of loyal customers.
Keyword
A keyword is basically an index term used to describe the content of a web page. Keywords are used by most search engines to identify what your web page is all about. Keywords help boost the SEO on your website and help rank your web pages higher in users’ search engine results.
L
Landing Page
Landing pages are essentially normal web pages where you divert traffic to encourage site visitors to take action immediately. For instance, you can create a landing page where all your site’s products are displayed in a beautiful product table.
This encourages site visitors to quickly and easily add multiple products to their cart and check from your online store without having to jump around multiple web pages.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is the act of taking interest in a business to grow a sales pipeline. In simpler words, it’s when a user exchanges their information in exchange for resources from the company. Then the company uses the user’s information to grow and build their email lists or enhance their marketing campaigns.
Learning Management System (LMS)
A learning management system or an LMS is designed to create and manage online courses. Creators can use LMS systems to create and manage their online courses while students can use them to track their progress throughout the duration of the online course.
Learning Style
A learning style is the unique ability everyone has to learn something based on their own speed, strengths, and preferences.
Link Building
Link building means building links between content online. Links are also used by search engines to find and locate content on the world wide web.
This means that the better and more high-quality links redirect to a specific page, the higher the page will rank in the user’s search engine results.
LinkedIn is a social media network designed with professionals in mind who want to showcase their careers or networks with big names in their industry. It’s a place where professionals connect with each other and can view other users’ profiles.
Long Tail
The long tail is referred to as the portion of data that represents a low volume set of data that’s very narrow and diverse. The long tail portion is opposite to the high concentration sets of data on the other side of the graph. It shows businesses the forgotten sets that have great potential output, similar to the sets of data on the other side of the long-tail.
M
Market Profile
Market profiles are created to represent certain characteristics of a specific market. This can include information about the customers and who the competitors are and other crucial information needed to effectively grow in a competitive market.
Market Research
Market research is referred to as the accumulation of knowledge regarding the sales of goods and services from manufacturers to the consumer.
Market Segmentation
Market segmentation means to create segments of your market and focus on one group only at a time. This strategy is used to boost sales by selling to a specific group or segment of the market instead of selling less to all types of segments or customer groups.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a fancy word used by businesses and companies to define the use of software for automating marketing campaigns and workflows. This means that the software will automatically perform marketing tasks for your business, despite the time and place.
Membership Site
A membership site is a website dedicated to the selling of exclusive content and training for users or members at the cost of recurring monthly or yearly fees.
Meme
Memes refer to funny content that’s passed around from one user to another while everyone adds their own touch along the way.
Mobile Marketing
Any type of advertisement that is displayed on mobile devices including smartphones and tablets is known as mobile marketing. Only mobile users are able to view mobile marketing promotions.
Multimedia
If you combine multiple types of media including graphics, audio, video, animations, and text into one, it becomes multimedia.
N
Native Advertising
Native advertising is also referred to as sponsored content that matches the publisher’s editorial standards but is paid by an advertiser to promote their product. The standards are decided based on the platform the native advertising is published on.
Newsjacking
Newsjacking is the process of bringing breaking news into the market for journalists to write their stories on. This way, the person who’s newsjacking also becomes a part of those stories.
Newsjacking is a tricky process as you have to be very quick and the first to get some exciting news and bring that into the market.
O
Offer
Offer, in simple words, means to present something. In the content marketing world, offers are used to identify what shoppers will receive when they make the purchase. For instance, you could offer customers a buy one get one free offer for specific products on your WooCommerce site. Once they purchase a single product, they will receive another one for free as part of the offer.
Off-page Optimization
Off-page optimizations aren’t really visible on your website but can help your website rank better in search engine results. Popular examples of off-page optimization include posting in forums, creating a fan base on social media sites, link building, or guest blog posts on other trending websites.
On-page Optimization
On-page optimization is directly related to the optimizations done to improve your website’s ranking in search engines. This not only helps improve the visibility of your web page in search engine results but also builds authority for your website.
Owned Media
Owned media refers to the media that’s owned and managed by a business or a brand. Examples of owned media can include a website, a blog, or social media accounts.
P
PageRank
Google’s page ranking algorithm ranks web pages by how many links point to a particular page and by determining how valuable those links are. If you have a lot of links pointing to your web page, your web page will rank higher in search engine results. However, the quality of those links matters a lot. For instance, 20 high-quality links will outrank a web page that has 200 lower-quality links linking to it.
Page Views
Page views is a metric used to determine how many times a page has been viewed by users. It’s important to understand this is different from page hits. Page hit measles the number of files on the page that are loaded when a user clicks on a link. A web page can have multiple hits as images, ads, and headers load up every time a user visits your page.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay per click or PPC is an advertisement term that businesses use when paying search engines or publishers for posting ads to boost site visitors on their web pages. Every time a user clicks on the pay-per-click ad, you will be charged a fee.
Permission Marketing
Permission marketing is the idea that businesses need to earn the right to sell to customers before they start overwhelming them with advertisements and promotions.
Podcasting
A podcast is audio content that users can listen to whenever it’s the most convenient for them. Podcasts offer an easy way for users to listen in, even using their mobile devices. This means you can watch your favorite shows and clips anywhere, as long as you have your mobile device.
There are many different types of podcasts including comedy podcasts, learning podcasts, interview podcasts, and many more. Some are for entertainment only while others cover serious topics or host interviews of famous personalities.
Private Label Rights (PLR)
Private label rights or PLR are given to other creators or users as permission to rebrand and sell your products. You can give out private label rights of your software, articles, or even e-books and let people change the product and sell it as their own.
Product Differentiation
Product differentiation is a technique that helps boost demand or at least influence it. It takes into consideration the customer’s perspective of a product and service compared to other competitors. This way, you can offer better value to your customers which subsequently helps increase the demand for your products.
R
Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design refers to the act of making a website user friendly for all devices. This means that the user experience on the web page will be seamless for users on a mobile device as well as desktop or tablet.
Retargeting
Retargeting is a strategy used to target online advertisements and promotions to users based on their previous browsing behavior on your website. Retargeting tags are implanted into the user’s browser through a cookie. This tells the browser that the user is a repeating visitor and displays specific promotions and advertisements to them.
Return On Investment (ROI)
Return on investment or ROI is calculated by subtracting the investment amount from gross revenue. It helps us measure the profits based on the amount invested.
S
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing is used to display promotions on search engine result pages such as Google or Bing. Users are shown these ads once they search the relevant keyword that’s related to the advertisement. For instance, if a user searches for “best cameras for photography in 2021”, they will be shown an ad to buy a camera on the search engine results page.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization or SEO is the involved process of diverting traffic from search engine results to your web pages. SEO keywords play an important role in ranking your web pages higher in search engine results and help boost engagement on your website.
Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
When a user enters a term into the search engine text field and clicks enter, the page of links displayed is known as the search engine results page or SERP.
Social Media
Social media is a term used for platforms that allow users to interact with each other, share ideas, network, play games, and indulge in various online activities. Popular examples of social media websites include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Split-Testing
Split testing is similar to A/B testing where two theories are tested side-by-side to see which one performs better.
Subject Matter Expert (SME)
A subject matter expert or SME is known as the person who has the highest level of expertise in their field. This means that they are able to perform a specific job, task, or skill perfectly and have heaps of knowledge regarding their skill or job.
T
Target Market
Target market refers to the group of people a business will aim their product or service at. Think of these individuals as “prospective customers” or people you want to promote and sell your product or service to.
Top of the Funnel
The top of the funnel is a reference point for businesses when a customer interacts with a company. It could mean that the customer may have opted-in for your newsletter or decided to register on your membership site.
U
Unique Page Views
Similar to page views, unique page views is a metric used by businesses to gauge how many individual page views they have received on web pages. In simpler words, unique page views tell you exactly how many people are looking at your website.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
The unique selling proposition or USP refers to the unique selling point of your business’s products or services. This means that it’s offering your customers something your competitors cannot. This encourages them to take the unique benefit from buying your products, rather than relying on other businesses.
V
Viral
Viral is a term used to define popular pieces of content that get shared around a lot on social media platforms. Viral content can also spread from one social media platform to another, purely based on its popularity.
Visitors
Site visitors or visitors are the people willing to visit your website and view your content.
W
Widgets
Widgets are applications designed to fit in the columns of your website. There are widget applications for search boxes, categories search, or related products.
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