Anna Colibri
Beautiful Positioning by Jasper Johns
There’s something really thrilling, deeply liberating, and very useful about understanding colleagues, leads, and clients when they are talking about marketing.
To help ensure you feel confident about when talking about marketing, I have compiled a list of marketing terms you’ll be glad you know.
- Marketing. Different from sales, marketing is how you introduce people to your company so that you can start the sales process.
- Marketing mix. Your marketing mix is all the tools and tactics you use to reach out to your target market, both online and off.
- Brand. The sum of experiences and feelings people have about your company. Remember: a brand is not what you hope people will think about your company. It’s what they actually do think.
- Visual identity. A set of carefully developed visual cues about your brand, including your logo and extending into the colors and typefaces you use to express your brand visually.
- Positioning. The process of identifying a market opportunity and solution and presenting it through messaging.
- Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Your USP answers the question, why should I buy from you instead of anyone else?
- Messaging. A set of carefully crafted ideas and concepts you want your target market to understand and believe about your company and brand, including your unique approach to solving their problems.
- Benefits. As opposed to features, benefits are what satisfy people’s desires and solve their problems. Example: roomy car.
- Features. The practical facts and physical elements of your product. Example: 4-door sedan.
- Brand management. The act of ensuring consistent presentation of your brand across all channels.
- Style guide. A document that describes everything about how your brand should appear, including colors, typefaces, grammar usage choices, and more.
- Voice & tone. This is how does your brand, in a figurative sense, “sounds.” Playful? Serious? Knowledgeable? Snobby?
- Logo/lock-up. The space in an advertisement occupied by a logo plus tagline.
- Psychographics. In addition to understanding the demographics of your target market, it is important to understand how they think, feel, and act.
- Segmentation. For businesses that have more than one group of people they are selling to, such as “pregnant women” and “new moms,” segmentation helps define, communicate with, and sell to, each group in ways tailored to their specific needs and concerns.
- Market share. This term refers to the percent of people using your product instead of other people’s products. For example, Google has a 95% market share of organic search in Europe.
- Competition. What Google has less and less of, at least when it comes to search, and what Facebook has more and more of when it comes to social media platforms.
- Communications. Communications include public relations and getting the word out about your company and brand via events and publications.
- Copy. Also called “text” or “content,” copy is written marketing content.
- Digital marketing. All of the marketing you do that happens with computers, including websites, social media, email, video, and more.
- Direct marketing. Any type of marketing that reaches directly out to individuals, such as emails or sales letters.
- Content marketing. This new(ish) category of marketing relies on blogging and other forms of copywriting to move your target market through the funnel.
- Channels. All of the places, online and off, your brand is represented, including word of mouth.
- Platforms. Specifically online channels, such as LinkedIn.
- Environmental advertising. Billboards and other forms of public messaging, such as signs on public transportation.
- Funnel. This is the journey your prospects take from simply being in your target market to becoming raving fans. Your funnel starts with awareness.
Alright, now, head off to your networking event or cocktail party and knock ‘em dead with your new knowledge or just listen sagely and learn.
Cheers!
Photo credit: Cliff
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