The words you need to know

A description of the exact type of customer your product is built for, the one who gets the most value, stays the longest, and costs the least to serve. Not a persona. A profile of a company or customer type. Everything else in marketing flows from having a clear ICP. Without one, you're marketing to everyone, which means you're reaching no one.

Where your product sits in a customer's mind relative to everything else they could choose, including doing nothing. Good positioning answers three questions: who is this for, what does it do, and why is it the right choice? If customers can't place your product instantly, your positioning isn't working.

The plan for how you'll reach your customers and get them to buy. Covers channels, messaging, pricing, and sales motion. A GTM strategy answers: who are we selling to, how do we reach them, and what do we say? Every new product or market entry needs one.

Three ways of sizing a market. TAM (Total Addressable Market) is everyone who could ever buy this. SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) is the part you can realistically reach. SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) is what you can actually win. Investors care about TAM. Operators care about SOM.

When a company doesn't just sell a product but defines a new type of product. Salesforce didn't sell CRM software, they created the category of cloud CRM. If you can name the category and own it, competitors are always playing catch-up. Hard to do. Very valuable when it works.

What people think and feel when they encounter your company, before you say a word. Not your logo. Not your colours. The sum of every interaction someone has ever had with you. Brand takes years to build and can be damaged quickly. The best brands make marketing cheaper because people already want to be associated with them.

Three categories of media. Earned is coverage you didn't pay for: press, word of mouth, shares. Owned is what you control: your website, email list, content. Paid is advertising. Earned is the hardest to get and the most trusted. Owned compounds over time. Paid stops the moment you stop spending.

Making your content rank higher in search results without paying for it. Involves understanding what people search for, creating content that answers it, and building the authority that makes search engines trust you. Slow to build, but once it works it's one of the cheapest sources of traffic you'll find.

Paying to appear at the top of search results. You bid on keywords; you pay each time someone clicks your ad. Fast to set up, instant traffic, stops when the budget runs out. The counterpart to SEO: paid vs organic search.

Creating useful, relevant content to attract and keep an audience, rather than interrupting them with ads. Blog posts, videos, guides, podcasts. The idea: if you help people before they buy, they're more likely to buy from you. Works slowly, compounds over time.

Evidence that other people trust you. Reviews, testimonials, case studies, logos of well-known customers, follower counts. People look to others when they're uncertain. Social proof reduces that uncertainty. It's why "10,000 customers" on a homepage does more work than a paragraph of copy.

The percentage of people who take the action you want. Visitors who sign up. Leads who buy. Emails sent that get clicked. Which conversion you're measuring matters. A high click rate on an ad that doesn't convert to sales means you're optimising the wrong thing.

What it costs to acquire one paying customer. Total marketing and sales spend divided by number of new customers in the same period. Compared against LTV, it tells you whether the economics of your marketing work.

Three ways of pricing digital advertising. CPM (Cost Per Mille) is cost per 1,000 impressions, you pay for eyeballs. CPC (Cost Per Click) is cost per click, you pay for interest. CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) is cost per conversion, you pay for action. CPA is usually what you actually care about.

Revenue generated for every pound or dollar spent on advertising. If you spend £1,000 and generate £4,000 in revenue, your ROAS is 4x. A simple measure of whether paid advertising is working. Doesn't account for margin, so a high ROAS on a low-margin product can still lose money.

Working out which marketing activity caused a customer to buy. Did they find you via a Google ad, a blog post, or a friend's recommendation? Often they touched all three. Attribution tries to give credit to the right touchpoints. It's genuinely hard, and most attribution models are a simplification of a messier reality.

Two stages of a lead's journey. An MQL has shown enough interest that marketing thinks they're worth pursuing. An SQL has been reviewed by sales and is considered ready to talk. The handoff between MQL and SQL is where marketing and sales teams most often disagree.

The words in marketing materials. Headlines, ads, emails, landing pages, product descriptions. Copywriting is the craft of writing words that persuade people to act. Good copy sounds like a person talking, not a company broadcasting.

The instruction that tells someone what to do next. "Sign up free." "Book a demo." "Download the guide." Every piece of marketing should have one. A page with no CTA is a dead end. A page with five CTAs is a mess. One clear ask, one clear next step.

The part of a webpage visible without scrolling. Borrowed from newspapers, where the most important stories go above the physical fold. On a website, if your value proposition isn't clear above the fold, most visitors won't scroll to find it.

A standalone page built for a single campaign or goal. Someone clicks an ad and lands here. Unlike your homepage, it has no navigation, no distractions, just one message and one action. A good landing page is relentlessly focused. Everything on it exists to get the visitor to do one thing.

The opening line or idea that stops someone and makes them want to keep reading, watching, or listening. The first sentence of an email. The first three seconds of a video. Getting the hook right is the hardest and most important part of any piece of marketing.

Dividing your audience into groups with shared characteristics so you can market to each group differently. By industry, company size, behaviour, geography, stage in the buying process. The more relevant your message is to the person receiving it, the better it performs.

A group of people identified by an ad platform (Facebook, Google, etc.) who share characteristics with your existing customers. You upload a list of your best customers; the platform finds more people like them. A way of expanding reach without losing relevance.

Showing ads to people who have already visited your site or engaged with your content. They looked, didn't buy, and now they see your ad again. Consistently one of the highest-performing types of paid advertising because the audience already knows who you are.

The rate at which customers stop buying from you. In marketing, reducing churn is often more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. If the bucket is leaking, filling it faster doesn't solve the problem.