Marketing Glossary

Demand generation is the full set of marketing activities that create awareness and interest in your product across the whole funnel — from content and events to advertising and nurturing. Unlike lead gen's focus on capturing contacts, demand gen builds the market awareness and intent that makes those contacts convert.

Lead generation is the process of attracting and capturing the contact details of potential customers — turning anonymous interest into known leads you can follow up with. It typically happens through gated content, forms, events and ads, and feeds the top of the sales funnel.

Inbound marketing is a methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them — earning attention rather than buying it. Popularized by HubSpot, it draws prospects in through search, content and social, then nurtures them toward a purchase.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the average cost to acquire one new customer over a period — total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers won. It's the denominator of SaaS efficiency, paired with LTV and payback to judge whether growth is actually profitable.

CAC payback period is the number of months it takes to recoup the cost of acquiring a customer from the gross margin they generate. It measures how quickly acquisition spend pays for itself — a shorter payback means more capital-efficient growth and less cash tied up in acquisition.

Cost per lead (CPL) is the average cost to generate one lead, calculated as total spend on a campaign or channel divided by the number of leads it produced. It's an early-funnel efficiency metric — useful for comparing channels, but only meaningful alongside lead quality and downstream conversion.

Conversion rate is the percentage of people who take a desired action out of those who had the opportunity — form submissions per visitor, MQLs per lead, deals per opportunity. It's the universal efficiency metric of the funnel, measured at every stage to find where prospects drop off.

The marketing funnel — TOFU, MOFU, BOFU — is a model of the buyer's journey in three stages: top of funnel (awareness), middle of funnel (consideration) and bottom of funnel (decision). It guides which content and offers fit each stage as prospects narrow from a broad audience to ready buyers.

Marketing attribution is the practice of assigning credit for a conversion or revenue to the marketing touchpoints that influenced it. The attribution model you choose decides how credit is split across channels and interactions, so you can see which marketing actually drives pipeline and revenue.

First-touch and last-touch are the two simplest attribution models. First-touch gives 100% of the credit to the interaction that first introduced a contact; last-touch gives 100% to the final interaction before they converted. Each tells a partial story — discovery versus closing.

Multi-touch attribution distributes credit for a conversion across several touchpoints in the buyer's journey, rather than crediting just one. Models like linear, U-shaped and W-shaped weight the touches differently, giving a more realistic picture of what influenced long, multi-interaction B2B deals.

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate repetitive marketing tasks — email sequences, lead nurturing, segmentation, scoring and campaign triggers — based on user behavior and rules. It lets teams deliver timely, personalized communication at scale without manual effort.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy that targets a defined set of high-value accounts with personalized marketing and sales, treating each account as a market of one. Instead of casting a wide net for leads, ABM concentrates resources on the specific companies most worth winning.

Marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced pipeline measure marketing's contribution two ways. Sourced pipeline is created by a marketing-originated lead (marketing gets first-touch credit); influenced pipeline is any deal marketing touched at all, anywhere in the journey. Influenced is always the larger number.

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is the revenue generated for every unit of currency spent on advertising, calculated as revenue from ads divided by ad spend. It's the core efficiency metric for paid media — a ROAS of 4 means €4 of revenue per €1 spent.

A drip campaign is a series of pre-written messages — usually emails — sent automatically on a schedule or triggered by a user's actions. Drips keep leads engaged over time with minimal manual effort, commonly used for onboarding, nurturing and re-engagement.

UTM parameters are tags added to a URL that tell analytics tools where traffic came from — capturing source, medium, campaign, term and content. They're the standard way to track which campaigns, channels and links drive visits and conversions.

A lead magnet is a free, valuable resource — an ebook, template, checklist, webinar or tool — offered in exchange for a prospect's contact details. It's the core mechanic of lead generation: trade something genuinely useful for permission to follow up.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the systematic practice of increasing the percentage of visitors who take a desired action — through testing, design, copy and UX improvements. CRO squeezes more results from existing traffic, often via A/B testing landing pages, forms and calls to action.