Aside from the general terms used in everyday business conversations, every industry and occupation has its own terms.

Your colleagues from the marketing department keep on throwing 3-letter words that sound like a secret code. The folks from the legal department use phrases that make them sound like Harvard Law nerds and the HR people scare their employees with words like “terminate” or “benchmarking.”

But once you know what these terms mean, it becomes clear what all these people are talking about.

So, here’s a list of occupation-specific business vocabulary you might want to get familiar with.

Marketing vocabulary

English is the dominant language of marketing. Terms like B2B, ROI, or CTA are being thrown around the marketing world like darts. And if you’re not a marketing expert, you may wonder what these terms mean.

From the outside, they may look like some sort of secret code only marketers understand. So, we’ve rounded up this list of marketing vocabulary to help you break the code.

Term/phrase Meaning Used in a sentence
B2B (Business to business) It’s business between two companies, rather than a company and an individual. We’re a B2B brand. We sell software to marketing companies.
Brand awareness Spreading the word about your brand as far and wide as you can. Usually via social media or Google. Increasing brand awareness is the primary goal of our social media strategy.
Branding Creating a unique and recognizable identity (both visual and non-visual) for a product or a company. This company’s branding is unique.
Call to action (CTA) The button on a website that encourages action, like making a purchase. The CTA on our landing page says, “Sign up for free.”
Case study A story about someone’s experience with your product or service and how it benefitted them. You need solid case studies if you want your customers to trust you more.
Clickbait Sneaky headlines that trick you into clicking. Once you do, it turns out it’s not what you expected. The title of this blog article was clickbait! It was a waste of time.
Cold calling Calling people who have never heard about your brand to sell them your products or services Cold calling can be an effective marketing strategy if done well.
Content marketing: Marketing your brand via any written, audio, or video content. Our content marketing strategy includes publishing informative blog posts to build brand credibility.
Conversion rate The percentage of visitors who take the desired action on your website (like making a purchase or signing up for your email list). We implemented a new checkout process that increased our conversion rate by 10%.
Customer journey The process your customers go through before they buy your stuff. The customer journey typically has a few stages.
Customer segmentation Dividing your customers into groups based on shared characteristics. We implement customer segmentation to personalize our email campaigns.
Going viral You go viral when one of your social media posts receives skyrocketing amounts of engagement you previously didn’t have. One of my Instagram reels went viral, and I became a travel influencer.
Influencer marketing Getting someone famous on social media to market your product or talk about your brand to their followers. We’ve got a fashion influencer promoting our clothing line on Instagram!
Landing page A page designed to promote one specific product or offer and get visitors to do one thing, like download a freebie or buy something. Our landing page isn’t converting. We should redesign it.
Market research Collecting data to understand your audience’s preferences and find out what your competitors are doing. We conducted market research to know what customers want.
Onboarding Getting new employees up to speed so they don’t feel like confused puppies. Or setting everything us for new customers so they can use your product or service without feeling confused (like puppies). Let’s get our new employees onboarded quickly.
ROI (Return on investment) The metric we calculate to see if the money we invested into something made us more money. Let’s calculate our ROI to know if we made a profit from our investment.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Optimizing a website or content to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results. We need to hire an SEO expert to help us appear on the first page of Google.
Social media engagement It measures how people interact with your social media content via likes, comments, shares, and saves. Our social media engagement is too low. We need to post better content!
Target audience The group of people who share similar characteristics and are most likely to be interested in your product or service. Our target audience is young moms who want to get in shape with quick home workouts.
Testimonials The written or recorded opinions people have about your products or services. How many testimonials should we put on our website?
Unique selling proposition (USP) It’s the trait that makes your product or service different from your competitors. Our USP is our eco-friendly packaging, which appeals to environmentally conscious consumers.