The Ultimately Dictionary of Product Marketing Terms

As a Product Marketer you’ve likely been in a meeting with sales, product, communications, or engineering where it felt like everyone in the room was using jargon or acronyms understood by everyone else but you. If you’re new to Product Marketing these conversations can feel like you’re listening to a conversation spoken in a foreign language. Sometimes a quick 1-line explanation for key terminology and concepts is all you need. This is your guide for Product Marketing terminology — save it as a bookmark and reference it any time a term comes up that stumps you.

77 Product Marketing Terms You Should Know

Go-To-Market (GTM)

A go-to-market strategy is a blueprint for delivering a product or service to the end customer, taking into account such factors as pricing, messaging and distribution.

Market Segmentation

Groups of potential customers based on different characteristics such as demographic, geographic, behavioral, or psychographic.

Buyer Persona

Semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer based on market research and customer data. (Source: Hubspot)

Demographic Segmentation

Divides your potential customer base by age, race, religion, gender, family size, ethnicity, income, job or education.

Geographic Segmentation

Divides your potential customer base by their permanent or recent location. This is especially useful if your product is only available in certain markets.

Behavioral Segmentation

Divides your potential customer base by their buying patterns including frequency of use, brand loyalty, needs, etc.

Psychographic Segmentation

Divides your potential customer base by personality traits, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.

Value Proposition

Synthesized statement that summarizes why a consumer should buy a product or use a service.

Thought Leadership

Marketing collateral that solidifies you as an expert and authority within your industry.

Evergreen Content

Content that can be used all year-round.

User Experience Research (UER)

The process of understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation/analysis of tasks and other feedback methodologies.

Industry Analyst

Individual or groups of individuals who performs primary and secondary market research within an industry.

Marketing Communications Team (MarCom Team)

Responsible for all the messages and media deployed to communicate with the market.

Demand Generation (Demand Gen)

Targeted marketing programs intended to drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and/or services.

Product Roadmap

A high-level visual summary of your product offering over time. A product roadmap is used to communicate what you’re building and why. It’s a guiding strategic document to align stakeholders, acquire budget and can also be a plan for executing the strategy.

Product Portfolio

Collection of all products or services offered by a company.

Quarterly Product Strategy (QPS)

Meeting held at a regular cadence to keep executives aligned to product direction, achievements, and blockers. Typical goals of the meeting include: share key results and learnings, discuss key theories and hypotheses, determine areas to invest, and understand product strategy, metrics, and tactics. Learn more about QPS.

Product Review Document (PRD)

Contains all the requirements for what a product should do generally avoiding how the product will do it in order to allow designers and engineers to use their expertise to provide the optimal solution.

Jira

Collaboration tool designed to help teams track all activity used for bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management.

Bug

Coding error flaw, failure or fault in a computer program or system that causes an incorrect or unexpected result. Learn more about bugs.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Typically used to reference the revenue opportunity available for a product or service. TAM helps a business prioritize opportunities by serving as a quick metric of revenue potential.

Competitive landscape (CI)

Action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Used to monitor competitors’ products, advertising and platform used to influence strategic decision-making.

Product Positioning

Process to determine how to best communicate a products’ attributes to their target customers based on customer needs, competitive pressures, available communication channels and carefully crafted key messages. (Source: Chron)

Marketing Plan

Comprehensive document outlining advertising and marketing efforts for an upcoming year or product launch. Set within a specified timeframe, it describes business activities involved in accomplishing specific marketing objectives.

Win/Loss Analysis

Market research exercise that focuses on de-constructing how companies market and sell their products and services from the prospect’s perspective. The process typically entails conducting extensive telephone interviews with new clients or lost prospects. (Source: Anova Consulting Group)

Customer Benefit

A benefit could be tangible or functional. Perhaps it helps a person do something faster, easier or more accurately. It could be intangible or emotional, helping a person feel better or avoid feeling worse. (Source: Pragmatic Marketing)

Product Adoption

Product adoption is the process where a customer decides to purchase or use a new product or service.

Integrated Marketing

An approach that aligns all marketing messages consistently throughout all communications channels.

Positioning Document

Internal document that distills your formalized marketing message to the core allowing each channel group to work off of the same message while customizing it appropriately for each channel. Read more about a positioning document here.

Product Release Schedule

Identifies which products will be offered and the release period, or the interval until the time that the product is released.

Blocker

Something that if not fixed prevents a product launch.

Field Marketing

Traditional discipline that involves people distributing, selling or sampling products directly to customers via Field Marketing Representatives.

Field Marketing Representatives

Liaison between a company and the consumer, responsible for driving brand awareness through on-site, face-to-face interaction with consumers.

Sales Enablement

Provides sales people with the tools, content, and information they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process

Sales Toolkit

Designed to get new sales reps up to speed on a product and its set of features, sales process, buyer persona, sales metrics, talk tracks and competitive intel. For more on sales toolkits.

Battle cards

Concise compilation of information about your product, the market, your customers, and your competition. To learn more about battle cards. (Source: PandaDoc)

Pitch Deck

A customer facing presentation deck, often created using PowerPoint, Keynote or Prezi, used by sales to provide a prospect with a quick overview of your product.

ROI Calculator

A tool used by sales to show prospects exactly the type of return they can expect from the cost of the product/service.

Pricing Calculator

A tool used by your sales team to quickly calculate how much a prospect might have to pay to make a deal happen.

Qualified Customer List

A short list of accounts or people who meets certain characteristics (such as ability, authority, and inclination to purchase, and economic size) that qualify them as a good prospect.

Marketing Collateral

Blog posts, customer case studies, e-books and numerous resources used by customers and sales in their purchasing decision.

Customer Case Studies

Show where a customer was before and after they made a purchase and how your product or service helped them bridge the gap.

Co-Marketing

When two companies collaborate to promote a piece of content or product, and share the results of that promotion. (Source: Hubspot)

Internal Marketing

Promotion of a company’s objectives, products and services to employees within the organization. The purpose is to increase employee engagement with the company’s goals and fostering brand advocacy. (Source: Whatis.com)

Spiff

Refers to the practice of paying a small but immediate bonus to a salesperson with the sale of a product.

Release Announcement

A press release, news release, media release, press statement or video release directed at members of the news media to announce a new product launch.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

An index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures customer loyalty based on their perception. NPS measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. Respondents are grouped into promoters, passives, and detractors.

Calculation:

(Number of Promoters — Number of Detractors) / (Number of Respondents) x 100

Promoters

Promoters are loyal enthusiasts who will continue to buy your product or service and refer others, fueling adoption and growth.

Passives

Passives are customers who are satisfied but unenthusiastic and are vulnerable to competitive offerings. (Source: Nice Satmetrix)

Detractors

Detractors are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

While CSAT measures a users’ satisfaction with a product or service, NPS measures customer loyalty. CSAT is useful to understand what customers think of a specific product or service, or measure impact of changes to a specific product or service

Naming Exercise

Process of captures the personality of your product in order to identify the optimal product name. the To learn more about naming exercise.

Product Lifecycle

Sequence of stages from introduction to growth, maturity, and decline. (Source: QuickMBA)

Deep Dive

Technique used to provide a more extensive review of a products details.

Use Cases

Utilized to effectively convey the benefits a product or service offers to customers. Typically utilized in a marketing presentation or in other marketing collateral.

Customer Advisory Board (CAB)

A small group of customers who convene on a regular basis to advise on industry trends, business priorities, and strategic direction.

Friction

Holds a customer back from completing their intended action.

Alpha Tests

Testing to identify any possible issue or bug before releasing the product to users.

Beta Test

Second phase of testing where a sampling of the intended audience uses the product.

General Availability (GA)

The marketing phase when all commercialization activities have been completed and the product is available for purchase.

Go/No-Go Criteria

Used at every point of the decision making process using acceptable thresholds for issues or problems.

Voice of Customer (VOC)

Expectations, preferences, comments, of a product or service expressed by customers typically discovered via in-depth customer interviews.

User Interviews

User research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies. (Source: usability.gov)

Usability Testing

Method by which users of a product are asked to perform certain tasks in an effort to measure the product’s ease-of-use, task time, and the user’s perception of the experience. (Source: Software Testing Class)

Customer Journey

The complete sum of interactions customers experience with your company on their path to purchase and ownership.

Customer Journey Map

Visual representation of the process a customer or prospect goes through during their process of purchase and ownership.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Calculated by simply dividing all the costs spent on acquiring more customers (marketing expenses) by the number of customers acquired in the period the money was spent. (Source: Neil Patel)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Metric that represents the total net profit a company makes from any given customer. CLV is a projection to estimate a customer’s monetary worth to a business after factoring in the value of the relationship with a customer over time. (Source: TechTarget)

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

Person who has been deemed more likely to become a customer compared to others based on what web pages they visited, content they’ve downloaded, and other similar actions. Learn more about marketing qualified leads.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

A prospective customer who has been researched and vetted by an organization’s marketing department and then by its sales team — and is deemed ready for the next stage in the sales process. (Source: TechTarget)

Churn Rate

The churn rate is the percentage of subscribers to a service who discontinue their subscriptions to the service within a given time period. For a company to expand its clientele, its growth rate, as measured by the number of new customers, must exceed its churn rate. This rate is generally expressed as a percentage. (Source: Investopedia)

Freemium

A business model that offers basic services for free a user to try and more advanced or additional features at a premium which people pay for.

Behavioral Economics

A method of economic analysis that applies psychological insights into human behavior to explain economic decision-making. Learn more about Behavioral Economics.

Nudge

Concept in behavioral science, political theory and economics which proposes positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions influence the behavior and decision making of groups or individuals.

Job to Be Done (JTBD)

The jobs-to-be-done framework is a tool for evaluating the circumstances that arise in customers’ lives. Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the “average” customer in their category may do — but they often buy things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve. (Source: Clay Christensen)

Decoy Effect

Phenomenon where consumers have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically better.

Decision Paralysis

A complete lack of ability to decide when given too many choices or options.

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