B2B SaaS Marketing Glossary

Creating highly customised marketing materials specifically designed to address the unique pain points, business goals, and strategic priorities of individual target accounts.

A coordinated strategy uniting marketing, sales, and customer success teams to deliver a seamless, personalised journey across every touchpoint for high-value accounts.

Concentrating marketing and sales resources on a defined set of target accounts, using personalised campaigns designed to resonate with each account’s specific context.

Leveraging large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence to produce high volumes of marketing assets like blogs, emails, and social posts with minimal human oversight.

Using advanced machine learning algorithms to analyse behavioral data and historical patterns, accurately predicting which prospects are most likely to convert into customers.

Anchor text strategy involves deliberately selecting clickable hyperlink words to provide search engines and users clear context about the linked destination page’s content.

Annual Contract Value measures the average yearly revenue generated from a single customer contract, excluding one-time fees and accounting only for recurring subscription costs.

Annual Recurring Revenue tracks the total predictable revenue a SaaS company expects to receive from all customers during a single twelve-month fiscal year period.

The analytical framework used to determine which specific marketing touchpoints should receive credit for a customer’s conversion throughout the entire sales funnel.

A dynamic system assigning numerical values to prospects based on specific digital interactions, measuring their engagement intensity and readiness to purchase your software.

Bottom-of-funnel refers to the final stage of the buyer journey where prospects are actively comparing specific solutions and preparing to make a purchase.

External datasets capturing signals of companies actively researching your software category across third-party websites, indicating they are currently in a buying cycle.

The strategic visualisation of every touchpoint a customer experiences, from initial problem awareness through to the final purchase and long-term product advocacy.

Brand equity represents the commercial value derived from consumer perception of your brand name, rather than from the actual product or service itself.

Cohort analysis is a method of behavioral analytics that breaks down customer data into related groups, allowing you to track their specific behaviors over time.

Churn rate measures the percentage of customers who stop using your software or cancel their subscriptions within a specific, clearly defined time period.

Systematically collecting and analysing information about competitors’ products, pricing, and marketing strategies to inform your strategic decisions.

Content syndication is the process of republishing your original content on established third-party websites to reach wider audiences and generate additional qualified leads.

Conversion rate represents the percentage of website or landing page visitors who complete a desired action, such as signing up or requesting a demo.

A cross-selling strategy involves encouraging existing customers to purchase complementary products or add-ons in addition to their current subscription to increase overall revenue.

Customer acquisition cost calculates the total expense involved in convincing a potential customer to purchase, including all marketing and sales spend combined.

Customer advocacy focuses on building strong relationships with satisfied users, transforming them into active promoters who enthusiastically recommend your product to peers.

A customer health score is a consolidated metric used to predict subscription renewal likelihood based on usage patterns, engagement levels, and support interactions.

Customer lifetime value estimates the total revenue a business can reasonably expect from a single customer account throughout their entire relationship with your company.

Dark social refers to the untraceable sharing of content through private channels like direct messages, emails, Slack groups, and other closed communities.

Data Enrichment is the process of enhancing existing customer data with third-party information to provide a more complete view of each prospect and their organisational context.

Demand capture focuses on identifying and converting prospects who are already actively searching for solutions to problems your software is designed to solve.

Demand generation creates long-term interest in your products through strategic marketing initiatives that build brand awareness and develop qualified lead pipelines over time.

A discovery call is an initial conversation between a sales representative and a prospect designed to determine if there’s genuine mutual fit.

Dynamic content is website or email material that automatically changes based on the specific behavior, preferences, and data of each individual user viewing it.

Expansion revenue is the additional income generated from existing customers through upsells, cross-sells, or adding more users to their current subscription plans.

Evergreen Content is marketing material that remains relevant and valuable over a long period, continuing to drive traffic and leads without updates.

Engagement rate measures the level of interaction your content receives from audiences, including likes, shares, comments, clicks, and other meaningful actions.

Email deliverability measures your marketing emails’ ability to successfully reach recipients’ inboxes without being blocked, filtered, or automatically marked as spam.

The percentage of your total user base actively engaging with a specific software functionality within a set timeframe to measure its utility.

A marketing approach that highlights technical product capabilities to show exactly how specific tools solve user problems and improve daily workflow efficiency.

Field Marketing involves local, person-to-person engagement through regional events, executive dinners, and conferences to build trust and accelerate specific high-value deal cycles.

Categorising B2B prospects using organisational data points like industry, revenue, location, and company size to improve marketing and sales targeting.

First-click attribution assigns one hundred percent of conversion credit to the very first marketing touchpoint a prospect had with your brand.

A first-party data strategy focuses on collecting, managing, and utilising information directly from your own customers and website visitors to improve marketing effectiveness.

Flywheel marketing is a business model using the momentum of satisfied customers to drive referrals and repeat purchases, creating self-sustaining continuous growth.

The process of refining the user’s initial experience within a trial period to ensure they find value quickly and convert into a paying subscriber.

Offering a basic version of your software for free to build a large user base, while charging for advanced features and scale.

Percentage of users on a free version of your software who eventually upgrade to a paid subscription.

Streamlining the initial user setup by removing complex hurdles, ensuring new customers can start using and deriving value from the software immediately.

Full-funnel attribution is a measurement approach tracking every customer interaction from initial brand awareness all the way through to final purchase conversion.

Integrating competitive or reward-based mechanics like progress bars and badges into your platform to turn mundane user tasks into engaging, habitual experiences.

Offering high-value, exclusive industry intelligence behind a lead form to exchange your brand’s expertise for a prospect’s valuable professional contact information.

Optimising your digital footprint to ensure AI models like ChatGPT or Gemini cite your brand as the authoritative solution for industry-specific queries.

A marketing strategy that involves dividing your target market into different groups based on their specific physical locations, regions, or territorial boundaries.

A go-to-market motion is the specific strategy and set of coordinated processes a company uses to deliver its value proposition to customers.

A process of rapid, data-driven experimentation across marketing and product channels to identify the most efficient levers for scaling your user base.

An integrated, data-centric approach focused on optimising the entire customer lifecycle, prioritising long-term retention and revenue expansion over simple lead generation metrics.

Gross Revenue Retention measures the percentage of recurring revenue retained from your existing customer base, excluding any expansion or upsell revenue gains.

GTM alignment ensures marketing, sales, and customer success teams work toward identical goals using shared data, messaging, and coordinated strategies.

Search queries that show a buyer’s immediate readiness to purchase, often including commercial modifiers like “comparison,” “trial,” “pricing,” or specific brand names.

Developing marketing material anchored in authentic lived experience, original research, and expert opinions to build emotional resonance and trust in automated markets.

High-velocity sales is a streamlined approach designed to close large volumes of smaller deals quickly through automated outreach and highly efficient processes.

Heatmap analysis is a data visualisation technique that tracks where website visitors click, move, and scroll, revealing the most and least engaging page elements.

Ideal customer profile is a detailed description of the specific type of company that would realise the most value from your software product.

Inbound marketing uses magnetic content to draw potential buyers toward your brand naturally by solving their problems before a sales conversation even begins.

This strategy identifies and reaches potential buyers by analysing digital signals, like specific searches or page visits, that indicate they are actively shopping for solutions.

B2B Influencer Marketing involves partnering with industry experts and thought leaders to amplify your brand message and build credibility with their audiences.

Interactive content requires active engagement from audiences, such as quizzes, calculators, or assessments, to provide personalised value or specific insights.

Internal linking involves connecting one page of a website to another on the same domain, helping users navigate while strengthening site-wide search authority.

Job-to-be-done is a framework that focuses on the specific progress a user wants to make, viewing software as a “hire” to accomplish a vital task.

Joint Marketing is a collaborative effort between two or more companies to cross-promote each other’s products to their respective audiences for mutual benefit.

J-curve growth describes a pattern where companies experience an initial period of losses or slow progress followed by dramatic, rapid expansion.

JSON-LD is a structured data format used to help search engines understand website content, improving the appearance of results with rich snippets.

Keyword cannibalisation occurs when multiple pages on your website target the same keyword, causing them to compete against each other in search results.

Keyword Clustering is the practice of grouping related search terms together to create a single, comprehensive piece of content that targets multiple keywords.

Numerical SEO metric estimating how challenging it would be to rank on the first page of search results.

Average number of times a specific search query is entered into search engines over a defined monthly period.

A KPI dashboard is a visual display of your most important marketing metrics, enabling real-time monitoring and data-driven decision-making across teams.

A self-service online library of information about a product, service, or topic that helps users solve technical problems independently without needing to contact your support team.

A free resource or service offered in exchange for collecting contact details, such as ebooks, templates, or tools.

A methodology used to rank prospects against a scale representing the perceived value each lead brings to your org.

Linear attribution is a multi-touch model that gives equal credit to every marketing touchpoint a customer interacts with before converting to a sale.

Long-Tail Keywords are longer and more specific search phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase.

Marketing Operations refers to the people, processes, and technology that power a marketing department and ensure it operates efficiently and achieves goals.

A messaging framework is a structured guide defining a brand’s unique value proposition, key benefits, and specific language for different audiences.

Mid-Funnel describes the stage where prospects have identified their problem and are actively researching and evaluating different solutions to solve their needs.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the total amount of predictable revenue that a SaaS company expects to receive every single month from active subscriptions.

Multi-Touch Attribution is a marketing effectiveness measurement that assigns value to all interactions a prospect has with your brand before final conversion.

A Multi-touch Campaign uses several different marketing channels and interactions to engage a prospect and move them steadily through the sales funnel.

Native advertising is a form of paid media where the advertisement matches the visual style and editorial tone of the platform where it is being displayed.

NLP SEO is the practice of optimising website content for search engine algorithms that use artificial intelligence to understand human language and intent.

Negative churn occurs when additional revenue from existing customers exceeds the revenue lost from customers who canceled subscriptions during that period.

Net Promoter Score is a standardised metric that measures customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking how likely users are to recommend your product.

Newsjacking is the practice of aligning your brand’s content with current news events or trending topics to gain immediate attention and engagement.

A niche market strategy focuses all marketing efforts on a specific, well-defined segment of the population with unique needs and preferences.

Omnichannel marketing provides a seamless and integrated customer experience across all channels, including email, social media, web, and even offline physical touchpoints.

On page SEO is the technical practice of optimising individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engine results.

Off page SEO refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages and visibility.

Opportunity-to-win ratio measures the percentage of sales opportunities in your pipeline that eventually result in a closed-won deal for your company.

Outbound sales involves proactively reaching out to potential customers who have not yet expressed interest in your product through cold calls or emails.

Organic search growth is the increase in website traffic from non-paid search engine results through effective SEO and high-quality content marketing.

Open Rate Optimisation is the process of improving the percentage of email recipients who open your messages through better subject lines and timing.

Paid Acquisition is the process of gaining new customers through paid channels such as social media ads, search engine marketing, and sponsorships.

Performance Marketing is a comprehensive term for online marketing and advertising programs where advertisers pay only when a specific action is completed.

Pipeline Velocity measures how quickly leads move through your sales funnel and how much revenue you can expect to generate over time.

Product Led Growth is a business strategy that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion.

The degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand and solves a significant problem for its customer base.

A Product Qualified Lead is a user who has experienced the value of your product through a trial or a freemium model.

A sales prospect that has been vetted and confirmed to have a genuine need, budget, and authority to purchase.

The underlying goal a user has when typing a search term into a search engine, such as learning, comparing, or purchasing.

Reach is the total number of unique people who see your content, while frequency is the number of times they see it.

A structured system designed to incentivise and reward your happiest customers for introducing your software to their professional network and business peers.

Retention Marketing focuses on activities designed to keep existing customers engaged and satisfied to reduce churn and increase their long-term lifetime value.

Revenue Attribution is the process of identifying which marketing and sales touchpoints contributed most to a specific sale or a new customer.

Return on investment is a performance measure evaluating the efficiency of an investment or comparing the efficiency of multiple different investments.

The SaaS Rule of 40 is a financial health metric stating that a company’s combined growth rate and profit margin should exceed forty percent.

A Sales Development Rep is a sales specialist focusing on outbound prospecting, lead qualification, and moving potential customers further into the sales funnel.

Sales Enablement provides your sales team with the resources, tools, and content they need to engage prospects effectively and close more business deals.

A Sales-Qualified Lead is a prospective customer who has been thoroughly vetted by marketing and sales teams and is ready for direct contact.

Sales-Marketing Alignment is the collaborative process where both departments work toward shared revenue goals and use the same data to track progress.

The Search Engine Results Page is the list of results that a search engine displays in response to a user's specific query today.

Service-Led Expansion uses professional services or expert consulting to deepen customer relationships and identify opportunities for additional software seat or feature sales.

Share of Voice measures the percentage of the total market conversation or advertising space that your brand occupies compared to your primary competitors.

Social Selling is the practice of using a brand’s social media channels to connect with prospects, develop a connection, and build brand authority.

The underlying ecosystem of software tools, API integrations, and data platforms that power a company’s marketing, sales, and internal product development operations.

The process of optimising a website’s backend infrastructure to help search engine spiders crawl and index the site more efficiently and accurately.

Thought Leadership is a marketing strategy that establishes an individual or company as an expert and an authoritative voice within a specific industry.

Time-to-Value measures the duration between a customer’s initial purchase and the moment they realise the first tangible benefit or success from your software.

Top-of-Funnel refers to the initial stage of the buyer journey where marketing efforts focus on building awareness and attracting a broad target audience.

Total addressable market represents the total revenue opportunity available if your company achieved 100% market share in its specific product category.

Topic Cluster Architecture organises website content into groups of related pages that link back to a central, comprehensive pillar page for better SEO.

Total Contract Value represents the entire worth of a customer contract, including recurring revenue and one time fees over the agreement’s full term.

Trial-to-paid conversion rate measures the percentage of users who move from a free trial version of your software to a paid subscription.

A Unique Selling Proposition is the specific benefit or feature that makes your software stand out from the competition and provides distinct value.

Unit economics describes the direct revenues and costs associated with a particular business model, expressed on a per-customer or per-unit basis.

Usage-Based Pricing is a model where customers pay based on how much of the service they consume, such as data used or transactions.

User Experience encompasses all aspects of an end-user’s interaction with a company, its services, and its products, focusing on usability and overall satisfaction.

User Generated Content is any form of content, such as reviews, testimonials, or social posts, that is created by customers rather than brands.

User Interface is the specific space where interactions between humans and machines occur, focusing on the visual design, layout, and interactive elements used.

Value-based pricing sets product cost based on the perceived or estimated value to customers rather than production cost or competitor pricing.

Vertical SaaS refers to software solutions designed specifically for a single industry or niche, such as healthcare, real estate, or professional law services.

Video Marketing uses video content to promote a brand, educate prospects, and drive sales through platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, or on-site embedded players.

A Viral Loop is a mechanism where existing users of a product encourage new users to join, creating a self-sustaining cycle of organic growth.

Voice of the Customer is a research technique that captures the detailed requirements, expectations, and feedback of customers to inform brand strategic decisions.

Voice Search Optimisation is the process of tailoring your content to rank for conversational, natural language queries made through voice activated digital assistants.

A Webinar is an online seminar or presentation used to educate prospects, demonstrate product value, and generate qualified leads for the sales team.

A Whitepaper is an authoritative, in-depth report that addresses a specific industry problem and proposes a comprehensive solution or unique technical perspective.

Win-Loss Analysis is the systematic process of investigating why sales deals were either won or lost to improve future sales and marketing strategies.

The organic, unpaid spread of a brand’s reputation through customer recommendations, social media mentions, and professional networking within a specific industry.

Using technology to perform repetitive marketing and sales tasks without human intervention, improving efficiency, speed, and consistency across the entire organisation.

Experience Management is the practice of monitoring and improving every interaction a person has with a company to increase loyalty and brand value.

XML Sitemap Optimisation involves refining the file that lists your website’s important pages to ensure search engines can discover and index them easily.

Year-over-Year is a financial comparison that looks at data from one specific period compared to the same period in the previous year.

YouTube Shorts are vertical, short form videos that allow brands to reach new audiences and drive engagement through quick, high impact visual updates.

Zero-Click Content is marketing material that provides full value directly on the platform where it is shared, without requiring a user to click.

Zero-Party Data is information that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand, such as preferences, purchase intentions, and personal context.