Marketing

The marketing funnel maps the customer journey from first awareness to purchase. Each stage narrows — typically 100 visitors → 10 leads → 1 customer (a 1% visitor-to-customer rate). Understanding where people drop off is the fastest way to grow revenue without spending more on ads.

Conversion Rate = (Next Stage ÷ Previous Stage) × 100%

Content marketing creates valuable, relevant content to attract and retain a target audience. Unlike paid ads that stop working when you stop paying, content compounds — a single blog post can generate leads for years. Companies with active blogs generate 67% more leads than those without.

Content ROI = (Revenue from Organic Traffic − Content Creation Cost) ÷ Content Creation Cost × 100

SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engines for terms your customers are searching. Unlike paid ads, organic search traffic is 'free' after the initial investment and compounds over time. SEO drives 53% of all website traffic, and the first Google result gets 31.7% of all clicks. For SaaS companies, SEO-driven customers have a 14.6% close rate vs 1.7% for outbound leads.

SEO ROI = (Organic Traffic × Conversion Rate × Customer Value − SEO Cost) ÷ SEO Cost × 100

Paid acquisition is spending money on ads to acquire customers — Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. The core equation is simple: if you spend $100 on ads and get 2 customers, your paid CAC is $50. The channel is scalable but has diminishing returns — the first $10K/month is often 3-5x more efficient than the next $100K/month because you exhaust the best-fit audiences first.

ROAS = Revenue from Paid Customers ÷ Ad Spend

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of visitors who take a desired action — signing up, purchasing, or subscribing. If your site gets 10,000 visitors and 200 convert, your conversion rate is 2%. Improving that to 3% gives you 50% more customers with zero additional ad spend. CRO typically delivers 2-5x better ROI than increasing traffic because it compounds on every future visitor.

Conversion Rate = (Conversions ÷ Total Visitors) × 100

Brand positioning is the deliberate process of occupying a distinct, highly defensible space in the minds of your target market relative to your competitors. It defines exactly who a product is for, what unique value it provides, and why it is objectively superior to the alternatives.

Email marketing is the highest-ROI digital channel because you own the distribution. Unlike social media algorithms that can throttle your reach overnight, your email list is a direct, algorithmic-free line to your audience. It encompasses newsletters (broadcasting), automated sequences (drip campaigns), and lifecycle triggers (abandoned cart, re-engagement).

A viral loop is a self-reinforcing mechanism engineered directly into a product that naturally encourages existing users to recruit new users as a byproduct of using the core features. When the Viral Coefficient (K-Factor) exceeds 1.0, every new user brings in more than one additional user, resulting in exponential, zero-CAC growth.

Social Media Marketing involves creating and sharing content on platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok to achieve branding and marketing goals. It requires balancing organic brand-building with paid targeted campaigns, aiming to generate an Engaged Follower Rate above 3% and drive direct measurable conversions.

Influencer Marketing relies on partnering with individuals who have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche. Instead of selling directly to consumers, brands leverage the trust and authority the influencer has already built with their audience to drive awareness, trust, and ultimately, sales.

Affiliate marketing is a purely performance-based acquisition channel where a business pays external partners (affiliates) a commission for generating specific, measurable actions (usually sales or leads). It fundamentally shifts the risk of marketing spend away from the brand and onto the partner, functioning as a variable cost rather than fixed advertising overhead.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a highly focused B2B strategy where marketing and sales teams align to target a specific, predefined list of high-value client accounts, rather than casting a wide net to capture individual leads. In ABM, you treat each highly valuable account as a 'market of one', creating personalized campaigns tailored specifically to that company's unique needs.

Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional, high-impact marketing strategy designed to generate maximum brand exposure and word-of-mouth (virality) with minimal financial investment. It relies on creativity, surprise, and hijacking existing public attention rather than buying traditional media placements.

Growth hacking is a specialized intersection of marketing, data analytics, and software engineering. It focuses solely on rapid, scalable growth across the entire funnel—from acquisition to retention. Growth hackers run constant, high-tempo A/B tests on product features and marketing channels, seeking asymmetrical returns (hacks) that cost little but generate massive user acquisition.

Public Relations (PR) is the strategic management of a company's public image and narrative. Unlike paid advertising, PR focuses on 'Earned Media'—convincing journalists, influencers, and publications to write about your company organically. PR provides massive third-party credibility that paid ads can never buy.

Performance marketing is a comprehensive term for online marketing and advertising programs where advertisers pay only when a specific action occurs. These actions include a generated lead, a sale, a click, and more. Unlike traditional advertising (like TV or print) where you pay for 'impressions' regardless of results, performance marketing is highly measurable and optimized entirely around ROI (Return on Investment).