Three marketing terms you should know explained in simple terms

Marketing is a really confusing profession. When I was a senior in college, I was so excited to get a job offer and I told me friend about it. His questions to me were, “What is a marketer? What are you going to do? Is it like advertising or something?” Truthfully, I had no idea. I was just happy to even get a job — this was in 2004 when the job market wasn’t so hot.

But even after I took the job and even years later yet after going to business school and working in marketing at Google, I still didn’t really understand what marketing was. It seemed like a series of activities. Like running ads. Or putting on events. Or writing copy.

In fact, what marketing is didn’t click for me until many years later when I was running my own startup and could start to see the big picture of what I was trying to achieve with marketing. In addition, it would be years after that before I really understood what were the most important things to consider in marketing and what could generally be ignored? There are so many terms in marketing. There are so many things you can track in your funnel. It’s all overwhelming.

So, over the last few days, I’ve put together a handful of videos on marketing 101 for startups. Just 3 terms will get you 90% of the way there. And things you need to consider as a business owner w/ regard to those 3 terms as well are covered in these videos.

What is marketing?

Three simple terms in marketing:

What is a payback period?

What is the cost to acquire a customer (CAC)?

What is lifetime value of a customer (LTV)?

Why cohorts are important in looking at your lifetime value?

Wrapping up the three key terms in marketing

Today I just wanted to get the basics of marketing out of the way. But now that we have three terms that we can use, subsequent marketing posts can get a lot more interesting.

If you are not already on my newsletter, consider subscribing for more tactical info on fundraising and customer acquisition: