Glossary: Outsourced Marketing & B2B Terms

Plain-English definitions of the marketing, e-commerce and B2B trade terms small manufacturers run into, from SEO and AEO to RFQ, MOQ and CAN-SPAM. Each entry is a short, standalone definition you can quote.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

AEO is the practice of optimizing content so AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) extract and cite it directly as the answer — centered on answer-first structure, structured data and entity clarity.

Alibaba Gold Supplier / TrustScore

Gold Supplier is Alibaba.com's paid supplier membership, and the platform also scores storefronts on performance such as product, marketing and trading activity. Buyers use these signals to judge how trustworthy a supplier is.

Related: Alibaba.com operations service

Amazon Business

Amazon Business is Amazon’s suite of features and tools for business-to-business (B2B) buying and selling. Business buyers get purchasing features such as quantity discounts, bulk packs and centralized approvals; sellers can set business-only prices and quantity discounts, list case packs and pallets, show certifications and respond to quote requests.

Related: Amazon seller & Amazon Business management

CAN-SPAM Act

CAN-SPAM is the US federal law governing commercial email, enforced by the FTC. It requires accurate header information, honest subject lines, identification as an ad, a valid postal address and a working opt-out that is honored promptly. It applies to B2B cold email sent to US recipients.

Canonical URL

A canonical URL is the preferred version of a page declared to search engines when the same content is reachable at multiple URLs, consolidating ranking signals and preventing duplicate-content dilution.

Cold Email

Cold email is outreach sent to a prospective buyer with no prior relationship. Effective cold email emphasizes personalization and relevance rather than mass-sent templates.

Related: Buyer prospecting & outreach service

CTR (Click-Through Rate)

CTR is the share of people who click your result after seeing it. Even with a good ranking, a low CTR usually means the title or description doesn't match search intent.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)

DKIM uses a cryptographic signature to verify that an email was not altered in transit and genuinely comes from the claimed domain — a key authentication mechanism for deliverability and trust.

DMARC

DMARC builds on SPF and DKIM, telling receivers how to handle messages that fail authentication (allow, quarantine or reject) and providing reports — protecting a domain from impersonation.

Email Deliverability

Deliverability is the rate at which outreach emails reach the inbox rather than the spam folder, driven by sending-domain reputation and authentication records like SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

FAQPage Schema

FAQPage is a structured-data type that marks up on-page questions and answers in machine-readable form, unlocking FAQ rich results in Google and raising the odds of citation by AI answer engines.

Fractional CMO

A fractional CMO is an experienced marketing executive who works part-time for one or more companies, usually on a retainer, setting marketing strategy, budgets and priorities and directing the people who carry them out. A fractional CMO typically leads the work rather than doing day-to-day execution.

Related: Guide: fractional CMO vs agency vs remote team

Fully Loaded Employee Cost

Fully loaded employee cost is the total annual cost of an employee to the employer: base salary plus employer-paid benefits and payroll taxes, and often recruiting, training, equipment, software and office space. It, not salary alone, is the figure to compare against outsourcing.

Related: Marketing hire cost calculator

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

GEO is the strategy of optimizing for generative AI search — engines that generate an answer rather than list links — so your brand is cited and recommended within AI-generated responses. Often used interchangeably with AEO.

Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews are AI-generated summary answers shown at the top of Google search results, citing several source pages. Being cited reaches buyers before they click any link.

hreflang

hreflang is an annotation that tells search engines which language/region versions of a page exist, so Google serves the right locale to each buyer and avoids duplicate-content issues on multilingual sites.

ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

An ICP is a profile of the customer type best suited to your product or service — covering industry, size, region and buying role — used to target prospecting precisely and lift reply and close rates.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing draws buyers in through SEO content, websites and resources so they find you on their own terms — building a compounding, long-term digital asset.

Incoterms

Incoterms are standardized trade terms from the International Chamber of Commerce (such as FOB, CIF, DDP) that define where responsibility for shipping, risk and cost passes between buyer and seller.

Knowledge Graph / Entity

A knowledge graph is the database search engines and AI use to understand real-world things (entities) and their relationships. Making your brand a clear, disambiguated entity is a prerequisite for being cited correctly by AI.

KPI Baseline

A KPI baseline is the recorded starting value of each key performance indicator before a project or engagement begins, such as current website traffic, inquiries or marketplace sales. Later results are measured against it, so progress can be shown rather than assumed.

Related: How KPIs and weekly reports work

Lead Time

Lead time is the time between placing an order and receiving it. In manufacturing it usually covers order processing, production and shipping, and buyers weigh a supplier’s quoted lead time alongside price and MOQ.

Line Card

A line card is a short document or web page listing the manufacturers, brands and product lines a distributor, trading company or manufacturers’ rep is authorized to sell. Buyers use it to check quickly whether a company carries what they need; manufacturers use it to judge whether a distributor is a good fit.

Related: Marketing for trading and distribution companies

LLM (Large Language Model)

An LLM is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate natural language. LLMs power AI assistants and answer engines such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a Markdown file at a site's root that gives AI crawlers a clean, curated map of the site and key company facts — modeled on robots.txt — to help AI find the most authoritative content.

Marketing Staff Augmentation

Marketing staff augmentation adds marketing capacity by bringing in external people who work inside a company’s own team, tools and processes, under its direction, for as long as the extra capacity is needed. Unlike handing the whole function to an agency, the company keeps day-to-day management.

Related: Dedicated marketing team member service

MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity)

MOQ is the smallest quantity a supplier is willing to produce per order. For smaller brands, a factory's MOQ often determines whether a partnership is feasible.

Outbound Prospecting

Outbound prospecting proactively reaches out to prospective buyers — via cold email or LinkedIn, for example — which gives you control over timing and targets, within the email laws of the recipient’s country.

Outsourced Marketing Team

An outsourced marketing team is an external group of marketers that a company engages to run some or all of its marketing, such as the website, SEO, content, marketplaces and email, instead of building that team in-house. The company sets goals and approves the work; the provider recruits, manages and replaces the people.

Related: Dedicated marketing team member service

RFQ (Request for Quotation)

An RFQ is a formal document in which a buyer asks suppliers to quote on specific products or parts — one of the strongest buying-intent signals in B2B procurement.

Related: Sales support: RFQ triage and follow-up

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is the practice of optimizing a website's content and technical structure so its pages rank higher in organic search results on engines like Google and get found by target buyers.

Related: Website & SEO service

SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

A SERP is the page returned after a query. Today it includes not just organic links but also AI Overviews, rich results and ads competing for attention.

Share of Voice

In an AEO context, Share of Voice is the proportion of a set of target questions for which your brand is cited by AI engines — a core metric for measuring GEO performance.

Shopify B2B

Shopify B2B is a suite of native Shopify features for selling business-to-business through the Shopify admin and online store. Merchants set up wholesale buyers as companies and tailor each one’s products, pricing, currency, payment and shipping methods and store content. It is available on selected Shopify plans, not all of them.

Related: Shopify store management service

SPF (Sender Policy Framework)

SPF is a DNS record listing the servers authorized to send email for a domain, helping receivers verify the sender and reducing spoofing and spam filtering.

Structured Data (JSON-LD)

Structured data marks up page content in a machine-readable format (commonly JSON-LD) using the Schema.org vocabulary, so search engines and AI can accurately understand what a page is and who published it.

Topic Cluster / Pillar

A topic cluster is a content structure where one core "pillar" page links to many related articles, signaling comprehensive topical authority to search engines and AI.

Virtual Assistant (VA)

A virtual assistant is a remote worker, usually a freelancer or provided through an agency, who handles administrative, scheduling, customer-service or routine marketing tasks for a business. VAs typically carry out defined tasks on instruction rather than owning a function and its results.