The marketing terms we hear all the time (explained with examples)
At some point, you’ll probably fall into a bit of a marketing rabbit hole.
You start off writing your website or a caption… and next thing you’re trying to figure out messaging, positioning, tone of voice, UX.
You sort of understand what they mean. But also, not fully 🤔
Trust me: you’re not alone. So many people throw these words around without fully understanding their meaning. The result? A whole lot of confusion & misinformation. So, to avoid adding to that, consider this your no-nonsense guide to the most common marketing terms, what they actually mean and how they might apply to your business.
Let’s start with: Messaging
Messaging is one of those terms that sounds straightforward, but rarely feels it when you actually sit down to write.
It’s not your headline or your tagline. It’s the overall way you talk about your business. What you choose to emphasise, how you explain what you do, and the language you come back to again and again.
Where this shows up most clearly is on a homepage.
I’ll often land on a site and see something like: “Helping businesses grow with confidence”
It sounds fine. It’s polished. But it doesn’t really tell you anything. Grow how? With what? For who?
So you scroll. Then scroll again. Then maybe click into services to try and piece it together. That’s a messaging issue.
You’ll usually feel it on your own side too. Writing takes longer than it should. You keep reworking the same lines. Nothing sounds wrong, but nothing feels particularly strong either.
That’s usually a sign the problem isn’t the writing. It’s that the core message hasn’t been nailed down yet. When it is, everything else becomes much easier. You’re not figuring it out as you go. You’re just expressing something that already makes sense.
Positioning
This is the one that trips people up the most. Not because it’s complicated. More because of how people approach it.
Most businesses don’t want to narrow things down. So they default to something vague and generic like: “We work with businesses of all sizes across a range of industries”. Sure, it feels safe and covers everything. But when you read it as a potential customer, it doesn’t really tell you anything.
If I’m a service-based business owner, I don’t know if you’re actually for me. Same if I’m a startup. Or more established. There’s nothing in it that makes me think, this is exactly what I need. So you keep reading. Or you leave.
Now compare that to: “Copywriting for service-based businesses”
It’s clearer straight away. Some people will rule themselves out. But the right people won’t have to think twice. They’ll recognise themselves in it. That’s the job.
Positioning isn’t about covering as much ground as possible. It’s about making it obvious who you’re for, so the right people don’t have to work it out.
Brand voice
Brand voice often gets reduced to a few words on a document somewhere. Friendly. Professional. Approachable. But in reality, it shows up in much smaller, more practical ways.
For example, I’ll often see brands say they want to sound “clear and down-to-earth”, but then their website is full of lines like: “We leverage innovative solutions to deliver scalable results”.
That’s not a tone issue. That’s a voice issue.
Your voice is reflected in how you actually write. For example:
Short sentences vs long ones
Plain language vs jargon
Direct vs slightly softened
It’s less about how you describe your voice, and more about whether it holds up across everything you put out. You can usually tell when it doesn’t. A website that sounds one way, emails that sound another, and social posts that feel like a third version again. When voice is clear, everything feels more consistent. Not identical, but recognisable.
Tone of voice
Tone is where your brand voice adapts to the moment. Your overall voice might stay consistent, but how it comes across should shift depending on what’s happening and what the person on the other side needs. This is easiest to spot when you look at different parts of a website side by side.
Your homepage might feel more structured and considered, because it’s introducing what you do. A confirmation message after someone books a call can be shorter and more direct. An error message, on the other hand, usually needs to do a bit more work. It has to explain what went wrong and reassure the person at the same time.
Where this tends to fall down is when everything is written in the exact same tone, regardless of context. I’ll often see brands use the same polished, slightly formal tone everywhere. Even in places where it doesn’t really fit.
For example, a form error that says: “There appears to be an issue with your submission”
Technically fine. But not especially helpful. Compare that to: “Something’s not quite right here. Let’s try again.” Same message. But one feels easier to deal with.
That’s tone doing its job. It’s not about sounding more casual or more professional. It’s about matching the moment. What does the person need right now? Clarity? Reassurance? A nudge? Good tone answers that, rather than defaulting to a single way of writing across everything.
Value proposition
Your value proposition is your answer to: Why should someone choose you?
And this is where things tend to drift into vague territory very quickly.
I’ll often see something like: “Helping you grow your business with tailored solutions”
Again, nothing technically wrong with it. But it could apply to almost anyone. So the reader has to do the work of figuring out whether it’s relevant.
A stronger version usually sounds simpler, not more impressive: “Website copy for service-based businesses” or: “Financial advice for freelancers and self-employed professionals” Now it’s clear what the business does and who it’s for. That’s what makes a value proposition useful. It helps someone quickly decide whether to keep reading or move on.
CTA (Call to Action)
A CTA is the point where someone decides what to do next. And this is where small details make a bigger difference than people expect.
“Learn more” and “Get started” aren’t confusing. But they do create a small pause. Learn more about what? Get started doing what? That pause is usually only a second. But it’s still friction.
Now compare that to:
“See pricing”
“Book a discovery call”
“Download the guide”
There’s no interpretation needed. The action is obvious.
I’ll often see websites where everything else is fairly clear, but the CTAs are vague. And that’s enough to slow things down. A good CTA doesn’t try to be clever. It just removes that extra moment of thinking.
UX (User Experience)
UX is how your website feels to use. Not just how it looks, but how easy it is to move through and understand. From a copy point of view, UX usually shows up in small moments of hesitation.
A button that isn’t quite clear.
A form that asks for a phone number without saying why.
A headline that sounds good but doesn’t actually explain anything.
Individually, none of these feel like a big deal. But when they start to stack up, the experience becomes harder than it should be.
I’ve worked on sites where nothing is “wrong”, but everything feels slightly effortful. You have to read twice. You have to think a bit more than you expected to. That’s usually where people drop off. Good UX copy removes that effort. It makes things feel obvious.
Conversion
Conversion is when someone takes the action you want them to take. And it’s often treated as a numbers problem. More traffic. More testing. More tweaks.
But a lot of the time, it comes back to something simpler: Does the person fully understand what you’re offering and what happens next?
I’ve seen service pages with plenty of traffic but very few enquiries. And when you look at them closely, the issue isn’t visibility. It’s clarity. The offer isn’t fully clear, the process isn’t explained and next step feels slightly uncertain. So people don’t act. Not necessarily because they’re not interested but because it didn’t feel straightforward enough.
Funnel
The marketing funnel is usually shown as a neat, step-by-step journey: Awareness → Consideration → Decision.
It looks tidy, logical, easy to create content around. But it doesn’t really reflect how people behave.
Someone might find you on Instagram, click through to your website, leave, then come back a week later after seeing your name again somewhere else. Or they land straight on a service page from Google, already half-sold, just looking for reassurance before they take the next step. Or they read three different pages in the “wrong” order, skip your homepage entirely, and still end up enquiring. It’s rarely linear.
The issue with thinking too rigidly about funnels is that you start writing for stages instead of people. “Top of funnel” content. “Middle of funnel” pages. “Bottom of funnel” CTAs. But when someone lands on your website, you don’t actually know where they are. They might be brand new. They might already trust you. They might just need one small thing clarified before they act.
That’s why each page has to do a bit more work. It needs to make sense on its own. It needs to explain enough. It needs to give someone a way forward, whether they’re just arriving or already halfway there. Because in reality, people aren’t moving neatly through a funnel. They’re dipping in and out, picking up what they need, and deciding when they’re ready.
Need 1:1 support figuring out what this actually looks like for your business?
If this all sounds familiar but things still aren’t quite clicking, it’s usually not about learning more terms. It’s about how they actually show up in your business.
Book a CopyKate Hotline session: a 1:1 hour where we’ll work through it together.
