glossary

Demand generation glossary

Plain-English definitions of the demand generation, funnel, and martech terms that matter — from MQL and SQL to CAC, pipeline, and attribution.

By The Marketinque TeamReviewed June 2026

Demand Generation: The marketing discipline of creating and capturing interest in a product across the entire buyer journey, so qualified buyers arrive ready to engage.
MQL: Marketing Qualified Lead — a lead whose engagement signals (content, fit, behavior) meet the threshold marketing agrees is worth passing toward sales.
SQL: Sales Qualified Lead — an MQL that sales has accepted as a genuine opportunity worth active pursuit.
Dark Funnel: The untrackable touchpoints — private communities, word of mouth, podcasts, peer reviews — that influence buyers before any attributable click.
TOFU / MOFU / BOFU: Top, middle, and bottom of funnel — shorthand for the awareness, consideration, and decision stages content and offers are mapped to.
CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost — the fully loaded sales and marketing spend required to win one new customer, usually paired with LTV.
LTV: Lifetime Value — the total gross profit a customer is expected to generate before churning; the ceiling on what you can afford to spend acquiring them.
ROAS: Return on Ad Spend — revenue attributed to an ad campaign divided by its cost; the standard efficiency yardstick for paid media.
Pipeline: The total value of open opportunities in the sales process; the demand-gen target that converts into bookings over time.
Attribution: The practice of assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touches that influenced it, using models from first-touch to multi-touch.
Lifecycle Marketing: The discipline that runs the funnel after the sale: onboarding customers to first value, growing retention and expansion, and turning satisfaction into advocacy.
Lead Generation: Lead generation (lead gen) is the practice of converting interest into contactable records — form fills, tool signups, and demo requests — that sales or nurture can then follow up with.
Growth Marketing: Growth marketing is an experiment-led practice that applies testing, data, and iteration across the whole customer journey — from first touch through retention and referral — rather than a single channel or campaign.
Positioning: The deliberate choice of the place a product occupies in a buyer’s mind: the category it competes in, who it is for, and the one difference that makes it the obvious pick.
ICP: Ideal Customer Profile: the description of the account that gets the most value from your product fastest, used to focus targeting, messaging, and qualification.
NRR: Net Revenue Retention: this period’s recurring revenue from an existing customer cohort divided by that cohort’s revenue a period ago, counting expansion, contraction, and churn but no new logos.
Churn: The rate at which customers or their revenue leave: logo churn counts the customers lost in a period, revenue churn counts the MRR they take with them.
Contributor Quality Score (CQS): Reddit’s hidden, site-wide trust score for an account, used by moderators and automod to filter, flag, or allow content — the gate every community-marketing post passes before humans see it.
The 90/10 rule: Reddit’s self-promotion norm: at most one in ten of your contributions should promote your own work — and the other nine must be genuine participation, not filler.
Stealth marketing: Promoting a product while concealing your affiliation with it — undisclosed founder posts, fake “satisfied user” reviews, sock-puppet recommendations. Against FTC guidance, platform rules, and increasingly, platform detection.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization — the work of getting pages crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines, and clicked once they rank. It is the retrieval layer every other search discipline draws from.
SMO: Social Media Optimization — making a product discoverable, shareable and talked about on social platforms. Coined in 2006 for share buttons and profile hygiene; it matters again because those platforms are now where buyers search and where assistants read.
AEO: Answer Engine Optimization — writing and structuring content so an engine can lift one passage as the direct answer to a question, instead of returning your page as one result among ten.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimization — influencing what a generative system says about you, not merely whether it can extract you. The term comes from a 2024 KDD paper that benchmarked which content changes actually move visibility inside generated answers.
DEO: Decision Engine Optimization — making a product legible enough that an AI assistant can verify it meets a buyer’s stated constraints and recommend it. An emerging practitioner framework rather than an established standard, and worth reading as one.
SXO: Search Experience Optimization — treating the click and what follows it as one job: the page has to satisfy the query it won, not just rank for it. In practice it is search and conversion work under a single name.
Governed Autonomy: An operating model for AI agents in which every action is allowed to run on its own only by an explicit rule, per action: some ask each time, some go out after a window you can cancel, and some run alone once they have earned it.
AI Marketing Agent: Software that takes a marketing goal and works toward it in steps: it keeps a plan, picks the next task, researches, drafts, and, where it is allowed to, publishes, sends or spends, instead of answering one prompt at a time.

Part of the demand generation hub.