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GLOSSARY · 35 DEFINITIONS
Marketing and customer experience terms, explained simply
Marketing and customer experience are full of technical terms. We are convinced that a fruitful collaboration starts with a clear understanding of the concepts. This glossary explains each term concisely, from local SEO to customer loyalty, so that you always know what we are talking about, and why.
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THE FUNDAMENTALS
Marketing: the fundamentals
Marketing strategy
Marketing strategy is the reasoned choice of your markets, your targets and the means to reach them. It comes before any action: without it, campaigns pile up with no direction. It turns into a prioritised roadmap, with measurable objectives and a schedule. Areta marketing and customer experience supports SMEs, hotels and restaurants, from the Basque Country to the Bigorre.
Our marketing approach for SMEs and local servicesMarketing positioning
Positioning is the place your brand holds in your customers' minds relative to your competitors. It answers a simple question: why choose you rather than someone else? A sustainable positioning rests on a real customer preference and on a proven capability of the company.
Marketing mix
The marketing mix is the coherent combination of action levers: offer, price, distribution, communication. The most common mistake is to work on communication alone, without first deciding the price and the offer it has to carry.
Brand platform
The brand platform is the reference document that sets out a brand's identity: mission, vision, values, promise, tone and proof. It ensures that every channel, from the website to social media, tells the same story.
Brand strategy applied to hospitalityBuyer persona
A buyer persona is a typical portrait of a customer, built from real data: expectations, hesitations, vocabulary, buying journey. It helps you write for someone rather than for everyone.
Marketing consulting
Marketing consulting means diagnosing a company's situation, recommending priorities and framing how to carry them out, without permanently taking the place of in-house teams. A marketing consultant works on a one-off assignment; an agency can then carry out all or part of the roadmap.
Outsourced marketing director
An outsourced marketing director leads a company's marketing from the outside, a few days a month, for a fixed fee. The arrangement brings the function of a marketing director without the recruitment, for SMEs whose volume does not justify a full-time hire.
Our outsourced marketing director offerSocial media management
Community management is the day-to-day running of a brand's communities on social media: content creation, publishing, replies, moderation. Its aim is not follower numbers but useful awareness, the kind that generates enquiries.
Our community management offerCampaign management
Campaign management is the end-to-end running of a campaign: objective, targeting, budget, schedule, delivery, measurement of results and corrections. A campaign without a measurement framework defined at the outset cannot be properly steered.
Culinary marketing
Culinary marketing applies marketing methods to restaurants and food brands: the identity of the offer, the menu, storytelling, content, customer reviews and loyalty. It links the dining room, the kitchen and digital into a single experience.
Our culinary marketing page -
GET FOUND
SEO: getting found on Google
Organic SEO
Organic SEO, or search engine optimisation, covers the techniques that improve a site's position in the unpaid results of search engines: technical quality, content, inbound links. It is a cumulative investment: the effects build up over months and last.
Our SEO method and pricingLocal SEO
Local SEO aims for visibility in searches with a geographic intent: “marketing agency bayonne”, “restaurant pau”. It relies on the Google Business Profile, customer reviews, consistent contact details and dedicated local pages.
Our local SEO agency in BayonneSEO audit
An SEO audit is a full review of a site's search performance: technical, content, popularity, competition. It produces a list of actions prioritised by impact and effort. It is the starting point of any serious engagement.
Our SEO audit offerLink building
Link building is the practice of earning links from other websites to yours. Each quality link acts as a recommendation in the eyes of search engines. Quality matters more than volume: ten relevant links are worth more than a hundred artificial ones.
Our link building offerGoogle Business Profile
Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, is a local company's identity card on Google and Google Maps: opening hours, photos, reviews, questions. It is often a local customer's first contact with your brand, even before your website.
Profile and reviews: our online reputation offerSearch intent
Search intent is what the user really wants to do behind the words they type: find information, compare, buy, find an address. A page performs when it answers the intent, not just the keyword.
Our five-step SEO method -
GET CITED
AI and GEO: getting cited by machines
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
GEO is the optimisation of a brand's visibility in the answers of generative AI: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI summaries. It means measuring what AI says about you, then working on the content and the sources it relies on to correct and strengthen that perception.
Our GEO method and pricingLLM
An LLM, or large language model, is the type of artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. It generates answers from the texts it was trained on and the sources it consults. What LLMs say about your brand has become a recommendation channel in its own right.
AI Overviews and AI Mode
AI Overviews are the summaries generated by Google's AI at the top of search results; AI Mode is the conversational version. They answer in place of websites and reduce clicks: being cited within them is becoming as important as ranking below them.
Citability
Citability is the ability of a piece of content to be picked up as it stands by an AI: self-contained passages, clear definitions, sourced and dated figures, questions followed by direct answers. Citable content is written to be extracted without losing its meaning.
Measure your citability in AI: our GEO offer -
BRING THEM BACK
Customer experience: bringing them back
Customer experience (CX)
Customer experience is the overall perception a customer takes away from all their interactions with a company, from first contact to after-sales service. It can be worked on and measured: journey, service standards, indicators. It decides whether a customer comes back and recommends you.
Our customer experience offerCustomer journey
The customer journey is the sequence of steps and touchpoints a customer goes through: search, booking or order, welcome, use, feedback. Mapping it reveals friction that cannot be seen from inside the company.
Map your customer journey with ARETAMoment of truth
A moment of truth is a point in the journey where the experience tips, for better or worse: arriving at the venue, receiving a quote, a complaint. Focusing effort on these moments pays off more than improving everything evenly.
Customer commitments
Customer commitments are written, measurable and enforceable service promises: response time, a gesture when something goes wrong, a welcome standard. They turn an intention of quality into a rule that teams and customers can check.
Formalise your customer commitments: our offerNPS (Net Promoter Score)
NPS measures how likely customers are to recommend a company, on a scale of 0 to 10. You subtract the share of detractors (0 to 6) from the share of promoters (9 and 10). Simple and comparable, it shows a trend; it does not say what to fix, hence the need to cross-check it with verbatim comments.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
CSAT measures satisfaction immediately after a specific interaction: a meal, a delivery, a call to support. Expressed as a percentage of satisfied customers, it pinpoints friction where NPS gives the overall temperature.
CES (Customer Effort Score)
CES measures the effort a customer had to make to get what they wanted: book, get a refund, reach someone. The lower the effort, the more likely loyalty. It is often the most actionable of the three indicators.
Mystery shopping
Mystery shopping means having an anonymous evaluator live the customer journey, equipped with an observation grid built on your standards. It measures the gap between the service promised and the service actually delivered, in the field.
Mystery shopping in our hospitality assignmentsOnline reputation
Online reputation is the image of a company as it emerges from online content: Google and TripAdvisor reviews, social media, press, forums and now AI answers. It is managed through active collection of reviews, systematic replies and handling the recurring causes of dissatisfaction.
Our online reputation offer -
SELL AND BUILD LOYALTY
E-commerce and loyalty
Shopify
Shopify is the e-commerce platform that hosts and runs an online shop: catalogue, payment, orders, shipping. Its strength is making the business independent in its day-to-day, without relying on a provider for every change.
Our Shopify offer: build and migrationShopify POS
Shopify POS is the physical till connected to the Shopify shop: in-store sales, stock and customer records are unified with the website. A customer can buy online and collect in store, or the reverse, with no double entry.
Connected POS system for restaurants: our dedicated pageMarketing automation
Marketing automation automatically triggers messages according to customer behaviour: abandoned basket, welcome, post-purchase follow-up, birthday. Well configured, it generates recurring revenue without daily intervention.
Omnichannel
Omnichannel is continuity of experience across sales channels: physical shop, website, phone, social media. The customer is recognised everywhere and their history follows them. Omnichannel is won in the systems, not in the slogans.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate is the share of visitors who take the expected action: purchase, booking, quote request. It judges the page, the offer and trust, where traffic only judges visibility. Doubling conversion is worth doubling traffic, at lower cost.
Improve the conversion of your Shopify shopLoyalty
Customer loyalty covers the actions that bring an existing customer back: loyalty programme, useful emails, reserved benefits, consistent quality. Keeping a customer costs less than winning a new one; it is the most profitable half of marketing, and the least worked on.
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AND NOW
The words are laid out. Let's talk about your case.
Thirty free minutes by video call, with no commitment, to take stock of your situation: visibility, customer journey, tools, measurement. We will tell you what seems a priority to us, and in what order. At areta, every term in this glossary corresponds to a real service.
Book 30 free minutesPage updated on 1 August 2026.
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