Creator marketing glossary
The creator and influencer marketing terms that matter for dev-tool and B2B-SaaS brands, defined in plain language.
- Influencer marketing
- Paid collaboration with creators who have a trusted audience, used to drive awareness, signups, or pipeline for a product.
- B2B influencer marketing
- Influencer marketing aimed at business buyers, where the creators are niche experts and success is measured in pipeline.
- Creator marketing
- A broader term for partnering with content creators across formats and platforms, not limited to a single sponsored post.
- Influencer seeding
- Giving creators free access to a product in the hope of earning organic, unpaid coverage.
- User-generated content (UGC)
- Authentic, creator-style content, often short-form, made to look native rather than like a produced ad.
- Usage rights
- The brand's contractual permission to use a creator's content in paid ads and other owned channels.
- CPM (cost per mille)
- The cost per one thousand views or impressions, the most common way to price and compare creator placements.
- Dedicated video vs integration
- A dedicated video is entirely about your product; an integration is a sponsored segment inside other content.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- The total spend to acquire one paying customer through a channel, the bottom-line metric for creator campaigns.
- Engagement rate
- The share of a creator's audience that interacts with content, used as a proxy for audience quality.
- Micro-influencer
- A creator with a smaller but highly engaged and often more niche audience, typically tens of thousands of followers.
- Ambassador program
- An ongoing relationship with creators who repeatedly feature a product, rather than a one-off sponsorship.
- Earned media value (EMV)
- An estimate of what organic, unpaid creator coverage would have cost as paid media.
- Developer marketing
- Marketing to software developers as a buying audience, which relies on trusted creators and technical content rather than ads.
- Share of voice
- How much of the creator conversation in your category features your product versus competitors.