If you haven’t worked in the marketing world (or at least have a business background), trying to engage with others who do for the first time can be challenging and intimidating. There’s a lot of industry-related lingo that gets thrown around, and if you’re not used to it, it can be confusing and overwhelming. If your marketing peeps are the patient, compassionate, and understanding people they should be, they’ll take the time to explain each term and concept to you clearly and thoroughly. However, it can still be helpful to the communication process if you’ve already established some level of familiarity with marketing language.
With that in mind, we’ve developed our own little dictionary to help you understand all of these terms, phrases, and acronyms that can make marketing seem more scary and complicated than it needs to be. Before you know it, you’ll be speaking fluent “marketing” just as well as all your marketing pals!
General Marketing Terms & Acronyms
B2B: Business to business. These types of businesses market their products or services to other companies instead of individual consumers.
B2C: Business to customer. Unlike a “business to business” or B2B company (as explained above), a B2C company sells directly to individual customers or consumers.
CMS: Content management system. A CMS is software that is used for creating, editing, organizing, and publishing online content, such as WordPress. Techradar gave us their picks for the top 10 content management systems to use in 2022.
CRM: Customer relationship management. This acronym describes a system that a business (usually the sales department) can use for client management. With a CRM, a business can store contact information, track the progress of a sale for new leads or existing customers, and save notes in an organized and easily accessible online space. PCMag outlined their favorite CRM software examples for 2022: we particularly like Salesforce and Pipedrive.
GA: Google Analytics. A service offered through Google, Google Analytics, is a tool that enables the user to better understand their online audience and their digital activity and track and report different metrics.
WWW: World wide web. These three letters make up the beginning of any URL (Uniform Resource Locator), or web address, on the Internet.
BR: Bounce rate. The bounce rate of a website or email will tell you how many audience members/email recipients end up on the initial first page but click away/exit the page instead of clicking on another page or link available on that page.
SERP: Search engine results page. This one is simpler than it sounds. SERPs are the list of webpage links a search engine shows you after you have searched for something. WordStream has a great article on SERP and how Google breaks down paid and organic search listings.
POS: Point of sale. In a retail, business, or marketing context, POS means the physical location where a customer purchased a product or service. It may also denote the device (such as a computer, tablet, cash register, or other hardware systems) used to make that sale.
SEP: Search engine positioning. This acronym sounds much more complicated than it is. It simply describes the rank of a website on a page of search engine results (the higher results, the lower the number, the better SEP your website has). Do you know what “position zero” is?
CTA: Call-to-action. This phrase denotes what you want your target audience to do after they have seen your ad or viewed your content. What action do you want them to take? Are you looking for your customer to download something, purchase something, call you, sign-up or register for something, or attend an event? Looking for more examples of CTAs? Hubspot illustrated 31 call-to-action examples in a recent blog.
CTR: Click-through rate. Your CTR will tell you the percentage of the visitors to your website, webpage, or online ad, that take the next step you want them to take (for example: moving from your website’s homepage to another page on the site). A Click-through rate is determined by dividing the initial number of people who click on the first page by the number of people who “click through” to the next.
CPC: Cost-per-click. This refers to the cost of a click when doing search engine marketing or digital advertising, like Google Ads or Facebook. It is the amount of money that is charged to the customer or business each time a user clicks on the online advertisement or link.
CPA: Cost-per-action or cost-per-acquisition. Regarding digital marketing, CPA denotes an online advertising payment model such as CPC (see CPC), in which the advertiser only pays for their ad every time a web user successfully completes a desired action (such as clicking on an ad).
ROAS: Return on ad spend. Similar to ROI (see ROI), ROAS determine the effectiveness of a digital advertising campaign. It is a means to calculate the profits generated by a particular ad.
KPI: Key performance indicator. As the name suggests, your KPIs are the metrics by which you measure the success of a particular campaign. They could include how many new customers you gain, any increase in website traffic, how many new followers you get on social media, or how many sales you make within a given time.
ROI: Return on investment. ROI measures a company’s profits (money earned) against money invested in a particular project, initiative, or campaign.
SEM: Search engine marketing. Contrasting to SEO (see SEO), SEM refers to paid advertising done in partnership with search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. SEM often is subdivided into paid search, display, shopping, video, and mobile search advertising.
SEO: Search engine optimization. SEO is the process of ranking your website high on search engine SERP pages. Put another way, when you have good SEO in place, your website and other online content will rank higher when searched on a search engine such as Google. Do you know what white-hat SEO is?
Impressions: Also called a view or ad view, an impression is simply another term for how many times a visitor has viewed an ad or webpage. One view = one impression, and so on.
Other Helpful Marketing-Related Terms
PNG: Portable network graphic. PNGs are an image file format that allows an image to retain a transparent background and is generally larger and higher quality than other file formats. They don’t work well for print and are generally only used for online purposes.
JPG: Joint photographic experts group. This file format is generally used for storing and sharing photographs.
PDF: Portable document format. PDFs are a file format great for sharing documents including text and images, across different software, hardware, and operating systems.
eCommerce: Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is the buying and selling of products or services online. Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Apple are some of the largest e-commerce operations in the world and account for 63.3% of all online sales in the US alone.
WordPress: WordPress is a content management system (see CMS). It is the most popular tool for blogging and for designing, publishing, and updating websites.
SSL certificate (https:// vs. https://) for domain names: Secure Sockets Layer. Also called a digital certificate, acquiring an SSL certificate means that the information being passed back and forth between a web browser and web server is encrypted, thus making the site safer and more secure. This security technology prevents sensitive information from being stolen or tampered with. Outside of maintaining privacy, an SSL certificate also proves to visitors of a website that its identity is verified.
To learn more marketing lingo or how these concepts, tools, and services can help you market your business, hit up our experts at Mountain Mojo Group, and before you know it, you’ll be one of the gang!
Mountain Mojo Group is located in Flagstaff, Williams, the White Mountains, and Page, Arizona, and provides top-quality marketing solutions and design! Our team works with small businesses all across the state of Arizona, providing a variety of marketing and design services, including social media management, photography, videography, strategy, web design, graphic design, SEO, and paid search engine marketing. Our team of creatives is ready to tackle your next marketing project. Contact our team today at (928) 440-5301 or stop by one of our offices in Northern Arizona.