The marketing world is filled with acronyms and abbreviations. What does CRM stand for? What’s AMP? Are CPC, CPA, and CTA related? Does it all mean the same thing?
To a beginner, the casual mention of SMM can be incredibly daunting. So, although we can’t answer all your questions, we can give you a list of marketing abbreviations that every aspiring marketer and business should know. Keep reading!
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B2B (Business to Business)
Business to Business (B2B) is a marketing strategy that focuses on selling to other businesses, rather than individuals. This was traditionally often done via email, phone calls, or written marketing materials like brochures. But today, LinkedIn and Telegram are two of the most common online B2B marketing platforms.
B2B marketers are responsible for talking with individual companies and explaining their products and services in terms that make sense to the people who will be using them. As such, their marketing campaigns are also targeted at businesses who purchase, sell or distribute your or their own products and services. Ex: When a printer manufacturer sells their printers to a paper company.
The B2B market is typically very competitive because there is less brand loyalty, and it is not as easy for companies to distinguish themselves from one another. Standing out from the crowd is one of the major challenges in B2B marketing.
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B2C (Business to Consumer)
Business to Consumer (B2C) is quite the opposite of B2B. It is a marketing strategy that focuses on selling to individuals, rather than businesses. This can be done either through traditional advertising methods like TV commercials or newspaper advertisements or digital channels like paid ads or social media marketing. Countless brands also use the D2C (Direct to Customer) approach to promote their products and services.
Unlike most B2B buyers, B2C consumers aren’t always well-informed about what they are buying. So, it is often crucial for marketers to create campaigns that are easily comprehensible and have a mass appeal.
That being said, the B2C market is much more diverse than the B2B market. Because of its monopolistic nature, it is much easier for companies to differentiate themselves from one another to attract the customers’ attention.
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SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an organic marketing technique designed to improve your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal of SEO is simple: get more visitors to your site and convert them using high-quality content, which ultimately leads to an increase in sales and revenue!
Search engines use algorithms based on keywords, links, content, and other factors to determine which websites deserve to rank higher than others. For this reason, the most common techniques used by SEO specialists include keyword research and content creation.
By following SEO best practices, you can increase your ranking on different search engines and have more people visiting your site in the long run, without perpetually relying on paid advertising to acquire customers.
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SMM (Social Media Marketing)
Social media marketing is a form of online marketing that uses social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as platforms for advertising, promotion, and sales communication.
Social media channels allow businesses huge opportunities for reaching customers directly, building relationships with them, and offering products or services at competitive prices.
There is no doubt that SMM is an absolute gamechanger in the digital world. Businesses can engage with their customers directly, collect feedback, and find opportunities for growth and improvement without spending money on the platforms.
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CMS (Content Management System)
Content marketing is almost impossible without a good Content Management System. A CMS is a platform that helps you manage and optimize the content on a website or blog. They can be used to streamline content in the form of articles, videos, images, social media posts, and even podcasts as well as analyze the performance of each piece individually.
Such systems are an excellent tool to figure out what kind of content works and doesn’t work for your business as well as identify gaps in your content marketing strategies.
Ex: WordPress, Wix, Drupal.
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CTA (Call to Action)
CTA stands for Call to Action, a marketing element used to encourage people to take action on your website, landing pages, or social media posts. CTAs often include buttons or links that direct people to specific actions like buying something or signing up for a newsletter. For example, a CTA could be “Buy Now” or “Sign Up.”
Since it can make or break your sale, you need to ensure that your CTA is clear and compelling in order to drive more traffic and sales. It should be able to perfectly summarize the entire rest of your copy in a way that the user would understand the gist of your landing page without feeling the need to read through it.
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CTR (Click Through Rate)
The CTR of a website, app, landing page, or social media post is the percentage of clicks that have led to a specific destination on your website. It refers to how many times each time someone interacts with it. In other words, how many times your target audience actually clicks on the link in the ad copy or post and goes through with whatever you intended them to do.
Ideally, the higher the CTR, the higher the chance it will convert visitors into buyers. However, if the landing page connected to your clickable link isn’t good enough, you won’t convert those leads into paying customers. This means you will experience a low ROI.
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ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend)
ROAS measures the amount of sales driven by an ad campaign or promotion. It is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on advertising by total sales generated by this campaign or promotion over a given period of time (ex. Q3).
The formula is:
ROAS = Total revenue collected / Total campaign cost
So, let’s say, you spend $100 on advertising and get back $100 in sales, then your ROAS is 100%.
Understandably, this metric is used by companies who want to know how much money they should spend on advertising campaigns so that they can get enough revenue out of them without burning too much money and still making a profit.
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PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
PPC is a method of driving traffic to your website. It involves running ad campaigns that charge you for each click. In other words, PPC is a form of online advertising that allows website owners to pay for traffic directed to their site.
It is similar to SEO, but instead of focusing on getting your website ranked higher in search engines, you are taking an active role in driving traffic to it. You can place your PPC ads on Google or Facebook Ads and target them at specific keywords related to your business, using whom your target audience is searching for you.
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СРС (Cost Per Click)
Cost Per Click is the cost you pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your site. As advertisers, you pay advertising platforms for each click-through on your ads. In other words, the platform takes a percentage of the cost of the ad to send traffic to your landing page.
Your CPC can be calculated using a formula, which measures the ROI against the total amount spent on ads divided by the total clicks generated. CPC is often used alongside Cost Per Acquisition for comparison purposes to see how much you spend after a lead clicked on your link, visited your site but didn’t convert into a buying customer.
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CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
CPA refers to the amount paid by a business or advertiser each time someone buys something from them using their website or app.
In this case, you are actually evaluating how much it costs you to acquire a single customer. The costs include marketing spends, resources required, and the time taken to convert a lead, among more.
CPA is an incredibly important metric, meaning that if your CPA is higher than your actual sales, then you are running at a loss. For instance, if you spend $10 to acquire one customer who buys a $5 product, you are spending more than half of what you are earning. Understandably, that’s not a very sustainable strategy.
Having said that, CPAs may be high for new businesses because they lack authority, trust, and credibility in the market. But it doesn’t always have to be the case. You can easily bring down your CPAs by working with a professional advertising agency that knows how to build successful ad campaigns.
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CPE (Cost Per Engagement)
CPE is the cost you pay for a customer (or group of customers) to engage with your business online. An engagement could be any interaction, including but not limited to: website clicks, sales, email opt-ins, or likes.
CPE is often confused with CPC but there is a slight difference between the two. Every click is an engagement but not every engagement is a click. For instance, a comment under your social media ad will be considered an engagement even when it isn’t a click.
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BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline)
BANT is a metric used to manage the behind-the-scenes of your campaign. It evaluates whether or not your prospective buyers have the required income, understanding, need, and time to buy what you are selling. BANT allows you to filter your target audience and get to the most qualified buyer without much trial and error.
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CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value)
Marketing calculations aren’t and shouldn’t be done solely based on one-off purchases as it can increase your CPA over time. Your CPA ought to justify the longevity of the relationship that you have with your customers post-acquisition.
CLTV is the average amount a customer will spend over their lifetime on your product or service. This is an extremely important metric because if your churn rate (customer fallout) is higher, it can affect your bottom line over time.
Customer Lifetime Value is an excellent metric to determine how much you should pay to acquire a new customer. If your customers don’t come back after their first purchase, it is time to consider bringing down your CPA.
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MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)
MRR is the total revenue from monthly customers. This unit is usually used by monthly premium service providers (ex. Netflix subscriptions) but could also apply to one-time fee-based business models.
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CPM (Cost Per Mille)
Cost per thousand impressions is used to measure how much it costs to generate 1,000 impressions on a piece of advertisement. Every time your prospective buyer sees your ad, it is counted as one impression.
Your ad platform charges you for impressions, which means that if you show your ad to the same person multiple times and they never buy from you, it can be a waste of marketing spend. Calculating the CPM lets you create a better budget for your marketing activities and tells you when you should put a cap on the impressions.
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CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
The process of analyzing user behavior on your website or app so that you can improve conversions is called Conversion Rate Optimization. It is a method used by marketers to understand how customers convert from one step in their journey toward purchase. This includes measuring how many people complete a particular goal in how much time and what’s the level of their satisfaction with their experience on your site or app or landing page.
For example, if your CTR is high but the CR is low, you could use CRO to figure out why your visiting traffic isn’t converting into paying traffic.
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COS (Content Optimization System)
Content optimization systems are content strategy tools that analyze and optimize the quality of your content. They work by creating an index of all the pages on your site, then analyzing their content and identifying the best and worst performing pieces. This allows you to understand what kind of content your audience prefers and where you should invest your money, as a result.
You can create, manage and execute content across multiple channels using COS. Some of the popular ones include Frase, SEO Surfer, SEMrush, and MarketMuse, which let you see in-depth analytics of all your content pieces.
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CRM
Customer Relationship Management refers to a business’s ability to identify customers and maintain relationships with them over time through various marketing channels. In the digital world, CRM is more about the use of technology and tools to track customer data and analyze how customers interact with brands.
CRM software allow companies to analyze customer data and make connections between customers’ actions and their needs or expectations.
Using CRM solutions, organizations can streamline their customer journey processes, increase productivity and facilitate better customer service by working together across channels where appropriate.
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KPI
Key Performance Indicators are metrics that measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns over time. They can be used to evaluate campaigns in order to determine whether or not they are meeting their goals. KPIs allow businesses to identify areas where they can improve upon their sales figures, customer retention rates, and overall brand awareness.
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AIDA
AIDA is a model used by marketers to describe the stages of persuasion. It is used as a framework for understanding how consumers interact with content and products.
- Attention: The first step in the AIDA model is to get the ideal buyer’s attention. Using an eye-catching headline that is easy to read and understand and writing a clear and concise copy are some ways to grab a prospective buyer’s attention.
- Interest: Next, you need to keep your reader interested in what you have to say. Using relevant images or videos and accurately addressing their pain points can perfectly keep a prospective buyer hooked on what you are saying.
- Desire: Once you have your prospective buyer’s attention and they are interested in what you have to say, the next step is to motivate them with a compelling offer or solution. The offer should be something that solves a problem for them or gives them something new or better than what they currently have — this will help you close sales! You can use testimonials from past customers or images of happy customers using your product or service as motivation tools.
- Action: Finally, the copy should end with an effective call-to-action that should tell people to take the exact action that you want them to take. If your copy is effective, it would convince the reader to take action.
AIDA is a brilliant content marketing tool for writing effective copies across all platforms. And the best part is that you can create the shortest social media posts and the longest blog articles using this model and it would work just as effectively.
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ToFu (Top Of The Funnel)
Content marketing carters to three levels of audiences: top, middle, and bottom. Top of the funnel content deals with audiences who are still in their awareness stage of the marketing funnel. They have just conceived the idea of buying a product that’s similar to yours and are doing research, weighing in options, and finding more about the product and its possible varieties. Such an audience isn’t necessarily ready to make a buying decision yet.
ToFu content needs to be general and should be targeted toward a larger set of audiences. It can’t be as niche as the other levels of content. For instance, if you are a beauty brand trying to educate your audience on retinol, one of your ToFu content topics could be about what retinol is.
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MoFu (Middle Of The Funnel)
Middle of the funnel content is targeted toward people who have made a decision to buy a product that’s similar to yours and are now looking for brands who can provide them with it. MoFu content should be centered more on the types or options that are available for people to choose from.
In this case, as a beauty brand, your content could be about the types of retinol products that the interested buyer could opt for.
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BoFu (Bottom Of The Funnel)
BoFu audience is super specific and requires niche information on the product that they are interested in buying because they are ready to purchase. These customers don’t need persuasion to buy in general but to buy from you specifically. Your content needs to give them a reason to buy from you.
For a beauty brand, a BoFu content topic on retinol could be about the things to look for in the brand whose retinol products they are considering buying.
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LPO (Landing Page Optimization)
Landing page optimization refers to the process of optimizing your landing page for search engines such as Google and Bing so that it ranks well on SERPs when people perform a search.
In essence, a landing page should consist of keywords and key phrases related to what people are searching for online in order to help them find what they need easily and quickly. It should address your ideal buyer’s pain points and speak to them directly.
If it is linked to an ad, the landing page must highlight words and phrases that would nudge prospective customers towards actually buying the product.
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UGC (User Generated Content)
As the name suggests, user-generated content is brand-specific content that’s created by users. It can be in any format: images, videos, articles, social media stories and posts, or reviews. Such content could be positive or negative, although positive user-generated content is the best earned media that any brand can get.
UGC is extremely important for building a brand as it is the best way to establish credibility in the market. It helps influence prospective buyers and increases your engagement rate. And since customers trust UGC more, positive UGC could do wonders for your brand loyalty.
This list isn’t complete but it is enough to get you started in the right direction. There are more than 100 marketing acronyms and abbreviations that you need to learn before you can create a solid marketing campaign for yourself because most of these metrics are responsible for making or breaking your business. So, if you aren’t sure about the extent of your knowledge, consider working with a professional marketing agency to get started.