The wonderful world of marketing acronyms
Have you ever attended a networking event, sat through a conference or just began a conversation with a colleague and found yourself being bombarded with three-lettered -acronyms? You’re a business owner so you are supposed to know all of these SEO’s, B2B’s, CMS’s and PPC’s aren’t you? Well, not necessarily but it may help if you have a basic understanding or familiarity with their meanings as you will discover they are all inadvertently important for your business and your website.
Here are the top 10 most used business marketing acronyms and their meanings:
B2B: Business-to-Business
If your business services other businesses, you are a B2B. Examples of B2B’s are Shared Marketing and Fiona Watson Recruitment.
B2C: Business-to-consumer
You are offering services directly to the individual consumer. Examples of B2C’s are Rockwear and Waitplate System.
BR: Bounce Rate
This is IT jargon and is used in the context of ‘Website Bounce Rate’ and ‘Email Bounce Rate.’ Website Bounce Rate is when people click through to your website and immediately leave without clicking through any other links on your site. The Email Bounce Rate is when email’s are returned from being delivered to incorrect email addresses – this is usually mostly seen in email campaigns. You don’t really want either of these Bounce Rates when it comes to marketing your business online as they will both ultimately lead to poor Conversion Rates (CR).
CR: Conversion Rate
This is purely how your website is performing and engaging it’s visitors. Your conversion rate is the amount of visitors to your website that performed an action through your website e.g. filled out an enquiry form or purchased a product. If you have a high conversion rate, this means that your visitors are ultimately being converted into customers or potential customers. A low conversion rate means people are leaving your website and thus making your website perform poorly in rankings.
CMS: Content Management System
This is another acronym that your website developer will throw around but it is good to know. The CMS that is chosen for your website usually depends on how many functions you require of your website (e.g. online sales). A well installed CMS will make it easier for the content of the website to be updated (e.g. blogs) without having to be a web designer. WordPress is one example of the popular CMS’s.
CTA: Call-to-Action
There needs to be a reason that new customers will chose your business and existing customers will return to your business. A call-to-action is just that, giving a specific reason or reward for people to take action on your website and ultimately spend their money. Some examples are ‘buy one get one free’,’20% for the month of December.’ A call-to-action can be done through social media, direct mail campaigns or on your website. The ultimate goal is to get people to your website and increase your conversion rate (and sales).
GA: Google Analytics
We couldn’t have a list about marketing without mentioning Google! Google Analytics is the most widely used method for tracking the movements of your website visitors. Google Analytics can keep the information as basic or complex as you need depending on how much time you have to read the reports on your website’s performance. However, it is vital that you are aware with the trends on how your website is performing as this will help you as a business owner to know which products are being viewed the most, how many people are finding you through your blog etc.. Google Analytics measures the amount of traffic to your website, follow’s visitors pathways through their clicks on your website and gives you graphs that you can physically see how your website is performing.
PPC: Pay-Per-Click
This is all to do with advertising your business online. PPC advertisements are designed to direct traffic to your website by appearing as advertisements amongst search results of related services. There are two available options of PPC campaigns, Flat rate PPC (fixed amount on each click) or Bid-based PPC (each advertiser sets a budget and once the maximum spend has been reached, the ad will stop appearing). It is important you design a proper PPC campaign to ensure the best results.
SEO: Search Engine Optimisation
This is how people find your website and the amount of work that is being put in to the content of your website to optimize it for search engines. SEO can be increased through paid campaigns (PPC or Facebook advertising) or ‘organically.’ For your website to be found organically your website must be top of the crop. Examples of features that will increase your SEO are: relevant and updated content; no broken links; information and a mobile-friendly design. SEO can be tedious and time-consuming process but it is worth the effort when your website improves it’s performance and Google ranking.
LOL: Laugh Out Loud
This will make you feel better about your marketing!