Every industry has them – acronyms. Acronyms are the shorthand for otherwise longer terms and they can be quite helpful – as long as you know what they mean. Here are my Top 10 marketing acronyms. Add others in the Comments if you’d like.
1) SERP – Search Engine Results Page – this is the page that is generated after you type a search term in and hit Enter
2) UVP – Unique Value Proposition – a Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is a clearly stated benefit that your potential customers will obtain from buying your products.
3) SEO – Search Engine Optimization – this is a practice of optimizing your web content so that the likes of Google, Bing and other search engines will be able to index your content properly and make sure the relevant content shows up in the SERPs. The Art of SEO usually involves “free” organic results.
4) SEM – Search Engine Marketing – this is the umbrella task under which SEO resides. SEM encompasses SEO, but it also involves other techniques such as Paid Search.
5) PPC – Pay-per-click – Pay-Per-Click advertising is also known as Paid Search. Paid search involves paying search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc to show up high on their SERPs. Your ranking on a SERP is usually based on how much you’re paying for a particular keyword. The two most popular paid ad platforms are Google and Facebook. You can get to grips with paid ads yourself, but in order to make the best possible return on your investment (ROI), it’s always better to approach a PPC agency. PPC agencies are experts in tailoring ads to your target audience and will be able to advise you on successful campaigns that increase traffic to your site.
6) CPA – Cost Per Action – This term is most commonly used in Affiliate Marketing. It covers the process where one company sends traffic to another company’s website and when those visitors perform a specified task – they may leave their email address, enter a contest, buy a product – the first company is paid by the second for the “action”.
7) CPS – Cost Per Sale – similar to CPA but more specific since it involves the first company getting paid only if the visitors they send buy something from the second company.
8) CMS – Content Management System – these platforms – like WordPress, Joomla and Hubspot – help organize and manage your content
9) ESP – Email Service Provider – sorry, this is not the psychic that will tell you of your upcoming fortune, an ESP is an Email Service Provider that hosts the email marketing services that you use to promote your business. ESPs include companies such as aWeber, MailChimp, DirectResponse and more.
10) CTR – Click Through Rate – the rate at which visitors click from a form of advertising to a page on your site. For example, if you send out 10,000 emails and 1,000 visitors come to your page from your email, then your CTR was 10%.
ABL – Always Be Learning – Everything you know about marketing today may not be relevant tomorrow so Always Be Learning.
