Today’s marketing jargon explained
When I came up with my company name, I thought yeah it makes sense, it’s the abbreviation of external marketing – EXT MKTG – but it may take a while for it to be easily digestible. I think about it a lot and then started to wonder about current marketing lingo and how there are more definitions and abbreviations since I completed my marketing degree all those years ago.
Thankfully, SWOTs, Marketing Mix and the 4 Ps are all still current/ valid but there is so much more, especially when you work in the field. Here’s what I’ve come up with as the most important and widely used, with a particular slant on metrics as this area seems to be where most the abbreviations fall.
A marketing campaign – by definition – is a set of activities within a timeframe, using multi-channels and methods to promote a particular service or product, for example in terms of B2B, a new service being offered so that businesses can measure the existing projects of that service in the pipeline/revenue, and then from promoting it from October 1st, how many more projects or revenue is being generated from four weeks of buzz around it. Maybe it’s a new coined phrase for your service? Or have you moved into a new revenue stream from making a particular product or buying out services from another firm?
Being ‘Channel agnostic’ – a slant on how to think about the customer journey, it’s not about the channel per se, but the communication received in whatever form by the customer when interacting with the brand or company. A business or brand communicates consistently and without preference to all channels, in the hope that consumer who sees the content become customers. In the B2C world, a brand seen to be ‘channel agnostic’ will position themselves as believing they are customer-centric and the journey starting with them but shouldn’t that always be the case?
Digital communication evolves constantly but more recently it’s taken huge leaps, WhatsApp is no longer for just between friends etc. Digital is finally being considered within the marketing team’s job description instead of a separate department. Of course digital specialists exist, but the commerce or digital team should not be separated, they should be brought to the fore. Who are your digital gurus? Are their ideas at the start of your marketing and business development plans? Do you have SEO specialists on your books?
A report by We are Social and Hootsuite stated some great stats earlier this year;
“More than 4.5 billion people now use the internet, while social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population is already online, and the latest trends suggest that more than half of the world’s total population will use social media by the middle of this year (2020).”
Source – We Are Social
What about looking at measures of success? What is successful for your business, ROI or hopefully more than that?!
An article on how marketers should report marketing activity to CEOS stated that they care most about the ‘CAC’ (Customer Acquisition Cost) which is….
“This is your total Sales and Marketing cost: Add up all the program or advertising spend, plus salaries, plus commissions and bonuses, plus overhead within a given time period. Then, divide it by the number of new customers in that same time period. For instance, if you spent $300,000 on Sales and Marketing in a month and added 30 customers that month, then your CAC is $10,000.”
What about Share of Voice, what does that mean?
“Share of voice is a marketing metric that helps your business determine how much exposure your brand is receiving. The primary goal of looking into your share of voice is to gain insight into the overall visibility of the brand. With that in mind, it’s also a useful marketing metric to utilize when conducting competitive analysis.”
Here’s an article on how to measure it (lots of other information out there!)
I saw a poll recently on LinkedIn that asked if I podded?! Its to do with conquering the LinkedIn algorithm – we are all having our content filtered / manipulated so we only see the content from the people you engage with the most, so if you have a big family and always like their posts, you will probably only see the activity your family are up to, which personally, I find annoying. I’d like the news in chronological order from all my contacts please, not this filtered version which gives me a very slanted view.
Have you reported your MQLs or SQLs? These are Marketing or Sales Qualified Leads. Most of the time any business is excited about the prospect of a new project and getting proposals / quotes written and contracts drawn up so checking where or how the lead came from does not happen. It should! I always ask how did you find us or hear about us? Might sound obvious. Here’s a good article on the topic and includes info on lead scoring.
Some more links below for further reading and get in touch if you want to hear where I would put my marketing efforts / budgets these days.
Zara, Director and Founder of EXT MKTG
https://www.iabuk.com/jargon-buster
https://www.articulatemarketing.com/blog/5-essential-marketing-metrics