Marketing terms 2018: Can you keep up?

If you are looking to improve your marketing, then you probably encounter strange marketing terms and acronyms regularly.

The marketing world is packed with jargon. Growing your practice with online and offline marketing should not require carrying around a dictionary—we can help. In no time, you can learn the basics and understand these marketing terms. You will know the lingo and be better prepared for conversations with sales representatives as you shop for software, too.

Use this article as your “cheat sheet” for when you read marketing blogs or research marketing software for your practice.

Conversion Rate

If you have a website, social media profile, online ad or use email marketing, you should carefully track and try to improve your conversion rates. Conversions are what happens when visitors interacting with your advertising or website move from merely viewing your media to becoming active customers.

CMS

Content management systems (CMS) make it much easier for people without a technical background to edit and manage a website. There is a fairly high degree of flexibility in many of these systems, allowing users to edit website content, change how their websites work and adjust user permissions, security, layout and functionality for their sites.

CRO

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) allows you to study and work on improving your website’s conversion rates.

CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you create a database of useful information about your customers. CRMs store contact information, records of when conversations with customers happened, and helpful notes about whether or not sales decisions or successful conversions occurred.

Or, in the case of a typical healthcare practice, information about patients. This is not a place for medical information or sensitive data—this is where you keep information useful for marketing. There are some healthcare-specific CRMs, too, that are HIPAA compliant. Keep in mind that if you decide to use a CRM, you will need to find one that is fully compliant with security and privacy regulations for patient data.

CTA

The Call to Action (CTA) is a link, button or picture website visitors can click on to take action and start a download, visit a different page and more. You want a clearly understood CTA that moves users to take an action that furthers your marketing and sales process somehow.

KPI

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are used by businesses to evaluate the success of a particular activity. Marketers can use KPIs to measure their progress towards their marketing goals. These are your benchmarks you use to figure out how successful your campaigns are thus far.

PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a common way for social media and search engines to charge for advertising. If you decide to advertise on a social media platform such as Facebook or LinkedIn, you will likely encounter PPC as an option. There are other ways websites can charge you when you buy advertising, but the advantage of PPC is only having to pay if a prospect clicks on the ad itself. Your ad can be shown many times before actually receiving a single “click,” and in some cases, viewers will see your ad without clicking and you will get free exposure to your audience.

Public relations (PR) is basically your efforts to influence the community and present a positive impression of your practice through marketing and outreach.

Page views (PV) help you determine your website’s audience. A single PV is one request for a webpage to load. Advertisers often use this number to understand how many individual users are looking at their content.

Retweeting someone’s Twitter post basically reposts it so your Twitter followers can also see it. RTs help you to reach new audiences of Twitter users.

SaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS) companies provide the use of their software online. Rather than download the entire program into your system, you go online and use their software via a web application. Typically, there is a monthly or annual charge for this service. Many marketing applications, such as CRMs, work this way.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of modifying a website for better representation by search engines. Using SEO, you can improve how well your site shows up in search results so your community has an increased likelihood of finding your website online. A variety of tools, services, and systems are available to help website owners improve their SEO themselves or hire someone else to help them.

Reference

Kolowich, L. “75 Marketing & Business Acronyms and Abbreviations Every Industry Pro Should Know.” Hubspot Blog. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-acronym-glossary. Published: July 2016. Updated: October 2017. Accessed: December 2017.