Now that you’re a pro at marketing acronyms, we thought we’d step it up a notch with a follow-up to stretch your vocabulary a bit more. Sometimes it seems like there’s new lingo every week, but not to worry, the ones that matter tend to stick around.
Without further ado, here’s Part 2 of Your Must-Know Marketing Acronyms.
ABM: Account-Based Marketing
Putting up a billboard on the side of the road may look nice and be good for the ego, but it’s not the most strategic. Account-Based Marketing is when the skills on both the sales team and the marketing department work together to tailor a buying experience for specific accounts at volume. Meaning, you are no longer taking a shotgun approach or “seeing what sticks.” The key to ABM is that at any point, any team member can pick up where the last person left off. This means strategy, targeted prospects, great documentation, and internal communication, all of which a CRM (see Part 1 Definitions) like HubSpot usually handles.
CAN-SPAM: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act
No, not the can of questionable meat next to the tuna on aisle 3. CAN-SPAM is a law passed in 2003 as email got out of hand. During the early Wild West of email, spam was so widespread that the federal government had to step in to help curb our inboxes. Although the success of the act is debated and spam-filters ended up doing most of the work, marketing emails must still comply with the laws set. Notably, having a clear unsubscribe link, including the physical address of the sender, and avoiding mass email lists.
GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation
Similar to CAN-SPAM, GDPR is a law set by the European Union in 2016 that protects user data and privacy. Although the regulation only applies overseas, many websites choose to follow GDPR rules for moral reasons, whereas international businesses are required even if based elsewhere. The GDPR has a few distinct qualities which are giving users the right to access and inquire about how their personal information is being used, and the right to have their information erased/forgotten if desired.
PPC: Pay Per Click
Although slightly self-explanatory, it is worth addressing as in our Part 1 we covered Cost Per Click (CCP). Essentially, these are the same but with a minor difference, so it’s important to know when to use the terms. When running an ads campaign that you pay for when someone clicks, such as Google Ads, this is a PPC campaign. When you are setting up this campaign, or reporting on it, the amount you spend on each click is the CPC. In short, CPC is the measure of a PPC campaign. However, a PPC campaign has many other factors besides CPC that are similar to other campaigns such as audience, geography, content, timing, etc.
SERP: Search Engine Results Page
When we search for “red balloon” on Google there are over 359,000,000 SERPs that are found as options. For you, that number might be different based on where you live and how you browse the Internet. There may also be hundreds, if not thousands of pages online about red balloons that choose not to show up in search results. It’s important to know what pages from your website show up, or don’t show up, for search users. This will help inform what information should be on your page for SEO, how your results shows up (like title and description), and how your page ranks. According to Moz, 71% of users choose a result on the first page. Pages two and three get only 5.59% of the clicks. Where do you show up?
SLA: Service Level Agreement
We talk about SLAs a lot. So much, that we dedicated an entire blog to it! To overview, an SLA is a tool (document) used to align marketing with sales, and sales with marketing. Overall, it helps everyone stay on the same page, quite literally. An SLA ensures all leads are properly vetted by marketing before being handed to sales and that all leads are properly managed by sales. The entire process is set to and agreed upon by both parties so that ownership and strategy can be executed on. An SLA can of course be updated as needed, but it helps keep everyone accountable.
SOP: Standard Operating Procedure
Funny enough, an SLA is one type of an SOP. Whereas an SLA is specific to the relationship between sales and marketing, an SOP can be created for a variety of purposes. Think of it as agreed-upon best practices. What is the process for writing and sending emails? Who needs to see social posts before they’re published? Is it the first or last Friday of the month that the office has donuts? Don’t go overboard with your SOPs, but we highly recommend them especially for large teams where “too many cooks in the kitchen” or “hands in the cookie jar” start to come into play.
USP: Unique Selling Proposition
What makes you different? Sometimes referred to as differentiators, your USP is the reason a customer should engage with you over the competition. A feature can be a USP, but everyone wants to talk about features. A great USP is a benefit. What are you helping your audience do and how do you help them do it? For example, our USP at 1 Bold Step is that we’re a Fractional Marketing Team. That is a service (feature) however, our actual USP is helping our clients grow without spending more. Rather than hiring one internal marketing person, use that budget toward an entire team of marketing professionals providing roles of a CMO, Copywriter, Digital Specialist, and more as needed – a fractional marketing team.
BRB, Our Brain Needs Some ZZZs
Pat yourself on the back, instead of scrolling through your newsfeed, you took the time to learn something new today! We hope you found a nugget here that inspires you to explore marketing in a new light.
Did we miss something you were hoping to see? Leave a comment below and we’ll be sure to respond and consider putting it in Part 3 if we wrangle enough acronyms together again...
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