Grinding the Axe on Marketing Jargon

We’ve got a (figurative) axe to grind! There are a lot of buzz words and jargon that get thrown around or whipped into the conversation so often that it becomes ‘normal’. Except that it’s not normal. Many of these terms are specific and only deeply understood by anyone working in this space all day, every day.

Let’s tackle a few C words that you’re allowed to say at work and are pretty important:

CX

CX or customer experience refers to how all touchpoints between a (potential) customer and your business and/or brand are experienced and perceived by the customer. It’s not how you want it to be, but how the customer actually experiences it. It should be everyone’s goal to create an optimal experience for customers, and potential ones, at all touchpoints. Due to many blurred lines between the marketing, sales and customer services teams, optimising your CX is absolutely essential. And how will you do this? By using a CJM, read on friends …

CJM

It stands for customer journey map and will help you to gain a comprehensive idea of CX with your brand. Don’t freak out, it doesn’t have to be an exact plan of every single touchpoint between a customer and your business. Remember our FREE developing personas for your marketing strategy workbook? Putting together a CJM is just like it, representing a typical experience from the customer’s point of view. A quick (cheap!) way to get insights into your CX and CJM is to ask a friend or acquaintance that is not involved with your business to try out different touchpoints and ask for their feedback on their experience.

CAC

Ever wondered how much it cost you to get new customers? The customer acquisition cost will tell you. It can be a basic calculation of taking all cost spend on advertising divided by customers acquired within that time. It is mainly used by both companies themselves and investors, as it helps to determine a company’s profitability. You should get your marketing team to track these numbers and optimize the returns on your advertising investments. It’s also one that investors want to know, as driving down the cost of acquisition is a smart area to focus on if you’re wanting that revenue line to grow, and your profit one to fatten up  even more so.

CTA

Most of you will know this one but we wanted to include it anyway.  Call to action is a widely used method by marketers to ask customers or visitors to act in a certain way. Whether its buying a product, hitting ‘like’, taking a survey or simply signing up to a newsletter. The primary goal is to get the audience to DO something. Don’t forget to stay polite and not to go down the path of being pushy!

CTR

Stands for click-through-rate and is a very important concept in search engine marketing. Think of it this way: Google and other search engines operate by having people vote for certain websites and listed results by clicking on them. The higher your click-through-rate is, the more successful your campaign will be. Just as simple as that

So you gotta know how your activity is performing. Place your ads, best if you can do a couple of variations (A/B testing) and track which ones are resulting in a higher click-through-rate.  Track what works well, double down on it and stop the ones that aren’t performing. Don’t just ‘set and forget’!

CPM

Lucky last one, is the cost per thousand. The ‘M” stands for the roman numeral of 1000. Its referring to the price of 1000 ad impressions. Sprout Social sum it up well “CPM (cost per mille) is a paid advertising option where companies pay a price for every 1,000 impressions an ad receives. An “impression” refers to when someone sees a campaign on social media, the search engines or another marketing platform.” So basically, cost per 1000 ‘eyeballs’ or viewings.