Acronyms, every industry has them and every person outside that industry hates them. If you are new to an industry or still getting fully acquainted with it, they can be a repetitive nuisance that you feel embarrassed to ask about.
Luckily for you, we have created a little guide to the acronyms of the digital marketing world, so you can not only walk the walk, but talk the talk. Take a look:
1. CMS – Content Management Service
A CMS is a software application or set of related programs used to create and manage digital content. Essentially this is the place where you will create and update all of your awesome website and Inbound content. A CMS can usually be classified into one of the following feature and functionality categories:
- General Marketing Functionality | Page management, blogs, news, etc
- B2C eCommerce Functionality | Shopping, check-out, credit card transactions
- B2B eCommerce Functionality | Order lookup, backoffice EDI, customer service tools
- Custom Functionality | Unique to your business features, product configurators, portals, etc
WordPress, BigTree and HubSpot are some of the more common CMS options that you have probably heard of.
2. CRM – Customer Relationship Management
A CRM system is a software program that an organization uses to organize and automate interactions with existing and potential customers. With a CRM you can:
- access customer contact information
- track communication like phone calls and emails
- schedule and log meetings
- send personalized communication
Having access to all of these things allow organizations to have more strategic and meaningful conversations with customers. Here at MINDSCAPE, our CRM of choice is HubSpot.
3. CTA – Call to Action
A call-to-action is text link, stylized button, or image that encourages someone to take an action on website page or in an email. In the Inbound world the most common CTA’s are ones urging visitors to download a piece of content or fill out a contact form.
It is important to make sure that CTA’s are visually appealing and make it very clear what will happen when someone clicks on them.
4. CTR – Click-Through Rate
The CTR is the percentage of people who view a piece of content (blog post, landing page, email, etc) actually move on to the next action in the marketing workflow. For example, if you send an email promoting a new page on your website, the CTR would be the number of people who actually click on the link in the email and go to the new page.
To figure out the percent, divide the total number of clicks by the number of opportunities that people had to click. Going back to the email example it would be link clicks divided by the total number of emails sent.
5. RSS – Rich Site Summary
An RSS feed (sometimes called a “really simple syndication”) is a web feed that publishes a recap of frequently updated information like blog posts, news stories, and podcasts. This is a great avenue for furthering the reach of your Inbound Marketing content, because if someone subscribes to your website’s RSS feed they will be notified every time you put out a new piece of content.
And no list about digital marketing would be complete without…
6. SEO – Search Engine Optimization
SEO is all about making sure your website (or Inbound Marketing content, like blog posts) rank in search engine results by using keywords that your target audience is searching for. You can have the best website content in the world but if it doesn’t have focused keywords that make it easy for search engines to crawl and find, sadly it might go unseen. And no one wants that!
- use long tail keywords or key phrases
- choose keywords that have high search volumes
- put keywords in titles, H1’s , and meta descriptions and in bold fonts
But if you really want to learn how to walk the walk, and talk the talk when it comes to digital and Inbound marketing; check out our new program. In just 60 days, we’ll teach you how to create and implement your own marketing strategy.
