Acronyms are great – when everyone knows what they stand for. Otherwise, it sends you down the rabbit hole of a never-ending Google search.
One thing is certain: Marketers love their acronyms. Some are more obvious than others, so skip through the ones you go “uh huh” to.
This blog post will update with more acronyms as they come to me. I’m omitting the brand-central acronyms like AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) because frankly, they change names every few years and it’d be hard to stay on top of.
CRM – Customer Relationship Management
CRMs are built to keep track of all of your customer intelligence. You store things like personal details, notes on the customer’s market, touch-point notes (when you speak to them) and any personality quarks. When used correctly, CRMs can be the backbone of your marketing and sales activities. Bonus: they provide excellent information for launching ABM strategies. Examples of CRMs are Salesforce and HubSpot.
ABM – Account-Based Marketing
Typically in marketing we target customer segments. That is, a group of customers that share common characteristics (things like socio-economic status, behaviours, etc…). By doing this, we focus marketing efforts to people who are interested in what we have to offer. ABM takes that to the next level and focuses directly on accounts and specific people. This means that whatever marketing strategy you deploy will be highly personalized and customized. You’re designing an experience for a person, or at its broadest, a company.
CMS – Content Management System
Way back in the dark ages, folks used to type something out on a website, and they would copy-paste it on multiple places where the same topic would repeat. A good example is when you have a disclaimer that appears on multiple webpages. What a CMS does is allow you to save a block of text and media and call on it everywhere you need it repeated. Instead of copying and pasting, you just call up the same block of text. If you need to change something (or notice a typo), you only change it once and it updates throughout the website. The same concept applies to images and media. The files are centrally stored and called upon when needed.
CTA – Call to Action
As the web has becoming increasingly interactive and dynamic, CTAs are an important part of a quality content strategy. You want to make sure your ads, web, social posts, everything has a CTA. Why are CTAs so important? That’s what you’re measuring. Did your users do what you asked them to? How many? What’s the percentage of engagement? Did they follow through with the next steps? Simply put, CTAs drive a designed customer journey that you’ve deliberately put in place and help measure how effective your strategy is.
CX/UX – Customer Experience/User Experience
If you’re considering designing a customer experience through customer journeys, CX is the acronym for you. UX is its techy counterpart because if it’s a digital experience, the customer becomes a user. The user is who engages with your digital content. They become a customer again when they’re part of your CRM. I’ll back the truck up just a little bit. Think about all the ways in which customers find out about your business, how they contact you or research you, how they speak to you (phone, chat, email, etc..), how they need to be handled in order to make the sale, etc… all of these touch points are part of the customer journey with your company and can be designed from start to finish to create a personalized experience.