Picture this: you’re beginning to work with a marketing agency. In a burst of passion, your marketing partners begin expanding upon all of the potential ways that they can help you grow your brand, throwing out acronyms left and right.
Suddenly, you find yourself overwhelmed. How will you ever keep up?
Like any field, the marketing sector is packed with industry-specific acronyms that can feel foreign at first. We’re here to help you develop your marketing knowledge so that you feel like a full partner in your marketing plan.
In this article, we break down three unrelated, but equally common, marketing acronyms: CTA, SEO, and A/B (testing). We discuss why these acronyms are so vital to collaborating with your marketing team, and how they will allow you to better communicate your goals and vision.
CTA
A CTA, or call to action, lays out the specific next action you want your website visitors to take and makes it simple and straightforward for them to do exactly what you want them to do.
“Sign up.” “Buy now.” “Save 25%.” These are just a few of the many ways to engage your target audience and move them in the intended direction. Is your initial goal for prospects to engage in your online course? Subscribe to your newsletter? Invest time in a complimentary call?
It is not enough for your prospects to simply see your content; your website needs a CTA to convert customers. Without one, your readers will have to work much harder to learn about your business and become a customer—and you increase the chances that they get bored or lost along on the way.
A clear CTA makes your customers’ lives simpler—and increases your sales.
You know your brand better than anyone—even your marketing team! By understanding CTAs, you can creatively and effectively strategize with your marketing partners around laying a clear path for conversions to meet your business goals.
[Dive deeper into what a CTA is and why your website needs one.]
SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the keys to brand visibility. Optimizing your marketing materials for SEO has many benefits, and helps your website rise through the rankings and appear higher up in search engine results.
SEO involves both front end (the part of your website that users see) and back end (“under the hood” tweaks, invisible to users) tactics, including:
- strong keywords
- regular website updates
- multimedia content
- blog posts
- image optimization
- rich metadata
By understanding what SEO is, you can better collaborate with your marketing team to audit and update your current SEO, and to cement a marketing plan rich in “SEO juice” that will keep your content easily visible for your target audience.
[Read more about the benefits of SEO and why it truly is the “acronym that unlocks your brand’s potential”]
A/B Testing
A/B testing refers to a method of testing two strategies against each other with the goal of achieving higher conversion rates. This includes strategies related to your brand’s social media channels, email marketing campaigns, website, and more.
A/B testing can be used to uncover a variety of things, including
- what time of day you should post on social media to garner the most views
- what subject lines result in the highest newsletter open-rates
- what sales page messaging leads to the most conversions
While finding the precise answers to these questions requires a lot of data, don’t let that scare you away. Very basic A/B testing can be done by simply trying out two different options while keeping all your other “variables” static. It won’t be perfect, but it’s a start.
By observing and responding to the effects of small changes, you can move the needle towards greater engagement and ultimately towards higher sales.
Plain English
Whether you are working with a marketing agency or taking these efforts into your own hands, you can achieve so much more by understanding the three marketing acronyms we’ve outlined today. We hope this brief overview will serve as a catalyst for you as you dive deeper into developing your marketing toolkit and working towards business growth.
Knowledge is power, and we love educating our clients so they understand the tactics we use to meet your marketing and business goals. At J.Scott Marketing, we also have a staunch company value to use plain English with our clients at all times. If you’re working with an agency, we recommend that you seek out a marketing partner who commits to ensuring you never feel lost or confused.
