B2B, SaaS, SERPs, Oh My! Popular Marketing Acronyms, Defined

It’s true, marketing lingo can often be ridden with jargon and hard-to-understand acronyms. For marketers, it comes easy to us, sometimes we forget that B2C actually isn’t a word found in the dictionary and just a fancy acronym with a number in it.

But we’re all about empowering our clients to understand the bigger picture when it comes to strategy and marketing decisions. We want to remove the complicated jargon that can sometimes feel intimidating and replace it with your friendly, neighborhood marketing agency.

We’ve created this guide to decode some of the more popular marketing lingo. But we go a step beyond just defining, we’ll map out why these terms are important and how they’re applied to different marketing strategies across industries.

Without further adieu, let’s dive in.

Search Engine Acronyms

• SEM: Search Engine Marketing

What it Actually Means: Search engine marketing is a broad term for all things related to search engines and how people search to find your website. Whether that’s through the content on your site or how many links you have out on the internet that direct users back to your site, SEM is an all-encompassing term.

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization

What it actually means: Search engine optimization is definitely a buzzword in the marketing industry. People want to optimize for SEO. Which actually is redundant, since the term has optimization in its definition. SEO consists of many different techniques to make your site stand out in search engine result pages, namely Google’s search engine.

• SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages

            What it actually means: This one is pretty straightforward. SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages are the pages that come up after someone has typed something in the search query. Ideally, if you’ve got a good SEM strategy and efficient SEO, then your site will come up in the first SERP. Following along? This means your website is among the first to pop up when a user types keywords associated with your site.

Business Acronyms + Their Relationship to Marketing

• B2B: Business to Business

What it actually means: This is a common marketing term for businesses whose primary audience is other businesses. So if you’re a distributor of coffee, you’re selling to other businesses, not individuals. These businesses often have different marketing strategies.

• B2C: Business to Consumer
  
  What it actually means: Conversely to B2B, B2Cs are businesses that sell products directly to consumers. These are businesses like restaurants and retailers. There are a lot of different examples of B2C, but often their marketing voice is different than a B2B.
  
  
• SaaS: Software as a Service
  
  What it actually means: Ok, this isn’t just some sassy acronym, no. This is a common term in the tech world for companies whose main product is software. Think Venmo or Headspace, or other Apps that’s main product is software.

Popular Marketing Metrics Acronyms

• KPI: Key Performance Indicator

What it actually means: KPIs can be different for any marketing department and company. They’re often indicators of how your particular service or product is performing. Some people use lead conversions as a KPI, others use e-commerce sales. These are key indicators of growth and success for both the company and the marketing strategy.

• ROI: Return on Investment

           
What it actually means: This is from the finance world. Like any big investment, people want a return on it. This is also true for marketing dollars spent. If you’re spending $500/month on lead generation, but you close $2000/month in sales then your net return is $1500. Not too shabby.

—

The truth is, these are just the more common acronyms used in marketing and sales. There are a lot of other terms that are used outside of this handy-dandy guide. And if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, we can help with any and all of your digital marketing needs.

Contact us to schedule a free consultation!