41 Jargons to Help Copywriters Get Started in the Marketing World

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Content marketing is riddled with acronyms and abbreviations.

When I started as a copywriter in a marketing team, I had no idea what people were talking about most of the time. Jargon and abbreviations flew at me from all sides, making me feel more like a fool and less like a part of the industry.

But there’s a learning curve to any job. And lingo is a big part of that. Here’re some of the shorthands, abbreviations, and acronyms that I’ve become accustomed to using over the years.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Most of these acronyms refer to marketing practices and tools that require deeper learning to work with.
Knowing what these are is the first step, learning what they do comes on the job.

1. ABM — Account-Based Marketing: If you’re part of an organisation, chances are you’ve already seen this in action. For a long time, what I thought the sales guys were doing was indeed Account-Based Marketing. They engage one-to-one with prospects who signed up for a campaign and suggest further steps based on the individual’s progress in the funnel — hence an account-based marketing approach. Often beginning with cold calling, ABM proceeds to troubleshooting, guidance, and at last, purchase. Based on the potential customer’s requirements (account), the salesperson distributes relevant content. Often we create content based on the account’s demand, rather than finding accounts for content we already have. I’d like to think of ABM as the big chunk between lead generation and lead nurturing. Here’s a good place to start learning more.
2. KPI — Key Performance Index: Any metric that helps you assess your performance. In the case of a web page, the average time someone spends on the page could be an important indicator of the content’s worth.
3. USP-Unique Selling Proposition: What makes you worth the money. In case of a product or a business, a USP is the selling point-the feature, capability, or factor that differentiates you from the rest of the competition. Examples include favourable pricing, an active user community, and the number of years in business (credibility). Marketers use the USP in advertising to persuade the audience to switch brands.
4. CMS — Content Management System: A tool that helps manage content on a large scale. Some website providers like WordPress are also content managers. Some businesses use a CMS to store information for internal knowledge and use. On a different note, I’ve also seen people using the abbreviation to refer to Content Marketing Strategy. The definition depends on who you’re talking to.
5. CRM — Customer Relationship Management: The process of collecting, storing, and following up on customer patterns. CRM tools help track the life cycle of a customer from before they purchase all through their association with the business.
6. CTA — Call to Action: A message — or button — that appeals to the reader to take immediate action. For example, a “Get Started” button, a “Sign Up” link, or an email subscription box.
7. SWOT analysis: A complete analysis that marketers and product managers make of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats their product will face when it launches. It often happens in the product ideation phase, but can also occur afterwards. This analysis helps us identify which messaging will suit the product and how we should position it.
8. R&D — Research and Development: Most companies spend a ton of money, time, and people on researching their market, challenges, opportunities, and predictions. They have separate departments and allocate budgets for research. Based on these insights, the company creates new opportunities and innovates on its offerings.
9. ROI — Return on Investment: How much you earn based on how much you (as a brand) spend on investing in people, assets, advertisements, etc.
10. B2B — Business to Business: A market where companies sell products or services to other companies.
11. B2C — Business to Customer: A market where companies sell products or services to the consumer.
12. B2E — Business to Enterprise: A market where companies sell products or services to large-scale enterprises.
13. WOM — Word of Mouth: Love Coke? Share a Coke. Word of Mouth is the spreading of an idea, a product, or a brand by telling others about it.
14. KT — Knowledge Transfer: My manager taught me this one.
15. MVP — Minimum Viable Product: A prototype — a basic functioning model of an idea. Having something to show for a plan makes it easy to convince the decision makers.
16. LTV — Life Time Value: How much a customer is worth to us throughout their term as a customer.
17. NPS — Net Promoter Score: A surveying method of scoring customers to identify the most influential and valuable customers. It comprises of one question only: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” Customers who rate above 8 are promoters — the most loyal customers.
18. SMB/SME — Small to medium businesses/Small to medium enterprises: Interesting fact: While Europe, Russia, and North America prefer “SMB”, most of South America, Mexico, Australia, and India use “SME”.
19. JTBT — Jobs to be done: A customer’s mindset. As consumers we often change our ideas about what we want and need. This is a “job”. To fulfil this job, a consumer looks for products or services. So in its basic sense a “job to be done” is an unresolved requirement of a specific customer. There’s so much more to JTBT. It’s based on a comprehensive theorem, and here’s a good place to learn more about it.
20. FOMO — Fear of Missing Out: Checking your phone regularly because you don’t want to miss the latest post from someone else. Related: JOMO — Joy of Missing Out: A mature state when FOMO doesn’t bother you anymore. On the contrary, you appreciate the freedom it offers. A rather unofficial (but fun to know) acronym, coined by Julia McCoy, CEO of the content agency, Express Writers.
21. PoS — Point of Sale: The time at which a retailer makes a sale to a customer. Also called the point of purchase. There’re online PoS tools (software) that help retailers track these exchange points and manage their sales.
22. POC — Proof of Concept: A smaller version of a prototype. A sample, a demonstration of sorts, of a concept in working, usable condition.
23. SMM — Social Media Marketing/Management: Using social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Instagram) to promote a brand and its content. This is an envelope phrase that encompasses: 1. building and maintaining communities on social media (Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Twitter chats, Instagram giveaways), 2: generating leads through conversations, 3: providing customer support on social media, 4: running paid ads and campaigns to increase awareness, 5. tracking success metrics, 6. analysing/researching audience, ideal times, and content, and more.
24. NSFW — Not Safe For Work: Content and topics too sensitive for work environments. Popularised by Reddit.
25. URLs — Uniform Resource Locators: The link of any page on the internet.
26. GA — Google Analytics: A product by Google that helps marketers track website analytics like page views, visitors’ navigation patterns, links and buttons they’ve clicked on, how long they’ve spent on the website, and more.
27. GTM — Google Tag Manager: A product by Google for webmasters (people who create, host, and manage a website) to manage the HTML and Javascript codes on their website. When we add a GTM script on our web pages, these pages will communicate with a user’s web browser every time they visit our website. The results will show up on Google Analytics.
28. UTM — Urchin Tracking Module: I’d like to think of this one as URL tracking management because that’s what it does. A UTM is a parameter (a prefix, if you will) that we add to a shared URL. For example, when we share a blog on Facebook, we add parameters called “source=Facebook” and “medium=social”. These UTM parameters are tracked in Google Analytics and help identify how many views or clicks that Facebook has contributed to the blog’s overall views.
29. CPA — Cost Per Action: How much a single action from a single user costs the company. The action depends on the company’s goals and wants, so it could be watching an ad, signing up for email subscription, downloading an ebook, etc.
30. CPL — Cost Per Lead: How much it costs to acquire a single lead. This varies from campaign to campaign, but in general we assess this by dividing the total spending (on print ads, Google text ads, remarketing ads, social media promotion, payments for influencers, expenses for video making, content creation, etc.) during a campaign by the number of leads that we generated from that campaign. What’s ironic, though, is that CPL doesn’t consider the hours of human work.
31. PPC — Pay Per Click: Google, when we run text ads, allows us to choose from multiple types of ads. Pay Per Click is a type where we pay Google every time a person who sees our ad clicks on it. Google doesn’t charge us for displaying the ad for the number of people who see the ad. However, for every click — intentional or not — we pay.
32. CPC — Cost Per Click: The cost of every click on a PPC campaign.
33. CTR — Clickthrough Rate: The percentage of people who click our text ads all the way through to the page, and complete the intended goal — could be signing up, downloading an ebook, or purchasing.
34. CRO — Conversion Rate Optimisation: A digital marketing practice of optimising the rate of conversions. For example, people converting from clicks to signups, from potential to customers, from blog post reader to email list subscriber.
35. SEO — Search Engine Optimisation: The branch of work that revolves around making content readable and more appealing to search engines. When we optimise our content, we increase the chances of our content showing up higher in search results. Search optimisation is more than just writing and publishing content. It’s about analysing common search terms related to our industry and trying to incorporate these phrases, and answers for questions in our content. SEO is about manipulating our web page content according to search trends.
36. SEM — Search Engine Marketing: Goes hand in hand with SEO. While SEO focuses on organic (unpaid) reach, SEM is when you’re investing time and money to create and display ads on search engines.
37. SLA — Service Level Agreement: A legal agreement between a client and a service-based business, often in writing. The agreement covers critical points about the joint partnership like duration, project details, and the terms and conditions of the project.
38. HTML — Hyper Text Markup Language: A programming language used to create a web page. The language defines the layout of the page and where each element goes.
39. CSS — Cascading Style language: The design language to create a web page. HTML and CSS are complementary. While HTML defines the structure of an element, CSS defines the colour, style, font style and size, and the effects of the element.
40. UI — User Interface: What a user sees on their screen. In case of a product, UI refers to its screens and how each element (buttons, links, text, icons, illustrations, text boxes, wizards, colours, etc.) on the product screen looks.
41. UX — User Experience: How UI feels like to the user. Some interfaces are hard to navigate, while some others are easier and more welcoming. UX is how a user experiences our product, every step of the way.

That’s my ever-growing list. Anything else come to mind? Do share, I’d love to learn from you.

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