The 15 Most Common Marketing Acronyms (and What They Mean)

Have you ever heard of acronymization? It is the act, process, or result of turning a phrase into an acronym. The world of Inbound Marketing* is filled with acronyms. We probably encounter acronyms such as FB (which stands for Facebook) and ROI (which stands for Return On Investment) frequently. But some acronyms have multiple meanings, even for jargons and technical terms. For instance, ROR can stand for Return On Revenue, Rate of Return or even Retinoic Acid Receptor.

The more you know, the more likely you’ll be able to understand and participate in conversations going on around you.That’s why I have listed 15 common yet essential acronyms mainly used in the Inbound Marketing field.

AIDA: Attention/Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action

AIDA describes a common list of events that may occur when a consumer engages with an advertisement.

Attention (Awareness) – Grab the attention of the customer

Interest – Raise customers’ interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits (instead of focusing on features, as in traditional advertising).

Desire – Convince customers that the product or service will satisfy their needs.

Action – Lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.

B2B: Business-to-Business

B2B portrays commerce transactions between businesses, such as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer.

B2C: Business-to-Consumer

B2C (also called retail) refers to the sale of goods and services from individuals or businesses to the end-user. A retailer purchases goods or products in large quantities from manufacturers directly or through a wholesale, and then sells smaller quantities to the consumer for a profit.

CMS: Content Management System

A content management system (CMS) is a system used to manage the content of a website. Typically, a CMS consists of two elements: the content management application (CMA) and the content delivery application (CDA). The function and use of content management systems is to store and organize files, and provide version-controlled access to their data.

COS: Content Optimization System

While CMS needs additional coding to optimize for mobile and provide static experience for everyone, COS is the first integrated website, blog and landing page system to be optimized for mobile right out-of-the-box. It is fully integrated with every marketing channel and it adapts to each viewer’s unique context.

CRM: Customer Relationship Management

CRM is a system for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It involves utilizing technology to organize, automate and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support.

At the basic level, CRM software helps you keep your eyes on contact information for these customers. On top of that, CRM systems can do lots of other things like tracking emails, phone calls, faxes, and deals as well as sending personalized emails. The primary goal is to create a system in which sales reps have lots of information so that they can quickly pull up everything about leads or existing customers.

CTA: Call-to-Action

CTA urges the viewer of a sales promotion message to take an immediate action by employing a text link, button, image or some other type of web link, such as “Write Now,” “Call Now,” or (on Internet) “Click Here.”

The main goal of a CTA is a click, or a scan in the case of a QR code, and its success can be measured via a conversion rate formula that calculates the number of clicks over the times the CTA was seen. Another way to test the effectiveness of a CTA is employing A/B testing where several graphics are presented to a user and the graphic with highest success rate becomes the default.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a simple randomized experiment with two variations, A and B. The main goal is to identify changes to web pages that increase or maximize the outcome of interest (e.g. click-through rate for a banner advertisement).

PV: Page View

PV is a request to load a single web page (HTML file) on the Internet. Marketers use them to analyze their website and to see if any change on the web page results in more or fewer page.

QR Code: Quick Response Barcode

QR Code is a machine-readable code consisting of an array of black and white squares, typically used for storing URLs or other information for reading by the camera on a smartphone in order to bridge offline and online marketing.The information encoded by QR codes can include text, a URL, or other data. You can easily generate a QR code using a site like Canva’s QR Code Generator or Kaywa QR Code or ToolsISeek QR code generator or you can use the Open Source code to generate codes for you if you have a smart developer on hand. Google has a tool as well.

RSS: Rich Site Summary

An RSS Feed is a web feed that publishes frequently updated information like blog posts and news stories. RSS feeds enable publishers to syndicate data automatically. A standard XML (EXtensible Markup Language) file format ensures compatibility with many different machines/programs. RSS feeds also benefit users who want to receive timely updates from favourite websites or to aggregate data from many sites.

Subscribing to a website RSS alleviates the need for the user to manually check the website for new content. Instead, their browser constantly monitors the site and informs the user of any updates. The browser can also be commanded to automatically download the new data for the user.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

SEO refers to the techniques that help your website rank higher in natural search results and thus making your website more visible to people who are looking for your brand, product, service via search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Recently, search ranking has expanded to include tweets, retweets, likes, social mentions, page load time, and content marketing. Hence, your focus should be on the page and the topic, not just potential keywords.You need to provide what people are looking for with enough depth and insight that they stay on your site and are compelled to take actions.

The new direction of SEO is all about creating a unique user experience for each visitor and personalizing those experiences as much as possible.

URL: Uniform Resource Locator

A URL is a formatted text string used by Web browsers, email clients and other software to identify a network resource on the Internet. Network resources are files that can be plain Web pages, other text documents, graphics, or programs.

URL strings consist of three parts (substrings):

1. network protocol
2. host name or address
3. file or resource location

These substrings are separated by special characters as follows: protocol :// host / location. If you want to have further information, refers to Learn how to optimize your URLs for search here.

UX: User Experience

User experience (UX) involves a person’s behaviours, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system or service. User experience includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership.

Additionally, it includes a person’s perception of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency. User experience may be considered subjective in nature to the degree that it is about individual perception and thought with respect to the system. User experience is dynamic as it is constantly modified over time due to changing usage circumstances and changes to individual systems as well as the wider usage context in which they can be found.

LPO: Landing Page Optimization

A landing page is a web-page that is displayed when a potential customer clicks an advertisement or a search engine result link. This web page typically displays content that is a relevant extension of the advertisement or link. LPO aims to provide page content and appearance that makes the web page more appealing to target audiences.

* Inbound Marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads.