Essential Marketing Terms Every C-Suite Executive Must Know for Business Growth

Marketing Jargon Every Founder Should Understand

If you are a founder or hold a position within the C-suite, it is likely that you are regularly invited to make decisions on the marketing proposals from the agencies on your roster. It would be in your remit to pinpoint areas for growth and sign off marketing budgets.

Marketers are known for their industry jargon. It helps us describe what we do and what we will achieve, but sometimes, unfortunately, clever words and abbreviations can be used to cover up incompetencies.

In this article, we drill down into the key marketing terms you need to understand as a stakeholder to make critical decisions about your business growth and marketing strategy.

Omnichannel

When launching a new product/brand you probably got pitched an ‘omnichannel approach’. In simple terms, all it means is that your outreach campaigns will run across many channels. These could include both physical and digital channels such as organic and paid social, paid search, OOH, BTL etc.

Here are two essential questions to ask your marketing partners to see if they know what they are doing:

Which exact channels are included in this ‘omnichannel strategy’ and why?
What is the role of each channel in the marketing funnel?

You must ensure that the proposed omnichannel approach is not a list of all marketing channels on the planet but, crucially, it is a system where each channel is playing a specific role in the funnel.

Daria Partas, Strategic Communications Advisor, Co-founder of Solid Water Marketing Agency

Beware that for a pre-launch or a small scale campaign to test the ground, the omnichannel approach might be a less effective use of your budget. Make sure to question the reasoning here.

Marketing funnel

Surely you are familiar with this term but just to recap - a marketing funnel consists of 3 main stages which lead a customer to a purchase:

Top of the funnel: awareness.
Middle of the funnel: consideration.
Bottom of the funnel: conversion.

Some marketing channels are naturally more suited towards a specific funnel stage. For instance, TV ads are very much awareness-focused but unlikely to bring immediate conversion. Some channels such as Meta Paid Ads can be used across all stages of the funnel.

Reach, Impressions, CPC, CTR

Depending on the stage of the funnel, a marketing campaign works towards different sets of KPIs.

Reach, Impressions, Cost-per-Click (CPC) and Click-through-Rate (CTR) are the metrics used to measure the effectiveness of an awareness-focused campaign (think top of the funnel).

An awareness campaign is a great way to showcase your brand to a large section of your target audience but perhaps not the most effective option to trigger immediate sales.

Within awareness campaigns, your omnichannel strategy may engage YouTube, influencer marketing and OOH (out-of-home) advertising.

As a decision-maker you should ask yourself if the proposed approach aligns with your expectations. If you are focused on increasing the number of signups or users, then you are being pitched the wrong approach and you should ask your agency what alternative options they can offer to help you achieve the KPIs you have in mind.

While getting millions of impressions is great for awareness, often smaller brands cannot afford to splash on such luxuries as brand campaigns. What they need is to deploy an approach which finds a customer in the middle or at the bottom of the funnel

CPA, CR, ROI/ ROAS

These are the metrics you should be using to set up KPIs for mid-funnel, or consideration campaigns: cost per acquisition (CPA), conversion rate (CR), return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS).

This will help you stay grounded with your marketing program. If this is your first launch campaign, you can ask your agency for the market benchmarks or some median numbers for the similar products in the geography of your launch/campaign. Otherwise, your marketing team should have historical data for these metrics and thus know what is generally acceptable.

Also, consider that when running several campaigns at once, you will note that CPA in one channel may be lower or higher compared to the other. This is normal, as long as the program’s overall CPA and ROI remain healthy (i.e. your average cost per acquisition cannot be higher than what you make from a user).

Note that your CPA will naturally be higher during the early launch stages but you will want to see it come down in the reasonable time of 3 to 6 months.

Single Customer View & Attribution Modelling

Now we move onto things that help you track these metrics and optimise your spend accordingly. There are plenty of martech tools which can help brands acquire a single customer view and build models of attribution.

In a likely event that you are acquiring customers from various channels you need to make sure you have robust analytics in place to track your sources of traffic. However, this becomes complicated for products like apps that have a multitude of customer touchpoints: landing pages, web app, mobile app, communities

You need to make sure that you can identify the same customer across all these platforms, track their journey, attribute the source of acquisition and optimise the marketing spend.

Maria Tsarkova, Growth Marketer and co-founder of Solid Water Marketing Agency

Take my word for it, I have seen certain channels bring tons of traffic and high conversion rates with low customer lifetime value. At the same time, some channels in your mix may bring less traffic and conversions but high lifetime customer value. So the strategies here can be counter intuitive and require a prolonged view of the customer which, again, you can build with the right analytics in place.

Usually, you would require a combination of tools, which vary with business type and industry. Let’s take an example of an app:

Web analytics for Landing pages/website to see which channels generate the most interest and click-throughs to app stores (Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, for some additional features like heatmaps & session recordings check out Hotjar and Fullstory);
MMP platfrom to understand where the downloads are coming from (Appsflyer, Adjust);
In-life customer journey tracking to link customer lifetime value with the source (Mixpanel, Heap);
CRM system that tracks customer responses to your communications to understand how you can prolong customer lifetime value (there are many, but I’ll give an honourable mention to Braze).

Attribution modelling helps you make sense of the multiple touchpoints your audience and later leads have with your brand before they become a paying customer.

Anastasia Dobronravova, Marketing Strategy at Solid Water Marketing Agency:

Let’s say, a customer first landed on the website from an influencer campaign; then filled in a lead generation form from an Instagram ad; finally bought your product with a friend’s referral code.

What is their source of acquisition? There are a few ways to model it - end source attribution, first touchpoint attribution etc. None of them are right or wrong. It is about testing and seeing what works for your business. But definitely a sensible question to ask your marketing team or agency is ‘what attribution model are you using?’ Then ask them to show it to you to avoid doubt.

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