Nothing makes you feel dumber than sitting in a meeting and not understanding the lingo of those around you. Three and four-letter acronyms get tossed around casually, and if you're in the dark, it can make you feel like a caveman who only elicits gutteral noises: "Me smart. Me must sell product."
You must love acronyms to be in marketing. You MUST! And you must be able to drop these letter bombs in every meeting. "The CPA for the SEM program is 2% higher than the SEO program. We need to increase the YTD numbers before the next FYE." WTH? And to complicate matters, some acronyms can change depending on that company's lingo.
Luckily, we live in a digital age where we can find a useful glossary at the touch of a mouse. This is a helpful guide from the AMA (look, there's another acronym!) -- the American Marketing Association. This helpful A-Z tool provides full terms as well as acronym definitions.
DBI (Database Marketing Institute) has this reference, also another useful guide of terms.
Cheat sheets for beginners are always helpful.
For more modern terms, this blog contains the latest for social media. Marketing these days is an ever-changing landscape, so it's important to stay current.
However, the most crucial move is to just ASK (that's all capitalization for emphasis, not an acronym). No one likes to look stupid, but the only way to navigate this alphabet soup is to ask someone what those letters stand for, ASAP. Pretending to know could leave you SOL, so don't be afraid to mine the definitions at any time. Your ROI will improve dramatically!
