Marketers speak French and senior managers speak English!

Let’s now turn to common marketing management terms to baseline the nomenclature differences.

•       GRPs, Reach, Frequency.  The three siblings of media metrics.  Some companies include others or omit one or more of these.  But for the most part, these are universal metrics in the advertising and marketing world.  In advertising, a Gross Rating Point (GRP) is a measure of the size of an advertising campaign by a specific medium or schedule. It does not measure the size of the audience reached.  Reach refers to the total number of different people or households exposed, at least once, to a medium during a given period.  Frequency is defined as the average number of times an individual notices an advertising message during a defined period of time.

•       Cost-per-click (CPC), pay-per-click (PPC).  CPC refers to the actual price you pay for each click in your PPC marketing campaigns.  While this makes obvious sense to a marketer – particularly those in digital or social media areas – for a senior manager it all sounds like “expense.” 

•       Click-through-rate.  The percentage of people visiting a web page who access a hypertext link to a particular advertisement.

•       Time-on-site.  This is the sum of the time on page for all pageviews in a visit to a company’s website.  Again, critical to digital marketers as it is a measure of “stickiness” of the visitor to the website and the brand/product/service, but to a senior manager, it must be translated into something related to the business funnel.

•       Impressions.  An impression is a measure of the number of times an ad is seen.  You can imagine how this is hard for a non-marketer to understand the value of in terms of a direction connection to sales

•       Clients entertained.  This is an “activation” or entertainment measure usually used by the events and sponsorship areas of a company.  It is a gross metric that is fairly meaningless without further context.  For instance, a company may entertain several hundreds of people at a NASCAR event, but only a fraction of those guests may be clients and/or decision makers. 

•       Cost per client, etc.  Further metrics associated with the entertainment world, they are also meaningless unless put into context as to who the guests were at the event.

What this means for the marketer.  Note how different these are from the Financial Managers’ common terms!  There is a huge communications gap between Finance and Marketing.

It’s like marketers are speaking French and senior managers are speaking English.