I read a headline in one of the numerous marketing newsletters I read each day that said ‘The 5 KPI’s Marketers Need to Measure’.

I thought to myself, “Wow, I must be out of touch because I don’t even know what a KPI is.”

I felt a little better after talking to five high-profile marketing types who also did not know what a KPI is.

Your clients and prospects are wary of lazy short-form applications (you might call them SFA’s…lol) written to make the writer feel trendy, and the reader feel obsolete.

By the way, the author apparently wanted KPI to mean ‘key performance indicators’.

I went online and found a site that listed over 100 three letter ‘marketing terms’.

I stopped at the C’s:

CPM, cost per thousand

CTA, call to action

CMO, chief marketing officer

CAC, customer acquisition cost

CRM, customer relations manager

COS, content operating system

CPC, cost per click

CPV, cost per view

CCO, chief creative officer

CPP, cost per point

CBS, creative brief summary

CSI, customer satisfaction index

CPL, cost per lead

There are 26 letters in the alphabet, meaning there are 17,576 possible
three-letter combinations. I have no intentions of learning them all and neither do your customers.

Using trendy marketing terms might make you feel important, but you’ll never lose points by saying what you mean rather than using trendy or misunderstood short forms.