Marketing and Product Glossary
The world moves pretty fast, you may want to look up an acronym once in a while, or you might just miss it #YOLO
* This is a non-comprehensive list of roles within your business that will benefit from aligning around commonly used, and misused, terms in your next team meeting. Feel free to use these definitions to bring everyone onto the same page
A Site Visitor is someone who has landed on your website. In Google Analytics, Site Visitors are users who have initiated a session with your website within a specific period of time (e.g. today, yesterday, last month) and show up as number of users in your Google Analytics dashboard.
Bounce Rate represents the percentage of site visitors who landed on your website, and then left immediately. Technically, Google Analytics measures Bounce Rates as pages which only triggered a single request to the Analytics server.
Pageviews are the number of pages visited by a site visitor while on your website. Google Analytics technically measures a pageview as an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser.
Time on site is the average amount of time that a site visitor spends on your website during each visit. Google Analytics calls this average session duration and calculates it by dividing the total duration of all sessions (in seconds) during a specified time frame by the total number of sessions during that same time frame.
Return visitors is the average number of site visitors who have visited your website more than once. Google Analytics does not have a dedicated measure of return visitors, so you will need to look at the number of unique site visitors for the month and subtract that from the total number of site visitors for the same period. Note that site visitors and sessions are not the same thing.
Your brand’s specific target revenue for a particular month. Your RAMMP scores are calculated on the basis of targets you set, and will be recalculated when you make changes to your monthly targets.
Average buy size is the average spend per customer, whether that be a B2C or a B2B transaction that is completed through a sales team.
The average number of buyers for a particular month, whether that be a B2C or a B2B transaction that is completed through a sales team.
The Zero Second milestone is the point of arrival on your website and the gateway to your brand. It is the necessary first step—the mere showing up at the first date. In marketing terms, this moment is typically referred to as search engine optimization (SEO). At this moment, the Zero Second milestone, your marketing budget has been entirely exhausted. Whatever efficiencies you can introduce from this point forward in your marketing or sales funnel all translate to pure profit.
The Ten Seconds milestone starts the moment your site visitor lands on your website and represents the first impression made by your brand. Just like in real life, the first impression you make is critical - if you fail here, your site visitor will leave and there is an 88% chance that they will never come back. In real life, your subconscious mind processes hundreds of variables in milliseconds and delivers a YES/NO verdict. In digital, there are only two key ingredients that make up your first impression - your vibe and visuals, and your value proposition. Great news is you have total control over how you represent your brand to newly arrived visitors!
The Three Minute moment is your digital first date—it is your opportunity to reveal the key elements of your brand and convince the site visitor that it is worth their while to get to know your brand at a deeper level. You don’t need to tell that site visitor your whole life story, only enough to interest them enough to go on to the next milestone. In digital terms, the Three Minute milestone is made up of your page layout, site layout and the sequencing of your CTA’s (call to actions).
The Sign-up milestone is your first real sign of commitment from the site visitor. When they sign-up, they are giving you a clear indication that they are interested - in human terms, it is the equivalent of moving in with someone. If you succeed in getting your site visitor through the Sign-up milestone, you stand the very best chance of creating a loyal brand advocate — and Harvard research shows that loyalty generates 2.5 more revenue and that this revenue base is more resilient to economic downturns and recessionary conditions.
The first 48 Hours after a prospect signs up is typically the “onboarding process”. It is the most expensive moment in the customer journey to lose a potential customer, and also one of the most overlooked milestones. We typically put a lot of effort and expense toward attracting visitors to our website and getting them to the Sign-up milestone. And then we simply lose interest. We enter the digital equivalent of the disillusionment phase in human relationships, and like in human relationships, we turn our attention to attracting a new prospect, rather than focusing on the last mile in the relationship we just spent so much energy cultivating. Each time you lose a customer after sign-up, you steal from yourself.
The Upgrade milestone is where the tire hits the road - did you make your new prospect a hero? Did you make their life better? You probably did, because your brand is awesome… but the fact is that if you don’t tell, and then remind, the people who matter about how it is that you make their life better, they might just forget. Not because they don’t value the relationship, but simply because they are thinking about 35,000 other things.
It is not enough to deliver a quality offering and to get someone through all the ADORE milestones to the point of sign-up and engagement. To get them to buy, and rebuy, from you, you need to create an authentic yet systematic way to remind your customers exactly how you make their life better. To be authentic, your reminder system should be decoupled from your billing cycles.
We shortcut decision-making by deferring to credible authorities. An endorsement by a higher authority eliminates the need to consciously weigh up the evidence and make the decision from first principles. Many successful value propositions lean on credibility from an authority: “Train, Eat and Live better with Chris Hemsworth’s team” is compelling, not because Chris Hemsworth has a PhD in nutrition or sports physiology, but because he is seen as an authority. The fact that he’s an authority in an unrelated space does not matter that much—in fact, the emergence and growth of “influencer marketing” as a discipline is based on our proclivity to defer our decision-making to a famous or credible authority.
We are intrinsically wired to mimic the behaviour of others. We ingest and respond to social proof unconsciously and often rely on it as a shortcut to making decisions. TripAdvisor star ratings are a handy shortcut to the opinions of others at a glance; ditto for product ratings on Amazon, eBay, or your favourite online store. Slogans like “4 out of 5 dentists recommend” were incredibly successful in activating our innate response of falling in line because others do. In the context of hectic lives and decision-overloaded days, star ratings provide us with the social proof to make a confident decision easily. .
We shortcut decision-making by making relative, not absolute, comparisons of value. As we don’t have an inherent sense of the value of things, we assess what is reasonable by looking at things in relation to other, similar things. In marketing terms, our human propensity to make decisions through comparison gives rise to what is known as “the decoy effect.” The decoy effect is a deliberate strategy to present a number of options to the buyer, some of which are deliberately unfavourable, in a move to steer them toward choosing the option which is best for the seller. This principle can also be used successfully when bringing a product or offering to a market with no real competitors.
The first time we are exposed to a price for goods or services forms an anchor in our minds that is hard to shift from, even with the passage of time. Anchoring is particularly visible when looking at the price sensitivity across generations. We have all heard our grandparents tell the story of “back in my day milk was $0.10 and a loaf of bread nothing over $0.20. Prices these days!” The predictable eye-roll is a reaction to the fact that your generation is anchored to a different normal price point. This chink in our thinking is notable when considering how to position your product both in relation to existing products and with regard to your target audience’s age.
It is human nature to want what we can’t have. The principle of scarcity goes further and shows us that we are more afraid of losing something than enticed by gaining something of equal value. Correspondingly, we are willing to pay more for something that we think is scarce or limited—a fact exploited by every rug business on the planet that has been in its “Final Closing Down 89% Off” sale consistently for the last five years.
We shortcut decision-making by wanting it more when it is free. Along with scarcity driving us to desire something more, the price tag of free has the power to send us into a similar irrational frenzy. The power of free comes from the fact that it is the price point at which all risk is eliminated. Free carries with it no downside in economic terms - there is however an opportunity cost we should be mindful of in a digital context. A FREE trial may not cost anything, but it does require a commitment to exploring your product further, and that takes time.
Once we take a stand, we have an almost obsessive propensity to remain consistent with our stated position. This familiar pattern is replicated in the digital space so often that we may not notice it anymore. At checkout, we are presented with the option to take advantage of free shipping if we spend another $32.49. We have already committed to buying the first item and so willingly add one more to get the free shipping. The power of free plus consistency deals us an irresistible double whammy.
We shortcut decision-making by preferring to do ... nothing. Netflix wins over a free trial of your product every day. Many business owners think that success follows if they can show that their offering has superior features or a lower price than their competitors. In reality, the inertia of doing nothing is stronger than the potential upside, even if the upside is risk-free. Your competitor list, therefore, includes inaction. To counteract inaction and get anyone to choose your brand, you must remove all the obstacles to render the desired behaviour easy.
SEO agencies will typically provide solutions to drive more traffic to your website. There are a host of sub-specialities and acronyms that differentiate the exact approach taken by a particular agency, including influencer marketing, performance marketing, CRO (convesion rate optimisation), SEO (search engine optimisation) - the main differentiator is in enlisting “organic” ways to rank well with Google, or utilising adwords. Given that Google changes its algorithms around 3,000 times a year, both approaches have limitations and are the key reason why we suggest that you optimise the rest of your funnel/customer journey first.
Marketing and branding agencies are often mistakenly thought to be the same. Marketing agencies in a pure sense design strategies and campaigns to drive more traffic to your website (see SEO agencies above), whereas branding agencies work with you to create a brand identity (logo, tagline, brand style guide, brand voice and tone, value proposition). If the RAMMP report identifies your Ten Second milestone as underperforming, work with a branding agency to uplift your first impression.
There is a huge range in the quality and scope of services that are offered by “web design” agencies. Some will have expert design skills and a good sense of how to market and position your brand, whereas clothes will simply provide a vanilla build service. Think architect-designed home vs demountable - both will technically allow you to sleep safely, but the experience will be vastly different. Work with a great web design agency if you have weaknesses at the Three Minute or Sign-up milestones.
User experience, customer experience, service design, product design, user interface design and plain old design are all variations of a common set of principles that stem from the discipline of design. There are nuanced differences between these various offerings, which may be relevant to your business, but what holds true across the board is that a great UX/UI/CX designer or design agency will unlock latent value in your product, test proposed designs with customers or members of your target audience and add value beyond the colour of pixels on the screen. It is worth finding a great recommendation in this space if you need to tune the First 48 hours or Upgrade milestones in your RAMMp report.
Typically development agencies provide front and back-end development services and/or web app or mobile app services. The most valuable way to work with agencies of this type is to have very specific designs, ideally designs that have been user-tested with your target audience. Please take care not to let your development agency or engineering team drive the design of your website, product or service.
Marketing Metrics
A Site Visitor is someone who has landed on your website. In Google Analytics, Site Visitors are users who have initiated a session with your website within a specific period of time (e.g. today, yesterday, last month) and show up as number of users in your Google Analytics dashboard.
Bounce Rate represents the percentage of site visitors who landed on your website, and then left immediately. Technically, Google Analytics measures Bounce Rates as pages which only triggered a single request to the Analytics server.
Pageviews are the number of pages visited by a site visitor while on your website. Google Analytics technically measures a pageview as an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser.
Time on site is the average amount of time that a site visitor spends on your website during each visit. Google Analytics calls this average session duration and calculates it by dividing the total duration of all sessions (in seconds) during a specified time frame by the total number of sessions during that same time frame.
Return visitors is the average number of site visitors who have visited your website more than once. Google Analytics does not have a dedicated measure of return visitors, so you will need to look at the number of unique site visitors for the month and subtract that from the total number of site visitors for the same period. Note that site visitors and sessions are not the same thing.
Your brand’s specific target revenue for a particular month. Your RAMMP scores are calculated on the basis of targets you set, and will be recalculated when you make changes to your monthly targets.
Average buy size is the average spend per customer, whether that be a B2C or a B2B transaction that is completed through a sales team.
The average number of buyers for a particular month, whether that be a B2C or a B2B transaction that is completed through a sales team.
ADORE ProcessTM
The Zero Second milestone is the point of arrival on your website and the gateway to your brand. It is the necessary first step—the mere showing up at the first date. In marketing terms, this moment is typically referred to as search engine optimization (SEO). At this moment, the Zero Second milestone, your marketing budget has been entirely exhausted. Whatever efficiencies you can introduce from this point forward in your marketing or sales funnel all translate to pure profit.
The Ten Seconds milestone starts the moment your site visitor lands on your website and represents the first impression made by your brand. Just like in real life, the first impression you make is critical - if you fail here, your site visitor will leave and there is an 88% chance that they will never come back. In real life, your subconscious mind processes hundreds of variables in milliseconds and delivers a YES/NO verdict. In digital, there are only two key ingredients that make up your first impression - your vibe and visuals, and your value proposition. Great news is you have total control over how you represent your brand to newly arrived visitors!
The Three Minute moment is your digital first date—it is your opportunity to reveal the key elements of your brand and convince the site visitor that it is worth their while to get to know your brand at a deeper level. You don’t need to tell that site visitor your whole life story, only enough to interest them enough to go on to the next milestone. In digital terms, the Three Minute milestone is made up of your page layout, site layout and the sequencing of your CTA’s (call to actions).
The Sign-up milestone is your first real sign of commitment from the site visitor. When they sign-up, they are giving you a clear indication that they are interested - in human terms, it is the equivalent of moving in with someone. If you succeed in getting your site visitor through the Sign-up milestone, you stand the very best chance of creating a loyal brand advocate — and Harvard research shows that loyalty generates 2.5 more revenue and that this revenue base is more resilient to economic downturns and recessionary conditions.
The first 48 Hours after a prospect signs up is typically the “onboarding process”. It is the most expensive moment in the customer journey to lose a potential customer, and also one of the most overlooked milestones. We typically put a lot of effort and expense toward attracting visitors to our website and getting them to the Sign-up milestone. And then we simply lose interest. We enter the digital equivalent of the disillusionment phase in human relationships, and like in human relationships, we turn our attention to attracting a new prospect, rather than focusing on the last mile in the relationship we just spent so much energy cultivating. Each time you lose a customer after sign-up, you steal from yourself.
The Upgrade milestone is where the tire hits the road - did you make your new prospect a hero? Did you make their life better? You probably did, because your brand is awesome… but the fact is that if you don’t tell, and then remind, the people who matter about how it is that you make their life better, they might just forget. Not because they don’t value the relationship, but simply because they are thinking about 35,000 other things.
It is not enough to deliver a quality offering and to get someone through all the ADORE milestones to the point of sign-up and engagement. To get them to buy, and rebuy, from you, you need to create an authentic yet systematic way to remind your customers exactly how you make their life better. To be authentic, your reminder system should be decoupled from your billing cycles.
What influences buying decisions?
We shortcut decision-making by deferring to credible authorities. An endorsement by a higher authority eliminates the need to consciously weigh up the evidence and make the decision from first principles. Many successful value propositions lean on credibility from an authority: “Train, Eat and Live better with Chris Hemsworth’s team” is compelling, not because Chris Hemsworth has a PhD in nutrition or sports physiology, but because he is seen as an authority. The fact that he’s an authority in an unrelated space does not matter that much—in fact, the emergence and growth of “influencer marketing” as a discipline is based on our proclivity to defer our decision-making to a famous or credible authority.
We are intrinsically wired to mimic the behaviour of others. We ingest and respond to social proof unconsciously and often rely on it as a shortcut to making decisions. TripAdvisor star ratings are a handy shortcut to the opinions of others at a glance; ditto for product ratings on Amazon, eBay, or your favourite online store. Slogans like “4 out of 5 dentists recommend” were incredibly successful in activating our innate response of falling in line because others do. In the context of hectic lives and decision-overloaded days, star ratings provide us with the social proof to make a confident decision easily. .
We shortcut decision-making by making relative, not absolute, comparisons of value. As we don’t have an inherent sense of the value of things, we assess what is reasonable by looking at things in relation to other, similar things. In marketing terms, our human propensity to make decisions through comparison gives rise to what is known as “the decoy effect.” The decoy effect is a deliberate strategy to present a number of options to the buyer, some of which are deliberately unfavourable, in a move to steer them toward choosing the option which is best for the seller. This principle can also be used successfully when bringing a product or offering to a market with no real competitors.
The first time we are exposed to a price for goods or services forms an anchor in our minds that is hard to shift from, even with the passage of time. Anchoring is particularly visible when looking at the price sensitivity across generations. We have all heard our grandparents tell the story of “back in my day milk was $0.10 and a loaf of bread nothing over $0.20. Prices these days!” The predictable eye-roll is a reaction to the fact that your generation is anchored to a different normal price point. This chink in our thinking is notable when considering how to position your product both in relation to existing products and with regard to your target audience’s age.
It is human nature to want what we can’t have. The principle of scarcity goes further and shows us that we are more afraid of losing something than enticed by gaining something of equal value. Correspondingly, we are willing to pay more for something that we think is scarce or limited—a fact exploited by every rug business on the planet that has been in its “Final Closing Down 89% Off” sale consistently for the last five years.
We shortcut decision-making by wanting it more when it is free. Along with scarcity driving us to desire something more, the price tag of free has the power to send us into a similar irrational frenzy. The power of free comes from the fact that it is the price point at which all risk is eliminated. Free carries with it no downside in economic terms - there is however an opportunity cost we should be mindful of in a digital context. A FREE trial may not cost anything, but it does require a commitment to exploring your product further, and that takes time.
Once we take a stand, we have an almost obsessive propensity to remain consistent with our stated position. This familiar pattern is replicated in the digital space so often that we may not notice it anymore. At checkout, we are presented with the option to take advantage of free shipping if we spend another $32.49. We have already committed to buying the first item and so willingly add one more to get the free shipping. The power of free plus consistency deals us an irresistible double whammy.
We shortcut decision-making by preferring to do ... nothing. Netflix wins over a free trial of your product every day. Many business owners think that success follows if they can show that their offering has superior features or a lower price than their competitors. In reality, the inertia of doing nothing is stronger than the potential upside, even if the upside is risk-free. Your competitor list, therefore, includes inaction. To counteract inaction and get anyone to choose your brand, you must remove all the obstacles to render the desired behaviour easy.
Who to hire?
SEO agencies will typically provide solutions to drive more traffic to your website. There are a host of sub-specialities and acronyms that differentiate the exact approach taken by a particular agency, including influencer marketing, performance marketing, CRO (convesion rate optimisation), SEO (search engine optimisation) - the main differentiator is in enlisting “organic” ways to rank well with Google, or utilising adwords. Given that Google changes its algorithms around 3,000 times a year, both approaches have limitations and are the key reason why we suggest that you optimise the rest of your funnel/customer journey first.
Marketing and branding agencies are often mistakenly thought to be the same. Marketing agencies in a pure sense design strategies and campaigns to drive more traffic to your website (see SEO agencies above), whereas branding agencies work with you to create a brand identity (logo, tagline, brand style guide, brand voice and tone, value proposition). If the RAMMP report identifies your Ten Second milestone as underperforming, work with a branding agency to uplift your first impression.
There is a huge range in the quality and scope of services that are offered by “web design” agencies. Some will have expert design skills and a good sense of how to market and position your brand, whereas clothes will simply provide a vanilla build service. Think architect-designed home vs demountable - both will technically allow you to sleep safely, but the experience will be vastly different. Work with a great web design agency if you have weaknesses at the Three Minute or Sign-up milestones.
User experience, customer experience, service design, product design, user interface design and plain old design are all variations of a common set of principles that stem from the discipline of design. There are nuanced differences between these various offerings, which may be relevant to your business, but what holds true across the board is that a great UX/UI/CX designer or design agency will unlock latent value in your product, test proposed designs with customers or members of your target audience and add value beyond the colour of pixels on the screen. It is worth finding a great recommendation in this space if you need to tune the First 48 hours or Upgrade milestones in your RAMMp report.
Typically development agencies provide front and back-end development services and/or web app or mobile app services. The most valuable way to work with agencies of this type is to have very specific designs, ideally designs that have been user-tested with your target audience. Please take care not to let your development agency or engineering team drive the design of your website, product or service.
