Jargon Busters: Understanding the Most Common Marketing Lingo in Franchising

Alice Tuffery, writer

Published at 11/02/2021, Updated on 04/05/2022 , Reading time: 6 min

Jargon Busters: Understanding the Most Common Marketing Lingo in Franchising — Photo © Marketing_Jargon.jpg

Implementing a successful marketing campaign shouldn’t just involve shouting about your product. It’s about fully understanding the wide variety of promotional techniques out there and selecting the right ones for your franchise business. Here’s our guide to the marketing lingo you need to know.

Like many other aspects of running a franchise business, advertising has its own set of key terms. Marketing jargon can be alienating, but once you know and understand some of the most important words and phrases, you’ll feel much more confident. We’ve provided a round-up of the most common franchise marketing terms below.

Franchise marketing lingo - key terms explained

Account-based marketing (ABM) - A one-to-one marketing strategy, in which companies target a specific business account with the intention of converting it into a customer or client.
Advertising fee - The payment made by a franchisee to a franchisor for the brand marketing activity they carry out on a regional or national scale. Usually, the fee is set at a percentage of the franchisee’s gross or net sales.
Bounce rate - The proportion of website visitors who leave without visiting any further pages on your site.
Brand awareness - A term used to describe a business’s level of public recognition and how well consumers know and understand the brand. It combines ‘brand recall’ (how successfully people can connect a brand to its sector) and ‘brand recognition’ (how successfully people identify it from its features, such as logo or colours).
Brand positioning - The process of presenting a business in line with its core values and strategies, and setting it apart from competitors. You can position a brand by its tone of voice and visual marketing design, for example.
Buyer persona - A description of a business’s target customer. You could identify them by their age, gender, interests or spending patterns, for instance.
Churn rate - A calculation measuring a business’s customer retention levels. It takes into account the proportion of people who stop buying from the company within a specific time period.
Content marketing - Activities relating to the creation and distribution of high-quality written or visual materials in order to find new customers and retain existing ones.
Conversational marketing - Any promotional material involving conversations. As part of this process, you try to convert leads into customers with personal communication, through chatbots or social media discussions, for example.
Conversion rate - The number of people who take a specific action out of all the people who visit a website or webpage. For example, you might try to calculate a conversion rate when you want to know the proportion of your website visitors who fill out your contact form.

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Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) - The practice of increasing your conversion rate.
Customer lifetime value (CLTV) - The total profit made through interactions with one customer throughout the duration of their time using the business.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software - A digital tool to handle customer communications and collect data. It usually stores useful contact information, such as names, phone numbers and emails, and the company customers belong to, if applicable.
Demand generation - A type of marketing practice. Specifically, demand generation involves taking steps to boost brand awareness and spark an interest among target customers.
Digital marketing - Any type of promotional activity completed with the use of electronic tools or devices. Digital marketing includes email campaigns, paid online adverts and social media interaction.
Direct mail - The process of sending items straight to the recipient. It’s considered to be a more personal form of marketing than email, and can involve everything from postcards and brochures to catalogues and even free gifts.
Engagement metric - A way of measuring how customers are interacting with your brand; for instance, through the number of likes and comments on social media posts. By keeping engagement metrics in mind, you can work out how effective your marketing efforts are.
Go-to-market (GTM) strategy - A plan for launching a product and carrying out marketing activity to make sure it achieves the highest possible level of awareness and interest.
Ideal customer profile (ICP) - Like a buyer persona, an ICP describes the target audience for a particular product, service or company.
Inbound marketing - The art of targeting specific individuals or companies with the potential to become high-value customers, rather than creating a general, widespread marketing campaign. You might create niche content on a particular subject or focus on SEO to attract relevant groups. Usually, inbound marketing tools will continue to benefit a business in the long term.
Lead nurturing - Investing time and money into making sure potential customers make a purchase with your business. Often, it’s about building trust and providing incentives.

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Market introduction programme - A scheme rolled out to mark the opening of a franchisee’s new unit. It should involve promotional and public relations initiatives to encourage people nearby to investigate the business.
Net promoter score (NPS) - The proportion of customers who would recommend your business, products or services to someone else. It is calculated as a number between -100 and 100 and any score above 0 is considered to be a positive result.
Outbound marketing - Also known as ‘interruption marketing’, this form of promotional activity involves targeting a wide range of different consumers in the hope of encouraging them to take action. It includes television, radio, print and paid online adverts, as well as cold calling and email spam.
Paid search - When search engines like Google place adverts on certain results pages, based on keywords. In theory, relevant products and services crop up when internet users type a particular term into the search box. These adverts work on a ‘pay-per-click’ basis, so businesses only hand over their money when someone clicks on them.
Sales funnel - A common metaphor to describe a company’s sales process, from the moment it creates marketing material to the point at which the customer receives their order confirmation email.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) - The process of improving your ranking position on search engines such as Google. The higher you rank, the more people will see your website, and you can use tactics like creating high-quality content and including keywords and links to reach the top spot.
Traffic - The amount of people who visit your website. In monitoring traffic, businesses often analyse customer journeys. Knowing whether most of your customers come to your site from a search engine, bookmark or external link can help inform your marketing strategies.

More insight into how to market your franchise business

If you’re keen to expand your advertising knowledge and master more marketing lingo, why not take a look at our other informative articles? You’ll find plenty of useful business guides in our catalogue and through the search box.