How To Speak Marketing
We’ve all been in THOSE meetings where you have either brought in a third party consultant to help out with growing the business through marketing – and they just don’t get you – or perhaps it’s an eager co-worker who likes to show off their wide-ranging vocabulary. It’s the dreaded marketing jargon showdown. The person using the verbiage carelessly goes on and on, when in reality others in the meeting are still back at “hello.”
A while back, we talked about a few trendy marketing and PR buzzwords that get thrown around a lot when it comes to building a strategy, but what about those nitty gritty terms that have been around for a long time, and will probably stick around?
The most important thing to remember is that no one should feel inferior if they don’t know what these terms mean. PERIOD. It’s probably best to stop the speaker and ask them to clarify, because chances are someone else has the same question (an old adage that has stuck with me as I get older).Here are a few marketing terms to brush up on before your next meeting!
B2B: Business to Business (B2B) means selling your product or services to other businesses.
B2C: Business to Consumer (B2C) means selling your product or services to the end-user consumers.
Brand loyalty: When a customer keeps coming back to the same brand over and over again in spite of other competitors on the market.
Call-to-action: What you are asking your audience to do (ie. Share a post, like a post, tell your friends, etc.). You should always include a call to action in your outgoing messaging.
CASL: Canadian Anti-Spam Laws were introduced in 2014 to protect people’s email inboxes. In short, you can’t send marketing communications via email unless the receiver has opted in to your list.
Clutter: Similar to when your desk is messy and you can’t find anything, clutter in marketing, or noise, refers to the amount of other marketing messages you have to break through. There are a lot of brands trying to reach customers on a daily basis, and the challenge is to cut through all of that so you get noticed.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): CRM is a system for managing customer and potential customer interactions on a daily basis.
First-Mover Advantage: Being the first to introduce a product into a new market. This allows you to capture a higher market share.
Going Viral: When your message spreads quickly via the internet or other channels. Contrary to what most people think, you can never really have full control over whether your video or message will go viral as it completely depends on how it is received. However, you can coax it along by getting to know what your target audience likes.
Integrated Strategy: Creating an overall strategy that takes into account both traditional and non-traditional (AKA digital) channels to reach the target audience and achieve the overall business goals.
Niche Market: A niche is a subsection of a larger whole. In marketing it’s when you choose to target your efforts to a smaller group with the goal of gaining higher brand loyalty than if you tried to appeal to a larger group.0
Personalization: The ultimate form of targeted marketing where a brand creates messages and other content for each individual.
Ubiquity: This can be used in everyday life (and we encourage it…), but in marketing it means that you are trying to be all things to all people. For example, if you are a luxury brand, you are also trying to appeal to the masses, which could affect your brand’s status.
There are many more terms that could be added to this list, but these are the common ones. You should never get bogged down with the lingo. Keep your strategy discussions simple and based on idea generation, while using these terms to highlight the conversation.
