Marketing Buzzwords… Not All Bad
Are you ready to diversify your brand through careful optimization, synergy tactics and ideation of viral contextual marketing? After that let’s discuss possible earned media platforms and the necessary thought leadership of gamification.
Ugh. Jargon can be really informative, or it can confuse the heck out of you. We’re here to help you sift through marketing lingo, figure out what it means, and help you understand how those terms can make your brand grow.
Let’s Begin
Clickability
What Is It:
Simply put, clickability is headlines, pictures and content with hyperlinks that lead elsewhere. The more clicks the higher the clickability.
Why We Hate to Say It:
Having visitors click around on your site doesn’t necessarily mean that the content is effective or even good. Measuring clickability is more complex than just number of hits; it’s also about where the links lead the visitor.
Why We Love to Use It:
We can track clicks and build algorithms off of those clicks. Ideally, keeping track of a site’s clickability over time gives marketers the opportunity to see what sorts of links are just too enticing to pass up.
Immersive Experience
What Is it:
When a site leaves an impression for being super interactive it’s an immersive experience. We’re talking about all the visual and audible bells and whistles of a website all at once. A perfect site experience makes you feel like you’re part of the brand.
Why We Hate to Say It:
Special programing can be overkill and visitors might end up clicking the “Skip Intro” button furiously, or exiting the site immediately. Especially if you’re browsing in the back of a lecture and sound effects begin blasting.
Why We Love to Use It:
We’re all for a lasting impression, exciting websites and interesting branding is our thing, so we’d be happy to help you strike that special balance for return visits.
Snackable Content
What Is It:
Remember before recess you got some goldfish crackers? Snackable Content is that, but in information form. It’s giving your customers easy to digest bits of information and leaving them excited for more.
Why We Hate to Say It:
It can be problematic from the inside. There is always that impulse to explain everything in its entirety, but people are less likely to read huge amounts of information and retain those facts. It can be a tough to filter out information.
Why We Love to Use It:
We’re experts at delivering snackable content through social media, collateral material or even fast facts on your site. Though pictures and concise copy we can get the right info to the right people and make it memorable.
Infographics
What Is It:
Infographics are visual representations of information. Sometimes there is a little flash animation, or small pieces of sound. They should always be light on text, easy to read and fun to look at.
Why We Hate to Say It:
They look simple, but they are tougher to make than one might think. There are tons of inforgraphics out there, and some of them are too information heavy, not scannable, or just poorly designed. A bad infographic can really damage a message.
Why We Love to Use It:
A solid infographic is an great way to deliver snackable content. We blogged about the amazing things infographics are doing for advertising.Plus, one of our designers has a PhD in infographic studies.
Participatory Commerce
What Is It:
You got a grade in participation in your Philosophy 101 class right? Same idea here, customers participate in making the product popular by promoting it or helping design it. Their input has direct value and can be achieved through pins, likes or contests.
Why We Hate to Say It:
This method relies heavily on word of mouth. You have to trust that customers will help promote your brand, which can be a tough sell if they aren’t on board from the start.
Why We Love to Use It:
We do the initial work by getting the word out, after that customers may not know it, but their positive participation does our job for us.
ROI
What Is It:
Return on investment isn’t only about marketing. It’s anything you put money into with the expectation that there will be a payoff. Yes, horse races and black jack totally count.
Why We Hate to Say It:
ROI is a catch-all phrase that means just about everything, so it can be challenging to pin down and define properly for our clients.
Why We Love to Use It:
The good news with digital marketing and advertising is that there are tools to track the successes of your ROI, and Andrew happens to be Yoda with just about all of those tools.
SoLoMo
What Is It:
SoLoMo stands for Social Media, Local Market and Mobile Site. The idea is that your web content touches all the bases. It is really important to keep a balance in mind while building a web campaign.
Why We Hate to Say It:
Sometimes we don’t use certain terms because they sound embarrassing. That’s how SoLoMo is. Despite the popularity of the concept, we wouldn’t recommend using this lingo in the board room. YOLO SOLOMO.
Why We Love to Use It:
We are thorough with our work. We try to cover all of the platforms of SoLoMo because it’s not going anywhere, in fact there will probably be more letters added to that acronym any day. In SoLoMo, the more expertise you have working on it, the further your brand will go.
Engagement Marketing
What Is It:
Engagement marketing is an ongoing practice that requires customer interaction on any or all of the steps along the way of a campaign. It’s about relationships and how people interact with your brand.
Why We Hate to Say It:
This term gets tossed around a lot, and just like your live-in-almost-engaged girlfriend, it’s complicated, a lot of work and somewhat never ending. It’s not a goal of marketing; it’s a process of marketing.
Why We Love to Use It:
Just like that ex, it’s a lot of work, but we promise there is big payoff if you do it right. Whether that means trade shows with customer engagement, email blasts with contest opportunities, or surveys, we’ll make note of customer relationships and build on what works.
Value Proposition
What Is It:
This is an easy one, in fact it’s so straightforward it could be a clue on a crossword puzzle. Example: “4. (Across) The intersection between product and customer need.” Now what’s a seven letter word for sponge?
Why We Hate to Say It:
There are a lot of ways of deciding where that intersection meets up. Figuring it out can be a timely process with a lot of research and trial and error.
Why We Love to Use It:
This bit of information is at the crux of all marketing and advertising. Once we agree what the value proposition of your product is, it’s a perfect jumping off point for us to put your product in the right place in front of the right people.
Growth Hacker
What Is It:
Growth hacking doesn’t actually have anything to do with hacking at all. It’s just about being a super smart ninja at digital marketing.
Why We Hate to Say It:
The term is a little misleading and there are negative connotations associated with hacking, but rest assured, no illegal War Games stuff is going on here.
Why We Love to Use It:
It’s the perfect way to reach the digital market, our growth hackers have lots of clever copy up their sleeve, SEO tricks, a knack for understanding customers and it’s likely their names are Mike or Andrew.
Agile Marketing
What Is It:
A few months ago we put together an entire blog post all about Agile Marketing. It’s pretty important to implement flexibility into your marketing plan because you can only predict market behavior so much
Why We Hate to Say It:
The term is really new, and as a result it’s sort of popping up in the marketing world everywhere. It can be hard to convince people they should pay for beta testing and creative flexibility.
Why We Love to Use It:
This is sort of how we’ve been doing business all along. We’re pretty sure we might be responsible for its origin. Our advice is to be open minded to agile marketing because trying multiple approaches and being openminded is key to creativity.
360 Campaign
What Is It:
A brilliant way to reach clients online and offline. It works to touch all the bases of advertisement. Think TV, radio, billboards, print ads, trade shows, social media, direct mailers, banner ads and email blasts.
Why We Hate to Say It:
Usually when we hear someone talk about something 360 we think about someone like this guy. Yikes.
Why We Love to Use It:
It’s extensive, but the hard work pays off. Big brands like Apple and Nike are good examples of companies that put the effort in and as a result everyone knows their product well.
Synergy
What Is It:
When two marketing campaigns work together and generate more interest than either one of the campaigns could on their own, that’s synergy.
Why We Hate to Say It:
Synergy is the marketing equivalent to college freshman words like “juxtapose” or “colloquial” Mostly it’s used to get attention from a professor. Also, it kind of seems like people who throw the word around don’t understand it and sound like amateurs.
Why We Love to Use It:
The good news is that it’s actually a great tool. We can help combine the right marketing efforts and mix things up for better results. The outcome is especially effective for reaching customers in places single strategies usually miss.
In closing, don’t be afraid to throw the words “agile marketing” or 360 campaign” around at a board meeting. You are officially a master of marketing jargon.