Content Marketing

21 Marketing Terms to Impress and Annoy Your Colleagues

I was at home catching up on some reading tonight. I’m a pretty simple guy, so whenever I hit some new terminology, I often click over to a search engine or dictionary to figure out what I’m reading. I’m also getting up there in years… so after I read what it is, I roll my eyes and go back to reading.

I roll my eyes because marketers (especially marketing authors) always feel compelled to invent new words for us to learn and to replace the old, boring terms. I suppose it makes them feel smarter while we retreat to inadequacy.

Here are some of those terms:

  1. Paid Media – We used to call this advertising.
  2. Earned Media – We used to call this word-of-mouth.
  3. Owned Media – We used to call this public relations.
  4. Traffic – We used to call this circulation or viewership.
  5. Gamification – We used to call this a reward, loyalty, badge, or point system. Boy Scout badges are circa 1930; this isn’t new.
  6. Engagement – We used to call this reading, listening, or viewing (and later… commenting)
  7. Content Marketing – We used to call this writing.
  8. Call-to-Action – we used to call this a banner ad. It didn’t mean we needed a new name just because it was on our site.
  9. Acceleration – we used to call this promotion.
  10. Graph – (e.g., Social Graph) we used to explain this as relationships.
  11. Authority – we used to call that popularity.
  12. Optimize – we used to call this improving.
  13. Curation – we used to call this organizing.
  14. Scorecards – we used to call these dashboards.
  15. Analytics – we used to call these reports.
  16. Updated: Personas – we used to call these segments based on behavioral or demographic profiles that data providers developed.
  17. Infographics – we used to call these pictographs, sometimes data illustrations, or posters. We’d hang the cool ones in our cubicles (er.. workstations).
  18. Verbiage – we used to call those words.
  19. Whitepaper – we just called those papers. They only came in white.
  20. Humanization – we didn’t have to call that anything.. we used to have to answer the phone or the door in person.
  21. Contextual Marketing – We used to call this dynamic or targeted content.

There are other great words, too… hybrid, fusion, velocity, democratization, cross-channel, templatize, aggregation, syndication, acceleration…

These guys need to back off the Google+, get some sleep, and dumbify it down to the elementary vocabulary we remember. Why is there this need by humans to always change? Perhaps calling it by something new means that we’ve somehow evolved? (I don’t buy it, do you?).

I think most companies struggle with simple branding or graduating from a crappy website, never mind a hybrid accelerated earned media campaign whose velocity is amplified by humanized engagement.

In all honesty, I suppose I’m guilty, too. I have a new media agency, not a marketing firm. It’s truly more of an inbound marketing agency… but I gambled that there will always be new media, but inbound might be replaced by some stupid new term like acute.

You know, as opposed to obtuse.

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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