News

Marketing is about attraction, drawing in the client or customer and holding their attention long enough to convince them that they want what you have. The brunt of this falls on communication. It’s important to use terms that resonate with your target market audience in a positive way.
In 2015, there are certain terms marketing companies should use while others that they should shy away from. Then there are the terms that should be avoided like the plague. Let’s dive in!
The Good:

• Organic and Sustainable – Natural and long lasting resonates with most clients and is their desired relationship both between an agency and their organization, but also between themselves and their customer base.
• Selfie – While selfies used to define one person posing for their camera phone for hours on end, now the term also represents group shots, or a photo of a group capturing good times and togetherness. Thanks to Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscar selfie, which basically broke twitter from extensive retweets, people are foregoing asking strangers to snap a picture for them, and opting to take an arm-length shot of however many people they can cram into the frame.
• Customizable – We all like to be catered to, whether you’re working with a client or a customer they like to think their experience is customized just for them, and to a certain extent, it is, and it will always have to be. Speaking as an agency, that is what makes relationships so strong, each experience with a client is interesting and has it’s own subtle nuances.
• Secure – In this day and age of account databases being hacked and client information being leaked, security is subjective. Your account can only be so secure, that’s the reality. The term “secure” implies that you need not worry about failure and that gives both clients and customers great peace of mind.
• Effortless – As an agency, we’d love for our client’s role in marketing to be as effortless as possible, and likewise when they’re attracting new customers. Effortless is easy, easy is simple, and simple is good.
• Family – With social media becoming more intertwined with all of lifes milestones from weddings to what your breakfast looked like this morning, staying in touch with family has never been easier. This ease of contact with family is essentially making family ties stronger, and companies know this and are targeting based off that warm and fuzzy feeling of togetherness.

The Bad:

• Snackable Content – Slightly insulting, take content and put it in bite-sized pieces for your clientele to digest. I’m much more satisfied after a slice or two of pizza than eating a Bagel Bite. But that’s just me.
• Storyscaping – Crafting a brand story to differentiate yourself and target particular groups of people. While a novel idea, it’s extremely difficult to target on a mass scale and still have it feel personal, reducing your overall impact.
• Conversation Marketing – Robots aren’t taking over the world…yet, but they are taking over marketing for some websites. Some company websites have begun to use bot’s (mostly) to communicate and have lengthy conversations with visitors to their website. It’s essentially a way for people to ask questions they have about the brand/company/site and have it regurgitated to them from a preprogrammed bot. Extremely inexpensive, by comparison to outsourcing to a third-world country, and you know you’re getting English vernacular and proper grammar in your conversations. So why is it bad? It’s a slap in the face to people who make well-designed and built websites. Why optimize your site and have efficient layout structure and proper tags and keywords in place if someone is just going to ask a bot for everything on the site?

 
The Ugly (the unforgivable list)

• Wizard/Guru/Rockstar – We get it, you’re great. Please find a better way to describe your expertise, because it just coming across as lazy.
• Pain Points – Let’s call a spade a spade. Pain points are “problem areas” or at the very least “areas for improvement”. Don’t side-step the issue, address it head on, you’ll thank yourself later.
• Gamification – Turning real life into video games for the sake of problem-solving as opposed to turning real life into videos for the sake of enjoyment and entertainment. I’m so sorry Mario; I don’t know where we went wrong.
• Low-Hanging Fruit – Two things, sometimes the fruit is low because it’s rotten and there are far more people trying to get the low hanging fruit simply because of ease of access. Assert yourself, and focus on your goal fruit at the mid to top of the tree and it’ll taste that much better when you get it. I’m pretty sure it’ll be organic too!
• Game Changer – By definition would change the game entirely. Unfortunately, this term has been so grossly overused that it’s now used to describe a good or mediocre idea.