This is a blog about marketing jargon. As a piece of content marketing, it won’t do a whole lot for our KPIs, and having been written with limited keyword research it certainly won’t tick many SEO boxes. Not to mention its lack of relevance in a B2B context, meaning it’s about as useful in our sales funnel as a piece of cheese.
Still, if you’ve ever found yourself at odds with an excess of marketing phrases, terms and acronyms, you may get some enjoyment out of this blog. We’re going to take common marketing jargon and give it the Bloody Marketing jargon busting treatment. Let’s begin!
Marketing: Technically, even this blog is classed as marketing, so I’m actually really stumped on this one.
Jargon: Jargon for jargon.
Content marketing: Can often be found talking about how important content marketing is.
Return on Investment (ROI): Lol, who cares?
Sales Funnel: I always picture those plastic funnels we used to use in science class, which were clearly a waste of time because I ended up with an E in Chemistry. Bloody photosynthesis.
Analytics: For nerds who were probably good at science.
Guerilla marketing: An absolute scam of a phrase; it has nothing to do with gorillas.
Testimonials: A Gorilla may struggle with this since they can’t speak like us, even though we share 98% of our DNA with them.
Keyword Research: This can lead to some very extraordinary findings. For example, when conducting keyword research for this piece, I discovered that we share 98% of our DNA with Gorillas!
Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Everyone’s special! 😊 Which is another way of saying no-one is special. 😧
A/B testing: Slightly more effective than eeny meeny miny mo.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): I can’t help but think that if SEO stood for Secret Elephant Oasis the world would be a better place.
Bounce rate: What goes up…
Landing page: … Must come down.
Unhinged nonsense: Yup.
Lead generation: On balance, a lot more desirable than lead poisoning.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Corporate gobbledygook at its finest.
Inbound marketing: The opposite of outbound marketing.
Outbound marketing: The opposite of inbound marketing.
Pay-per-click (PPC): Sacrifices made to the Google Gods.
Buyer persona: An in-depth, imaginary depiction of your ideal customer, which when you think about it is really quite strange. Can we, as people with varying backgrounds and beliefs and interests, be so easily extrapolated to fit the mould of any given product or service? Are we truly so transparent? Do our lives amount to nothing more than categorised consumerism?
Blog: Rhymes with dog.
Call to Action (CTA): Sadly, this is rarely as cool as it sounds. A REAL Call to Action would say stuff like ‘Jump out of a Helicopter!’ or ‘Do a Back-flip!’ or ‘Go on a Cosmic Quest to Find the Five Infinity Stones to Restore the Infinity Gauntlet So You Can Bring Stability to the Universe by Wiping Out Half of All Life and Therefore Appease Death Who Also Happens to be Your Mother!’ or ‘Hang Out With Gorillas!’
But instead it’s usually something boring like ‘Get your Marketing Sorted!’
