How to avoid "marketing-speak"

An effective white paper helps a business person understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision.

Marketing-speak doesn’t help with any of those aims. Instead, it slows readers down and wastes their time.

When every customer is a “stakeholder” and every problem is a “concern” and every bug is an “issue,” readers have to work to decode that extra layer of verbiage.

Any white paper that wastes a prospect’s time is gambling on their patience. That’s risky.

Many busy business people likely chuck that content, and turn to something that’s less of a brain-teaser. If that “something else” comes from a competitor, your company just fumbled away an opportunity to make a good impression.

Risk #3: Marketing-speak does not position your company well

You want to position your company as a trusted advisor. You want to help prospects to know, like, and trust you.

Instead, marketing-speak positions your company as a master of double-speak. It encourages prospects to ignore, dislike, and mistrust your company.

Is that really what you want? Or is that a risk too big to ignore?

The 3 R’s to end marketing-speak

What if you’re under pressure to stick marketing-speak into your white paper?

Reviewers—especially salespeople—may push to include the same tired buzzwords you’ve heard a thousand times before. That’s happened to me.

If so, try using the three R’s: Resist, Review, and Reword.

Resist: Push back by explaining the three risks. Remind your colleagues or client what you’re trying to achieve with your content.

Review: Get to the bottom of what the people pressuring you want to say.

Usually that’s some variation of, “We’re better than the other guys…” But when someone doesn’t know how to state that clearly and persuasively, they often fall back on jargon and cliches.

Reword: Restate the message in direct terms. Give examples to make abstractions more concrete. Cut through the fog to show what’s really there.

Practice the three R’s, and your colleagues or client will likely thank you when your next white paper actually gets noticed.

Empty marketing-speak terms to avoid

Here’s a list of some choice phrases in marketing-speak, and what I suspect these mean in plain English.

Remember: Your prospects are using their valuable time to decode your marketing-speak… and they might come up with the translations shown in this table. Then where would you be?

Jargon can be useful, within limits

Every profession and every trade uses certain terms to mean something precise. This is called “jargon.”

Used properly, jargon saves trained professionals time and makes sure their messages are exact.

The problem is when jargon spills over to the outside population, those who lack training or insight to use it properly.

Or, there’s a problem when people like journalists or copywriters use language in a slap-dash fashion, coining new phrases without any precise definition.

When the latest buzzword gets picked up by salespeople and thrown around by executives, it starts to become empty, meaningless, and flabby.

So now that you understand the risks of using marketing-speak, and some of the worst examples out there, you’re going to avoid it, right?

Does this list miss any choice words that you’ve banished? Do you disagree with any of these choices? Please leave a comment below.

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