Maybe it’s not a good idea to toss these out of the lexicon entirely - they can be an important bit of shorthand when trying to have a productive and quick conversation with a colleague or client who knows and understands them as “lingo” – but, let’s all agree that some of these buzzwords are so overused that they’ve just about lost all meaning.
1. Strategize: Creating an action plan to achieve a particular set of goals.
2. Personalization: Catering a piece of content to target a specific person or personality type.
3. Conversation: Two parties exchanging words or ideas.
4. Impression: One view of internet content.
5. Brand Equity: How the public’s perception of a brand impacts brand value.
6. Perception: A person’s contextual thinking on a brand.
7. Positioning: How a piece of content is utilized.
8. Engagement: Activity between people and a company.
9. Listening: Paying attention to messages.
10. Utilize: To use something. (“Utilization” is equally if not more misused by the innovative marketing community.)
11. Effectiveness: Whether or not a goal was achieved.
12. Efficiency: A quality describing whether something or someone was able to complete a certain task or goal based on the amount of effort the person planned to use
13. Organic: When qualifying the word “results”, this means to say the goal was achieved without paying for an ad or paying for content placement.
14. ROI: Short for Return on Investment.
15. Campaign: A grouping of related actions that work toward a specific goal.
16. Synergy/Synergistic: Combining multiple actions/ideas toward a common goal.
17. Evaluate: To reflect on a certain action, hopefully using numbers, to decide if the action was effective (hehe) or not
18. Awareness: How much the public knows about a company, personality, brand etc.
19. Branding: Associating a thought or feeling with a brand/company.
20. Buzz: How much chatter exists in the public sphere surrounding an idea/company/brand.
21. Viral: The rampant and rapid sharing of content.
22. Optimize: Improving a web page’s (or any other web or real-life entity) ability to compete within the confines and context of its particular marketplace.
23. Streamline: To make a series of processes more efficient and easy to complete.
24. Messaging: The agreed upon concepts or ideas that innovative marketing experts use to describe a product or brand.
25. Alignment: Sharing goals and coordinating tasks between multiple parties within an innovative marketing team.
If you hear yourself saying these words so often it’s akin to every 80’s kid’s use of the word “like”…ask yourself, is there a better way or maybe a new buzzword you can coin to say that same thing innovatively? Remember, in innovative marketing, the goal is to keep communicative fresh, clear and direct. If these vocabulary crutches aren’t helping you say what you mean any longer…perhaps it’s time to shake things up.